Hello, friends. Welcome to the first essay in an end-of-summer series that you can, if you want, call Hot Boy Summer. Yes, I am aware it is late August. No, I did not expect these essays to take me so long.

In this series, I will introduce two new characters. Both are Boyfriends. One represents our ex of our recent past. He is the token love interest of late capitalism, otherwise known as the late-2010s, otherwise known as the time when women waited for texts from boys with buzzcuts and ADHD and big grey hoodies that they could ‘borrow’ at the first opportunity.

It’s been fun to think back to this time, mostly because we’ve moved far away from it, even if we still wear the hoodie for hangovers and the guy gave up Adderall and married a woman who is probably called Emily.

If this first essay is a historical record, and it definitely won’t be, the second will be more of a trend forecast. I will pitch the Boyfriend of our near-future, and what he can tell us about culture, women and what both of these things desire. It’s the latest in my ongoing attempt to untangle this thing we call ‘heterosexuality’, and the characters that define it.

Enjoy the series.

The Online Boyfriend: Part I

Picture this: the year is 2017. It’s Saturday morning and you’ve woken up on a mattress on the floor of a room in Bushwick or Peckham. There’s a faint smell of weed in the air and the whirring of an overheated laptop in your ears.

You turn over and there is a boy next to you. He’s awake and his laptop is propped up against his thighs. It has a sticker on it that says blonded and another that says Feminist Internet and another that says sadboys in the Supreme font and another that says Bernie 2016 (swap out for Vote Labour if you’re in the UK).

He’s either slack-jawed scrolling Vine, editing the Wikipedia page for Seppuku, or furiously arguing with someone on Reddit. Basically, he’s doing something that is taking every bit of his attention and you don’t know for how long. His eyes are bloodshot behind his clear-rimmed glasses and there’s a crusty bowl of cereal on the floor. The big light is on, even though it’s been morning for so long it’s the afternoon.

Now, he notices you’re awake and drops his headphones around his neck. You know better than to ask what he’s been doing. He won’t tell you. Instead he’ll show you a video about the Black Death or how to make omurice and you’ll watch it together while eating more cereal. You will not fuck.

After a smoke (indoors), he will call in sick to his job (also indoors: graphic designer, Vice journalist, simply the word ‘tech’) and get back to his laptop, where he will spend the day working on his art, otherwise known as his memes. One day you see one of these memes on a page with over 1m followers and you will gasp.

Your friends don’t get why you keeping seeing this guy. You’re four months into a Thursday night Tinder swipe who dared you to Ask for Angela, and now you keep waking up at his house, even though neither of you bothers to text first.

The word situationship has not been invented yet, which means he is ostensibly your boyfriend, although you don’t know if he’s sleeping with other people, because you already asked once and he didn’t hear you and anyway this is an era of the unbothered, pre-contouring Cool Girl. And anyway the sex is bad so you’re not too concerned.

When you get home that evening, your flatmate will be watching Girls and even though you’ve seen it you will join her, mostly to project your own relationship (??) onto Hannah and Adam’s. You will squirm at the first season, scream at the second, and during the scene where he runs across Greenpoint to scoop her up during her nervous breakdown you will tear up. (You will misunderstand this, and Adam, because, as much as the internet adores him, he is not an Online Boyfriend. We will get to this another time.)

Let me introduce our first main character. He is not a creation from Lena Dunham’s brain, but another much-hated Millennial who has been hit with ‘voice of a generation’ allegations. A woman called Lauren Oyler.

Trope 1: Trolled

When the critic Lauren Oyler published her first and only novel, Fake Accounts, in 2021, it already felt dated. This can be a problem for authors who attempt to capture the current zeitgeist, as Oyler did. By the time the book ended up in readers’ hands, things had changed: memes had been forgotten, a dating app went normie, the ring around people’s Stories was a different colour.

Writers didn’t really have this problem in the past, as culture moved a lot slower. When Bret Easton Ellis published Less Than Zero in 1985, his portrait of nihilistic rich kids in LA, this subculture was still relatively underground, and it gave readers a sort of special knowledge, an X-ray vision to see and understand something that was happening right in front of them.

This is, I think, what Fake Accounts was hoping to do. It’s the purest distillation of what happened when two versions of the late-2010s collided: Brooklyn hipsters and Silicon Valley tech bros. It’s set in early 2017, a time when white girls were feeling weird about saying ‘namaste’ in yoga and everyone was mildly bloated at all times due to lactose intolerance or, more likely, craft beer.

The book opens on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration. The narrator – an unnamed woman in her mid-twenties, who writes clickbait articles for a woman’s digital magazine – is busy snooping through her boyfriend’s phone – name a more 2017 activity – when she makes a startling discovery. Her boyfriend has been living a double life as an online conspiracy theorist.

What goes on to happen (spoilers ahead) is that our narrator takes herself to the Women’s March, not because she cares about politics but because everyone else does. It’s here, in Washington DC and wearing a pink pussyhat, that she receives a call from her boyfriend’s mother, who informs her that he has died.

As you can probably tell, I did not like Fake Accounts. This can happen with content that has ostensibly been written for me, a Millennial who spent her study abroad semester running around Williamsburg in a floral dress. This happened the first time I watched Fleabag. It happened the first time I watched Girls.

Suffice to say, once I powered through the humiliation of feeling seen, I lapped both these shows up. The same can’t quite be said for Fake Accounts, although I was surprised to discover that, of the 60 books I read in 2021, most of which disappeared into the blackhole of my pandemic brain, it is one of the ones that stuck with me the most. I still think about it.

But what exactly do I think about? It’s not the whipsmart, Oyler-lite narrator, but her boyfriend, Felix: the artist who Nepo Babied his way into an overpaid tech job, who, unbeknownst to his girlfriend, has been running an anonymous online conspiracy theory account in his spare time. Although I didn’t know it in 2021, Felix would become the prototype of a character I would become very interested in. A character I am calling the Online Boyfriend.

In retrospect, it makes sense why I reached for a book like Fake Accounts. In the late-2010s, I had gotten involved with two very different but equally online men. One was a comp-lit graduate turned layabout whose greatest achievement was moderating the r/Cooking subreddit. The other streamed his hardcore mixes on the dark web. Either of them could have run an account like Felix’s.

I don’t think I was alone in this. This was an era where the hottest thing a man could be was online. The internet had a masculine energy that had not yet attached the dark undertones of the manosphere; it was more of a boyosphere: a place of Viceland, UniLad, fuckjerry, the Distracted Boyfriend meme, ‘bae’, Netflix & Chill, BDE, Four Lads in Jeans, hypebeasts, hoverboards, Warby Parker, PewDiePie, Drake.

It’s easy to write off this moment as laddish, especially when it preceded the explosion of the term ‘toxic masculinity’, but with our 2026 vantage point, with our Andrew Tates and goon caves, it looks almost cute. If culture is oscillating between Alpha and Beta energy, the late-2010s – with its pre-goatee Timothee, its tiny beanies and skinny jeans, its lower-caps text messages and their performance of sensitivity that, for a while, had us fooled – looks undeniably Beta.

Before we get carried away, let’s go back to the 2017 of Fake Accounts. The book traverses the hippy trail of its era, moving the plot from Brooklyn to Berlin. There, the narrator, who is already pretty annoying, becomes even more so. She’s less upset that her boyfriend has died and more upset that he died before she had the chance to break up with him.

Plus, she is becoming her own sort of conspiracy theorist too, and has a sneaking suspicion that there is more to his death than meets the eye. ‘Again,’ Oyler writes, ‘I began to think, or perversely hope, that this was somehow about me.’

Trope 2: Ego

In the weeks I’ve been thinking about the Online Boyfriend, a certain face kept appearing in my mind. It was Alex Karpovsky’s, the actor who plays Ray in Girls.

This is odd, because Ray is not an Online Boyfriend. He is a grumbling 35-year-old man, who dropped out his Latin Studies PhD and now hangs out with women in their early twenties. He is actually quite analogue. (Side note: I love Ray. Since I have entering my thirties I have realised how truly timeless Ray is. I know Rays. In many ways, I am Ray.)

Then something hit me: it wasn’t Ray I was thinking about. It was Jed, the character Karpovsky plays in Dunham’s 2010 feature film, Tiny Furniture.

The first time I saw Tiny Furniture, somewhere between an actual boyfriend and several non-boyfriends, I wasn’t predisposed to the character of Jed. I was much more drawn to Keith, the repulsive Hot Chef who cheats on his girlfriend with Lena’s character of Aura in a metal tube in some sort of scrapyard.

(Another side note: I recently found out, while lapping up Famesick like a thirsty dog, that this experience had not only actually happened to Lena, because of course it did, but that she brought the guy to the film’s premiere, without giving him so much as a head’s up. My girl.)

In many ways, Jed is a sort of Ray-lite. They share traits, mostly synonyms of ‘cynical’ and ‘sarcastic’. They are both glorified slackers. But where Ray and Jed differ is their approach to the internet. Ray is a something of a luddite, reading the New York Times on the toilet and switching off the WiFi in the coffee shop he runs. Jed, on the other hand, is a niche internet celebrity. He is visiting New York to try to sell his YouTube series, Nietzschean Cowboy, to networks. He meets Aura early in the film, at a friend’s party.

This is where we get to ego. Watching Tiny Furniture in my early twenties, I did not immediately register that Jed was also a repulsive character (I probably didn’t register that Keith was either). You could put this down to my personal naivety, but you could also put it down to Dunham’s.

Her character of Aura, a Hannah Horvath-lite, might be a spoilt, selfish liberal arts graduate, but there’s an innocence to her. She treats Jed like a unicorn, or her new boss. She puts as much effort into impressing him as she does being impressed by him. In one of the film’s many perfect scenes, Aura shows her mother one of Jed’s videos, in which he rides a rocking horse while reciting philosophy, and is surprised when her mother – a successful Downtown artist – thinks it’s bad.

With more mature eyes, it’s easy to question what Aura sees in Jed. But we have to remember: she’s a 22-year-old girl raised on MySpace. Of course she’s charmed by this older guy who ‘gets’ the internet. This was 2010; social media was still considered vapid and girly. Jia Tolentino wouldn’t write The I in Internet for another nine years. There was a perceived feminism to men who saw digital media as a viable artistic medium, who took seriously your deepest, darkest desire to become a vlogger.

It would be several years before characters like Jed would become an all-too-common enemy to women, that we’d start to notice the massive ego that often, if not always, lies behind the urge to put oneself online. But back in 2010, we’d be so charmed by a man who spoke only in irony that we would welcome him, like Aura does, into our home. Or worse: our romantic imagination.

Trope 3: I don’t fuck, I scroll

In Tiny Furniture, we see Aura’s youth play out in a number of recognisable ways. She reconnects with a toxic friend straight out of rehab. She ghosts a nicer friend from college. She starts a job as a hostess at a local restaurant. She flirts with one of the chefs, the aforementioned pill-popping, trilby-wearing, girlfriend-having Keith.

From a storytelling perspective, it’s an interesting choice to give us another (entirely self-interested) man for Aura to chase after. We were introduced to Jed, the niche internet celebrity, in the first ten minutes, effectually setting him up to be the film’s central Love Interest. It also helps that Dunham and Karpovsky are, and I hope this doesn’t sound mean, equal amounts of weird looking.

Ever the Hetero-optimist, Dunham continues to lead viewers down this path. When Aura finds out Jed’s accommodation (a ‘studio space’ in ‘Bushwick’, air-quotes included) has fallen through, she invites him to crash for a few nights in her family home while her mum and sister are out of town.

Soon enough, a few nights have become a week, and Jed has moved from her mother’s bed to her sister’s and finally to Aura’s. He keeps extending his stay and asks to borrow money, all the while complaining about the girl back in Chicago who has been giving him so many blowjobs that it’s actively disrupting his life.

When Aura’s mother, played by Dunham’s real mother, Laurie Simmons, gets back to find a grown man hanging around the house reading Woody Allen essays and eating all the frozen food, she’s livid. ‘You’re not even having sex with this person,’ she hisses at her daughter. And it’s true: for all the build-up the film gives us, Jed and Aura never have sex. He doesn’t seem to want to.

This is interesting and, I would argue, relevant, especially given the media landscape of the time. Between 2008 and 2014, you couldn’t move for stories of hormonal Losers trying desperately to get laid. And if they didn’t, it was because the girls got grossed out, and went off with a taller, richer guy instead. As bro-coded as these films might be, you can’t argue that their female characters usually held the sexual power.

This is why Dunham, with Tiny Furniture and also Girls, hit so hard. She presented us with a new social world, in which everyone, no matter their age, gender or popularity, could be – and be rejected by – a Loser. As Juno Kelly wrote last week, Girls should be one of our go-to sources when we need reminding of the ‘inherent assholeness’ of being human.

But why is the fact Jed and Aura don’t fuck so important? Because it’s a vital clue to the priorities of the Online Boyfriend. His sexual disinterest might run counter to his Love Interest status, and the sexual prize he paints himself as with all the blowjob stories, but is worth paying attention to.

For a while now, straight men have been becoming less interested in sex. Back in 2019 – a year that marks the death of the Online Boyfriend, at least in this form – a poll by the Washington Post found that a third of American men were not having sex. A ‘much larger than expected number’ of these men were aged 18-29.

In today’s Sex Recession, we like to blame things like antidepressants, pornography and #MeToo (to the chagrin of most of my friends, the impact of MeToo on men’s sexuality is a special interest of mine). But the Internet does seem to be at the centre of this shift.

On one hand, there’s the obvious equation that more screentime = less facetime. But I suspect it’s more than that. Spending lots of time online feels like the antithesis of sex. Aside from writing, it is perhaps the most socially acceptable way to live inside your own head. When I spend too long on my laptop, I long to be back in my body. I slam it shut and search for a body of water to plunge myself in. On which note, the Online Boyfriend is not phone-addicted; he is a laptop-addicted, which is quite different.

Earlier this week, a SubwayTake popped up on my feed. ‘Men don’t really want to have sex,’ Bini Yamin, a very young comedian, was saying. Although a full decade has passed since the heyday of the Online Boyfriend, I think she is right. Society continues to tells us that all men want is to have sex, and yet we find ourselves, in the West at least, in the most asexual period in history. The birth rate is at rock-bottom, there never been more Femcels.

But there is something else I’ve been thinking about. The sense of the Online Boyfriend as above sex. Sex being a base masculine instinct, and mastery of that instinct as something to be proud of. Because, in a way, being online is all about mastery: you are controlling a small world, you are surrendering to nothing.

You could argue that this is giving Sigma Male: the term the manosphere gives to lone-wolves who live by their own rules, appearing to operate outside of social hierarchies. The Online Boyfriend might care too much about the opinion of others (namely strangers on Twitter) to actually be a Sigma Male, but he definitely sees himself that way.

Trope 4: Self-narrative

So far, both of the Online Boyfriends we’ve talked about have been fictional characters, created by Millennial female writers. This sort of girl myth-making was business as usual in the late-2010s, when women were writing confessional books, hosting podcasts, and generally ushering in new terms (Fuckboy, Softboi) that allowed them to warn one another about untrustworthy men.

But something happened when we moved into the 2020s. The Online Boyfriend disappeared as a Love Interest, and reappeared as a self-authored Narrator.

No text tells us more about this shift than Fuccboi, the 2022 novel by Sean Thor Conroe. Fuccboi falls into that favourite category of young male writers and Knausgaard/Lerner wannabes: autofiction. It concerns a young food delivery rider called Sean, living in Philadelphia and trying to write a novel.

While Sean doesn’t spend much time Actually Online, he is Spiritually Online. One way this manifests is in the writing style, which has been described as ‘bro speak’ or a blend of ‘Soundcloud rap and Instagram self-care argot’ or ‘fake slang from an ivy league kid’ depending on who you ask. Here’s a snippet:

He’d been preaching paleo but had one-eightied to veganism.
Was exploring fruitarianism.
“Bro I ate seven bananas today.”
I was like “Bro seven? Bro that’s a lotta bananas.”
He was like “Dude I’ll eat seven bananas tomorrow!”
I was like “Fock yeah. Get it.”

When Fuccboi came out, it polarised the literary scene. Conroe was either a hero, saving the fate of straight male writers from death-by-Sally-Rooney, or, well, a villain. Of course, the villain argument is more narratively compelling. It’s fun to imagine a 30-year-old debut author with a six-figure advance as an already wealthy, Barry Lyndon-esque grifter, passing himself off as a working-class victim of white supremacy, which is what the internet was all too excited to cast him as.

He was even accused of lifting his tone-of-voice from another writer, even though both of them had probably lifted it from African Americans. We won’t get into identity politics right now – don’t worry, we will in Part II – but it is worth noting that Conroe is our only non-white Online Boyfriend (he’s half-Japanese).

Anyway, all of this internet chatter his gave Fuccboi the buzz of temporary virality. Its impact on culture, which was much smaller than publishers and internet trolls alike expected, has best been captured in an Unherd article titled: Has Fuccboi killed literature?

The journalist, Esther Manov, is less interested in Conroe as a hustler, and more interested in how he has become an easy scapegoat for the general shittiness of Millennial literature. She blames authors’ egos, inflated like balloons by years spent on social media, for the insipid, tangled, self-obsessed writing that defines the literary fiction of this time. ‘The problem is that this book,’ she writes, ‘values “authenticity” and “realness” over more venerable criteria of literary value (depth, characterisation, plot).’

This might be surprising after I spent so long painting a portrait of a man whose defining characteristic is his thick coating of irony. But this is where the Online Boyfriend of the 2010s morphs into his 2020s successor: he sheds some of his superiority, gains some self-awareness, and as a result becomes… sincere?

When I read Fuccboi in 2023, it underwhelmed me. By that point, I had spent so long in the heads of fucked-up women that I was looking forward to being in the heads of the men who fucked them up. I suppose there was some self-interest wrapped up in this; I wanted to know what, in the era of men lacking desire, men desired.

What I read had nothing to do with desire. The book is more of a meditation on the state of liberal masculinity than the exploits of a player. Although the character refers to women as ‘baes’, he only fucks once; he’s too busy emailing Sheila Heti, suffering from a rare skin disorder, or begrudging his so-called male privilege. The only thing its title does is reveal Conroe’s deep self-awareness: he has the most fuckboy-ish name and image to ever exist.

To conclude Part I, I’d like to return to a question Manov poses in her article: why are Millennial authors so allergic to depth? She writes:

Men write “stories” about men with their demographic characteristics doing cocaine/Adderall and displaying traits of narcissistic personality disorder; women write “stories” about women with their demographic characteristics doing ketamine/Klonopin and displaying traits of borderline personality disorder.

Both contingents write in a mode of blasé detachment that has become achingly stale. They are averse to or incapable of subjectivity and depth. What little allowance is made for human feeling is exclusively of pharmaceutical origin. These are not works of art; they are simply unremarkable descriptions of unremarkable lives.

Eeesh. It’s a cruel take on the now-historic genre of Online Boyfriend/Girlfriend literature, of which Fuccboi and Fake Accounts, as well as books like Taipei, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Crudo, No One is Talking About This are part of. But it does get at a certain truth: that describing a piece of art as inherently ‘online’ can be a way of justifying its essential emptiness.

Don’t get me wrong, I like some of these novels, but there’s also some I don’t like. I agree with Manov that we have a cultural problem with excusing writers for their unintelligible style by gesturing vaguely to the influence of 'the internet’, as if it’s not their fault, it’s a generational hazard.

I know that times have changed. Young writers in 2026 wouldn’t dream of making their main character a podcaster, and they’re much more likely to set their debut in a village church (à la Lost Lambs) than a houseshare in Dalston. But I do still think about the Online Boyfriend, and what impact he must have had on these young female minds.

After all, there must be a reason so many talented women like Dunham and Oyler felt compelled to write about him; a reason why so many other girls kept waking up to the sound of an overheating laptop fan. I think this is where our overactive imaginations come in: there is a mirage of complexity to the Online Boyfriend that could make the women who fall for it as culpable as the men who perform it. A complexity that, while new and exciting in 2016, we now understand to be utterly exhausting.

That’s where we’ll leave things for Part I. Next time, we’ll unpick the so-called complexities of the Online Boyfriend, and track his move from Bernie Bro to the Dirtbag Left, online troll to ideological opportunist. See you then.

Today I’m joined by , a writer from South London, to ask the question: is Englishness inherently weird?

We discuss how Britain’s colonial hangover has shaped the ‘plucky’ national character, whether Dunkirk is the Roman Empire for blokes, and how TikTok is complicating neurodiversity discourse. Along the way, we stop to take shots at Seb’s old workplace, Noel Fielding, the entirety of Soho, Francis Bourgeois, and Brexit.

We also dig into real-life London eccentrics, such as Hackney’s mole man and a Nunhead Elvis impersonator, characters who appear to answer a generational yearning for Authentic Community™ in a city at the mercy of American sweet shops, noise complaints, and slop bowl salad bars.

You can now listen to this episode, and others, on Spotify and Apple!

Come with us now on a journey through time and space…

Show Notes:

• Pinterest Board

• The English Eccentrics by Edith Sitwell

• Seb’s Substack post on Steve Bennett

• Henry Paget / Madfabulous (2026)

• The Mole Man of Hackney / Karen Russo

• Paddy Power World Cup advert

• Character #9: The Free Spirit

• Rethinking Eccentricity by Miranda Gill

• Soho eccentrics: Philip Sallon & Thierry Alexandre

• Jonathan Nunn on ‘Sohoification’

• Eccentric Soho spots: All Is Joy, Bradley’s Spanish Bar & Bar Italia

• The Mighty Boosh (2003–2007)

• Withnail & I (1987)

• Wallace & Gromit (1989–Present)

• Gromit’s upcoming autobiography

• Richard E. Grant’s Instagram

• Saltburn (2023)

• SpaceX goes public

• Scrapheap Challenge (1998–2010)

• Poetry and the Turning World: Work by the LRB

• Francis Bourgeois

• Mission to Space with Francis Bourgeois (2026)

• Noel Fielding on Talk Art

• British eccentricity is dying out by the Telegraph

• The King of SE15 (2021)

• New York Nico

• Character #2: The Branded Couple

• There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack by Paul Gilroy (1991)

• Year of the Rat by Harry Shukman (2025)

• Vittles

• Caffs not Cafes and Wooden City by Isaac Rangaswami

You may know Emma as the host of STARGIRL, a podcast about girls who stand out, and she’s also a personal trainer and health goddess at large. In this episode, we discuss the seductive power of the Free Spirit, charting her journey from whimsical romcom girlfriend to self-authored forest nymph.

In the era of the Oura ring, the Free Spirit seems to offer us an alternative mode of living. Ripe with sensuality and sex appeal, she is at one with Earth: rising with the sun, bathing in waterfalls, navigating via deep intuition over Google Maps. She also releases us from technological hysteria, taking our hand and leading us down a desire path that is unencumbered by fads, political ideologies, and, um, footwear.

At the end of the episode, I interrogate my own feelings about the Free Spirit and the sense of suspicion I can’t seem to shake...

Show Notes:

• Almost Famous (2000)

• 50 First Dates (2004)

• Along Came Polly (2004)

• Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008)

• 500 Days of Summer (2009)

• The Blithe Spirit by TV Tropes

• Manic Pixie Dream Girl by TV Tropes

• ‘What time was I born’ meme

• Girls (2012–2016)

• Hippies by Dear Americana

• Faye Wong’s pixie crop in Chungking Express (1994)

• Tao Lin’s Substack

• Joel Golby on Eat Pray Love (2006)

• Health Gossip

• Emma’s interview with Lily Sperry, founder of Health Gossip

• Sigh Swoon

• Hitomi Mochizuki

• Emma’s episode on Hitomi

• Sotce

• Kamryn Renae

• Kamryn Renae on Getting Glam to Hike the Pacific Crest Trail by Interview

In the Spring issue:

1. Sadgirl cinema strikes again

2. An eel bites the space between your thumb and forefinger

3. In search of the Deviant Feminine

Arthouse is boring

As a teenager, my dad would take me to the cinema every week or so. There wasn’t a cinema in our town, and the nearest was a multiplex in Stockport, where I’d go with friends to see films like Borat (2006) and Orphan (2009), so we usually went all the way to Sheffield, where there was a small arthouse cinema.

Being an hour away – 39 minutes with my dad at the wheel – the cinema became an event. We would get dinner – Turkish or Chinese – and often meet up with his friend and his son, who was my age. We would watch the film, eat, and usually complain about the film. ‘Where have the stories gone? What happened to plot?’ my dad would bellow. I didn’t bring up the fact that arthouse and plot didn’t usually go hand in hand.

We saw plenty of films over the years: kitchen sink dramas, psychological horrors, stylish slow burns, Oscars bait. But, for some reason, the films that stuck with me the most were the meandering, experimental yawn-fests that are the bread-and-butter of your local arthouse cinema: films like Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), or Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), or Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011).

Not only did I not like these films, I was suspicious of them. They seemed like a ruse: something to keep me away from my plate of lamb chops for forty minutes longer than they needed to. Or worse: they were intended to make me ‘see’ the ‘beauty’ or ‘pain’ of ‘existence’. I’d have much rather been watching Borat.

Of all of these films, The Tree of Life, a coming-of-age drama starring Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, with whispers of scenes that last either three seconds or thirty minutes, has stuck with me. I remember shots of fields, hands, planets, deserts, dinosaurs. I remember quite a lot of silence. I was bored out of my mind.

I can see now, rewatching the trailer, that the film might be beautiful; it might even be good. But I’m pretty sure it’s to blame for an allergy to arthouse that I suffered for years to come.

In my early twenties, by then exhausted by arthouse – what happened to story? what happened to plot? – I gravitated towards a different type of film. These had the snarl of the indie but the pace of the big hit: We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), The Great Beauty (2013), Whiplash (2014).

On the few occasions I was drawn to European cinema, it was because of its dry humour: like Toni Erdmann (2016), the German comedy in which the prankster dad of a McKinsey girlboss shows up at her office in Bucharest and, in an attempt to bond with her, puts on false teeth and a wig and pretends to be an in-demand corporate life coach. It’s a deliriously feel-good film.

So, after years of avoiding films that dared to be slow, subtitled, and sincere, I was surprised when I found myself, in March 2026, to be utterly blown away by another German film; only one that is deeply serious, deeply traumatic, and deeply two-and-a-half-hours. It’s called Sound of Falling.

It’s a difficult film to talk about. In true arthouse style, there is no story, very little plot. Set across four timelines at the same rural German farmhouse – the 1910s, 1940s, 1980s, and 2020s – it follows the lives of the girls and women who live there.

I realise this makes Sound of Falling sound like one of the austere artpieces I just criticised. Which it is, but also isn’t. So, I’m going to try something else, and describe the film’s opening scene:

Now imagine being me, watching this on a Thursday afternoon in a basement in central London. I had no expectations of the film. In fact, I was prepared to fall asleep. But I was wide awake, gripping the armrests, and I was thinking: here we fucking go.

Girl everything

In 2023, everyone started talking about ‘girlhood’. To refresh your memory, this was the era of girl dinner, girl maths, hot girl summer, coquette, blokette, the Eras Tour, Barbie, a time when the ultimate compliment you could give a male celebrity was the term ‘babygirl’.

Sure, I wrote about these trends. I even analysed them. But something held me back from taking them seriously. Not because the return of ‘the girl’ was an infantilising or antifeminist project, or because these girls were really women, but because I found it all a bit twee.

If there is one film that embodies this celebration of girlishness, it’s Sofia Coppola’s adaptation of The Virgin Suicides (1999). The film came out a full quarter of a century before brands started putting ribbons on everything, but it’s never been a truer cultural object: a moodboard of female despair that will be no doubt be plastered on the digital equivalent of teenage girls’ bedrooms – adult women’s Pinterest boards – for years to come.

I’ve never really liked The Virgin Suicides. This might be unexpected for someone who was once part of the emo scene, who owns too much gingham, whose favourite Lana Del Rey songs are the album tracks about dying, but there is something about this whimsical, youthful brand of suffering that I find both irritating and uninspiring.

Let me give some context. I was a very dreamy child. I spent long swathes of time in my own head. This realisation came to me very recently and suddenly, at one in the morning during the recent UK heatwave. I have often wondered why my childhood felt so disembodied, so distant. Oh wait, I realised, staring at my ceiling in a thin coat of sweat, no wonder I can’t remember anything about it. I wasn’t there.

What I mean is, I lived in my imagination. There are entire years I cannot recall, because I spent them drawing or writing or daydreaming or playing The Sims. If I was alone for even an hour without a computer or paper and pen, I would retreat to fantasy. What was I supposed to do? Be present? I spent entire holidays ignoring my family, wrapped up in the possibility of a boy on the beach, who I would not speak to but would cast as my imaginary boyfriend. I didn’t need a computer to play The Sims.

You’d think, from this context, that I would be praying at the alter of Sofia Coppola and her pretty little virgins in dresses. But although I was a dreamy kid, I was also a sheltered and simple one. I couldn’t relate to the type of sadness the Lisbon sisters were supposedly infected by.

I had a similar experience when I turned eighteen and my dad pushed a copy of The Bell Jar in my hands, presuming that his weird teenage daughter would relate to this weird teenage character. I groaned and picked up The Catcher in the Rye instead. Boy sadness, for some reason, I had more time for.

Trauma response

When Sound of Falling was released, in March 2026, it quickly attracted comparisons to the The Virgin Suicides. In some sense, I get it. Like Coppola, Sound of Falling’s writer-director Mascha Schilinski takes teenage girls – and their societally sugar-coated problems – very seriously indeed.

There is no sugar-coating in this film. There are, instead, recurring images of death, or near death, or sexual violence, or near sexual violence. And yet, as film critic Alex Heeney says in her podcast review of Sound of Falling, we never see the worst things that happen to these girls. It’s a film about trauma, and yet there is very little trauma on screen. Like the girls, we feel it. We inherit it.

Trauma is not always loud, in fact it’s usually quiet. I have a lot of respect for films that understand this. Another recent example is Sentimental Value (2025), which shares a lot of DNA with Sound of Falling: they both tell stories of inter-generational trauma through the spaces their characters inhabit – a nice house in Oslo; a barn in rural Germany – both anthropomorphising these buildings into sentient beings with their own feelings and eyeballs.

This softening of trauma feels particularly important right now, especially as media has become increasingly hungry for stories of trauma that are not only visible, but easily comprehensible. Sexual abuse, in particular, has been a go-to justification for characters’ declining mental health: take the teen drama Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) or my all-time-most-hated-book A Little Life (2015).

Addressing the easy-win of the trauma plot, journalist Diana Reid writes:

‘In fiction, once the trauma is ventilated, the story reaches its natural resolution: the tension abates, the mystery surrounding the protagonist dissipates. The audience’s relief mimics the feeling of witnessing or participating in real-life testimony: we have faced the worst, we are stronger and more resolute for having faced it.’

You can always tell when a trend has reached its peak when parodies are written, produced, and promptly released. Take the novel Big Swiss (2023), which tries – and succeeds – to criticise our modern preoccupation with trauma discourse, or the film After the Hunt (2025), which tries – and massively fails – to criticise our modern preoccupation with on-campus sexual assault.

Sound of Falling is cinematic proof that we don’t need to parody trauma in order to make it feel relevant. It treats its audience like grownups, it who have the mental capacity to take trauma seriously, without resorting to bleakness or despair, like A Little Life.

As we float between the four timelines, we hear the girls’ inner thoughts, often disembodied and unrelated to the images we’re seeing. Many of these fragmented, half-thoughts are related to death. ‘If I want to lift my leg, I can do it,’ thinks a girl called Angelika, lying on a swinging chair in the sun. ‘But when I command my heart to stand still, it doesn’t.’

This is where the film crosses over with The Virgin Suicides. ‘Obviously, doctor, you’ve never been a teenage girl,’ reads one Letterboxd review of Sound of Falling. ‘There are Lana Del Rey listeners everywhere for those with eyes to see,’ reads another. ‘The German Suicides,’ reads a third. The film refuses to give clear-cut answers to the characters’ depressive inclinations: one of the youngest girls imagines rolling down a riverbank and drowning. Why? Because her mother walks too far in front of her.

While the film treads dark territory, it is also funny and joyful and downright weird. In the 1980s timeline, the family hosts a ritual celebration that involves grabbing an eel from a tank while riding a bike. Everyone smiles and cheers as the squirming eel is waved in the air like a flag. ‘Bad things happen here,’ continues Heeney in her review. ‘But good things happen here too.’

The scene leads to some of the one of the most memorable pieces of imagery in the film: an eel biting a person’s hand, in that soft well between the thumb and forefinger. Schilinski loves to emote these sort of visceral responses. ‘When I see a door handle, I know exactly what it tastes like, even though I’ve never licked one,’ another character muses, and suddenly we can taste the door handle too.

The Deviant Feminine

When I emerged three hours’ later from the basement cinema that evening, I had that wonderful feeling you get when transformation comes for you on an ordinary weekday afternoon.

I found myself wandering Covent Garden, mute and deaf and unsure whether I wanted to unpack what I’d just seen or simply stew in it. I ended up in the halfway house of a Wetherspoons, where I didn’t buy a drink or even sit down, but stood near the toilets, staring into a crowd of young drinkers and feeling full-bodily female.

This is another element to Sound of Falling I want to discuss: how resolutely feminine I felt while watching it. I can only assume this is why some women like The Virgin Suicides or Little Women (2019) or Ladybird (2017), but it turns out I need a nonlinear ghost story with no actual ghosts to put me in touch with my femininity.

This brings me onto a topic I’ve been thinking about recently: the Divine Feminine. I’d planned to talk about this on an upcoming Character report, but sadly the guest and I ran out of time. For those who aren’t aware, the Divine Feminine refers to a spiritual energy that is soft, nurturing, creative, and intuitive, as opposed to the logical, analytical, and assertive structures of patriarchal spirituality.

It’s a concept I’ve not paid much notice to until recently. As someone who was branded ‘confident’ and ‘ambitious’ and ‘bossy’ as a young girl, I’ve created an understanding of myself as someone who balances both masculine and feminine energies, perhaps with more of an emphasis on the former.

So, what piqued my interest in the Divine Feminine? It came from listening to Lily Sperry – the founder of Health Gossip – talking about her femininity on STARGIRL:

I was walking home at the time, and this soundbite literally stopped me in my tracks. I instantly wondered whether I’d been drawn to the big-city because it appeared to reward my culturally ‘masculine’ attributes: my assertiveness, my need for control.

My relationship to London is complicated. I’ve lived here for nearly 14 years, but I often feel I need to leave it to be inspired, be feminine, or even be human. Ryanair has profited greatly from my belief that to have a transformative experience I simply must be abroad. (Of course, this is untrue: I claimed to have had a transformative experience in London just a couple of paragraphs ago).

The feminine codes of Sound of Falling reminded me of Lily’s sentiment. Although we hear the girls’ thoughts, their experiences are mostly sensual, not cerebral. They play in bales of hay, pull twigs from bleeding feet, pinch the wrinkled hands of grandmothers, try on other people’s shoes, do handstands against trees. The women are inside their bodies in a way I – as a (gags) ‘urban woman’ – regularly forget to be.

There’s also sex. It’s a bold choice to tackle sexuality when you’re making a film about mostly pre-pubescent girls – at least without going in the direction of Lolita (1997) – but it would also be inaccurate and even cowardly to dismiss it. Sound of Falling gives us an intricate study of not only how girls are erotically observed, but how they act as observers too.

In fact, the entire film is shot through characters observing one another. Alma, in the 1910s, is too young to be told what is happening, so she closely observes her family for clues. Lenka, in the 2020s, is observing the behaviour of a girl she idolises. Angelika, in the 1980s, appears to be an object of observation by her uncle and cousin, only we discover she is aware that the men are watching her, therefore is it really her who is watching them watching her?

I’ll leave you with a final image. Erika, the teenage girl who is erotically fixated on the man with the amputated leg, is caught in his room. First we see the man, looking at her intensely. We expect to see Erika panicked or humiliated, because we are taught that teenage girls should feel ashamed of their sexuality. But when the camera cuts to Erika, she is holding his gaze: unperturbed, determined, or maybe just relaxed.

This is just one example of Schilinski’s deviant filmmaking, one of her many decisions that ask us to recognise how sad and happy, observed and observational, powerless and perverted young girls can be.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back with Character #9 soon.

In this episode, we return to the aesthetic of love and lovelessness, exploring how a post-Femcel internet has cultivated an appetite for online stalking, emotional scarcity, and sexual competition, and why this has left us in a crisis of disembodiment.

We also spotlight two of the freakiest writers working today – Sheena Patel and Sayaka Murata – whose estranged heroines reveal what happens when romance loses its grip on reality. We’ll ask questions like: is love entertainment? Is celibacy anti-establishment? Do anime boyfriends and emotionally unavailable men have more in common than we think?

Let’s find out.

Show Notes:

• he needs me by The Femcels

• Post-Femcel Femininity by

• I’m A Fan (2022) by Sheena Patel

• Fandom with Sheena Patel by Literary Friction

• Pillion (2025)

• Sayaka Murata: The Cosmic Novelist by The Gentlewoman

• Convenience Store Woman (2016) by Sayaka Murata

• Vanishing World (2025) by Sayaka Murata

• Earthlings (2018) by Sayaka Murata

• Sayaka Murata Inhabits A Planet of Her Own by Wired

• ‘Marriage feels like a hostage situation, and motherhood a curse’ Sayaka profiled in The Guardian

• The rise of mixed-orientation marriage by Impact

• What’s going on with straight women? by Dee Salmin

• To Rest Our Minds and Bodies (2025) by Harriet Armstrong

• Mimetic theory of desire by René Girard

• Doomers in Love by Mana Afsari

In the second episode of the Recurring Character podcast, I talk about the first character who actively scares me: The Femcel.

In Part I, we define what a Femcel actually is: is she an aesthetic? Alt-right? Is she actually celibate? Is it involuntarily? We chart the demise of the Millennial Slut and the SHEconomy, as a new generation of chronically online sadgirls embrace performative – and actual? – sexlessness.

But we also get socio-cultural. In an era where everyone is beautiful and no one is horny, where heterosexuality is deemed ‘embarrassing’ and female loneliness is on the rise, is the Femcel really a cute feminine dream, or is she a symptom of a bigger, and scarier, cultural reality?

Show Notes:

• Femcel by Aesthetics Fandom Wiki

• r/psychologyofsex “Femcels”

• The Rise of Femcels by The Hook Up

• The woman who founded the ‘incel’ movement by BBC

• Character #3: The Hetero-optimist

• My thoughts on the ‘having a boyfriend is embarrassing’ discourse

• She’s Not Celibate – She’s Boysober by The New York Times

• 2025 Was the Year Single Women Chose Themselves by Vogue

• r/FemaleDatingStrategy

• Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny by RS Benedict

• The Sex Recession by Andrea Mizrahi

• Rise of the SHEconomy by Morgan Stanley

• Married moms twice as likely to be be ‘very happy’ than single childless women by YouGov

• Materialists (2025)

• Sophie is a Tragic Character by @marmaryeesa2026

• i want to be a girl in love again by Ismene Ormonde

I’ll soon be launching Recurring Character as a podcast – available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts etc – but for now you can listen above, on the Substack app, or, if you’re a true loser, in the warm glow of your desktop computer.

That’s not the only exciting news, because this is also the first instalment in a new, ongoing series: The Loser Series. Expect weirdos, drifters, deadbeats, fuck-ups, loners and incels all coming your way.

For now, it’s time to embrace the universality of loserdom, pair up with a fellow misfit, and let your freak flag fly. Enjoy the first episode.

Show Notes:

• The Loser archetype by TV Tropes

• The Loser in Cinema by Crooked Marquee

• Losercore by Nymphet Alumni

• The Mainstreaming of Loserdom by Tell the Bees

• Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk at fashion week

• Superbad (2007)

• An Oral History of Superbad by Vanity Fair

• The Inbetweeners (2008–2010)

• Booksmart (2019)

• Peep Show (2003–2015)

• Peep Show Still Proves That Self-loathing is Pretty Universal by The New York Times

• Succession Owes its Genius to Peep Show by i

• Four Naan, Jeremy?

• Ghost World (2001)

• Discussing Ottessa Moshfegh on STARGIRL

• Types of Social Networks: Samplers on TikTok

For Part III, we’ll fast-forward to today, where a Hot Chef that is calmer, cleaner, and more culturally-literate is coming to the fore. Let’s get straight into it.

Trope 1: Posh Boys

I really wanted to hate Jackson Boxer. This was mostly, I’m afraid to say, based on appearances – specifically his. Jackson looks like a Made in Chelsea cast member that moved to Hoxton in 2014. He looks like your friend’s toxic ex. He also looks a bit like James Dean.

Jackson Boxer is a prime example of the Hot Chef of 2026. He’s a family man, not a roving bachelor. He’s affluent, not a working-class hero. And he has – has always had – a hand firmly in London’s food scene. Not only does he run six restaurants including Dove and Henri and Brunswick House, but his brother is the Frank behind Frank’s in Peckham and they now co-run Below Stone Nest.

And that’s not all. Their dad is behind Italo, the Vauxhall deli where you can buy a sausage sandwich from the hottest person you’ve ever seen, and his godfather is Jeremy Lee of the Soho institution Quo Vadis. And that’s not to mention the Times and cookbook writers in his lineage, nor his friends at Jolene, The Yellow Bittern, and St. John.

Although it looks like I just did, I’m not interested in judging Jackson on his privilege. It’s an endlessly boring argument, not to mention bad criticism. I know that. But what I think I’m trying to say when I list his place in the family tree that is London’s restaurant scene, is that Jackson is part of a post-Covid food culture that looks suspiciously, well, the same.

Let’s quickly go back to Dom Hamdy from Part I. Nice enough, yet all-too vanilla Dom is a good representation of what’s been happening to London’s food scene more generally, a phenomenon Vittles calls the ‘Sohoification of food’ (like me, Vittles loves a verb-to-noun affix).

I don’t mind food trends. They’re an inescapable reality, plus it’s fun to look back on the time when we queued up for red velvet cupcakes and rainbow bagels and bottomless brunch. But what I find interesting about restaurants today is the assertion that they are operating outside of the trends cycle.

I referred to this in Part I, but let’s double-click. What do I mean here? What does the generic restaurant experience of a major city in 2026 look like?

Well, it’s timeless, but mostly modern. It’s global, but mostly French. Expect to start with house pickles (£7) and radicchio salad (£11), followed by pig head terrine (£14) and Delicia pumpkin (£16), followed by beef rib pappardelle (£26) and whole turbot (£35) and culminating in – what else! – sticky toffee pudding (£13).

Then there’s the branding. Think big bold lettering. Over-exposed photography of half-eaten burgers, brown drinks with huge ice cubes, tattooed hands picking at what’s left of a lobster swimming in butter. Plates are always dirty; fingernails clean. Pizzas wobble on the edge of a corner, blood red tomato pasta stains a tablecloth, and parmesan is finely grated onto a dish that can no longer be identified.

The chef is central to the brand. He’s sitting on the countertop with a hand running through his hair, or in the alley out back, sipping an espresso or Negroni before service. He’s in the pages of Tatler, GQ, British Vogue, or he’s causing Sunday Times readers to get horny over a house tour.

We began to explore this trend in the Branded Couple – the ‘new network of digital geography’ that places London in synchronicity with everywhere from Melbourne to Sao Paulo. Consider the iconic American Apparel shopping bag with its graphically identical cities bleeding into one another: that’s what’s happening here, except the bag is Barbican or London Review of Books or Louisiana or Trader Joe’s.

The Branded Couple love these restaurants. They follow the inter-city collaborations on Instagram, ticking off a new one every Thursday night. They aren’t too worried about whether the food is good, only that it’s buttery and salty, and that there’s a retro Italian poster hung in the toilets, and that they leave with enough acid in their stomach to opt out of sex and catch up on Industry instead.

But wait, I’m getting carried away. What about the Chef? The Chef is a mate, or at least a guy they follow on Instagram. A guy whose recipes they made during the pandemic, before their gout scare. Who bragged about making £21,000 in three weeks as a private chef before flying out to St Barthes to spend it. A guy who posted a now-infamous photo of his all-white, all-male kitchen team. The Chef is Thomas Straker.

British media loves Thomas Straker. He’s been sold to us as the return of the Bad Boy we love and miss, although I have a feeling he’s the salesman, considering the ‘bad’ activities include riding a motorbike, having an affair with the Princess of Greece, being caught driving on his phone, and ‘making West London cool again’.

If you don’t know him, perhaps you’ll know the moment when he was shamed by the anonymous writer Slutty Cheff for that all-white, all-male staff photo that lives rent-free in the head of all Straker haters.

‘Thomas Straker is just repeatedly posting pics hanging out with David Cameron or cradling Boris Johnson’s baby,’ writes Jonathan Nunn, the editor of Vittles. You’d think Vittles, with its interest in London’s mutlidimensional, mostly diasporic, cuisines, would be certifiably anti-Straker. But Nunn doesn’t seem to mind the chef. In fact, he respects how Straker doesn’t even try to hide his poshness.

I see where Nunn is coming from. There’s something oddly authentic about Straker. Don’t expect to see stick-n-poke tattoos or a slutty earring. He’s not even trying to appear liberal, and he’s definitely not living in Fish Island. Straker is West London through and through. When he isn’t doing coke with American girls in Notting Hill, he’s at Carole Bamford’s estate in the Cotswolds, ‘blitzing whole packs of butter with random shit in a magi mixer’, as Slutty Cheff so gracefully puts it.

In Part II, we identified the common enemy of the Hot Chef: spoilt white boys. Well, guess what. The enemy has become the hero. The Hot Chef du jour is no longer a wild-haired, big-pupilled underdog, he’s fully the overdog. He is destined for success, or at least funded for it.

A topic I’m particularly interested in – and will return to throughout this project – is the impact of economic precarity on culture.

I can’t decide whether we talk too much or not enough about how expensive it is to live in a city like London or New York today. We gesture vaguely to a ‘cost-of-living crisis’ that is causing broccoli to cost £1 instead of 40p, or a room in a houseshare to cost £1,200 instead of £650, but we still buy the broccoli and rent the room.

I wonder if the reason we avoid actually talking about this fact (beyond complaining and threatening, but never succeeding, to ‘leave London’) is because we are hyper-aware that it affects other people more than us. If we, a thirty-year-old with a well-paid email job, few overheads and no dependents, can’t afford to buy fresh meat, then what about the people who actually can’t afford to buy fresh meat?

We rarely have productive conversations about money anymore. If our modern fixation on privilege allowed us to talk about what it means to live below the poverty line, or indeed create solutions, then great, but instead it’s just become a way of shutting down conversations about what it means to be historically so rich and still feel so poor.

I’d like to introduce a new character. Ed McIlroy is a chef and the mind behind some of my favourite restaurants in London. He’s also somewhat of a dying breed in the industry, in that his career path to North London hospitality darling has not been linear. He didn’t begin as a teen dishwasher like Bourdain – and definitely not as a Dorchester intern, like Straker – but as a scaffolder, delivery driver and courier.

With his obligatory tattoos, Ed may look like your typical Chef, and he fits with the hedonistic side too, claiming the antisocial hours complement his hard-partying lifestyle. But his background of genuine graft makes him somewhat of a special case in London today.

Listen to how he speaks about keeping his restaurants alive:

I find Ed’s honesty so refreshing. Rather than lashing out at his customers to stop ordering tap water and spend more money – like The Yellow Bittern famously did last year – he speaks to them like adults: hey, we’re a business, and we’d like to make some money so we can keep being a business. Cheers!

Now, let’s compare Ed to Jackson Boxer, a guy who has gone on record saying he is ‘not interested' in making money. He tells an interviewer for SL.Man:

Maybe I will make money in time, maybe I won’t, but I think in the meantime, I have a sense of longevity and still really enjoy my work.

I laughed out loud when I read this. Imagine being in a position where making money is not something you need to worry about? What irritates me even more is that Jackson appears so smug in his own ability to de-centre profit. It’s as if he’s proving a point; that by not being in the business for financial gain, he’s operating his restaurants as some sort of charity for the hungry.

Of course, we all know why Jackson is not concerned with money. I’m not saying generational wealth and industry ties are enough to make a restaurant succeed, but they do give people like Jackson access to a level of creative risk that other chefs would be understandably cautious about. Knowing that your tables will at the very least be filled by your pals Benedict Cumberbatch and Florence Welch, and, if you should fail, that failure would be more of a social problem than a financial one, proves the confidence of the rich and connected cannot be overstated.

I realise there are more important things to worry about, but I can’t help but feel somewhat anxious that we are heading towards a future of bland businesses, where the only creative risks can be taken by the already wealthy.

Ed’s restaurants give us hope. Each one is trying – and succeeding – to do something new. The Plimsoll is the gastropub to end all gastropubs, a space that knows and respects the Millennial Bloke’s truest love: sitting on the kerb with a pint and a really good burger on a day that is neither warm nor sunny. I used to live around the corner, and found endless fascination in people-watching as I cycled past. It’s performative in the best possible way.

Ed is also behind Tollington’s, a fish and chip shop turned tapas bar that does a pretty good job of making N4 feel like Barcelona. His next venture will be a Philadelphia-style pizza joint in Newington Green, opening in April. See you there!

Trope 2: Smart Boys

At the start of the year, I read I Regret Almost Everything, the memoir by the restauranteur Keith McNally. Somewhat amazingly, I made it 250 pages before I could not bear another apology to his wives or children. But I really enjoyed the book’s first half, in which McNally drifts from Bethnal Green layabout to child actor, muse of Alan Bennett to the director of two feature films, oyster shucker to restauranteur.

What I found most inspiring about the book was that it portrayed a world in which one could stumble into bad and good decisions; a time when there was no strategy, no planning, just martinis and vibes, and probably lots of cocaine.

McNally created his hugely successful empire of Manhattan bars and restaurants seemingly by accident. This was something that was actually possible in the 1970s: you could go to a party in SoHo and leave with a blurry business idea and the keys for an empty building. McNally started with little money and very few connections. But what he did have was an openness to trying. He was very, very good at taking punts.

He also had an eye for copying. McNally is brazen about the fact he lifted ideas from Europe and placed them in Downtown New York. Balthazar, for example, was a rip-off of Brasserie Lipp in Paris. But what differentiates his mimicry from that of, say, Bistro Freddie or Henri, is that McNally was one of the first. His originality was his total lack of originality. He was, I’m afraid to say, a pretty smart guy.

In doing this research, I thought it would be a good idea to listen to one of the Chefs who I suspected, based on no evidence at all, had very little to say.

I picked the first name that came to mind – Jackson Boxer – and clicked on an episode of a podcast called Hungry. When I saw the runtime was nearly two hours, I was like: alright, I’ll give him twenty minutes. I listened to the whole episode.

Here’s the thing: Jackson is smart. The other thing: he’s very excited to tell you that he is not like other chefs. He reads ‘voraciously’. He dropped out of English and Philosophy at Cambridge. He wants cooking to return to a mechanical, rather than artistic, process. He writes. He is sober. He ‘loves having children’, ‘could go on having children forever.’

This sounds annoying, and it is kind of annoying. But listening to two hours of Jackson talking – although it’s an interview, it’s not a conversation – made me realise something. While Marco Pierre White showed us the power of good looks, and Anthony Bourdain the power of charisma, Jackson Boxer shows us the power of intelligence.

As someone who went to a state school and did a fashion degree, I’m still getting comfortable with people like Jackson, who are walking advertisements for private education. The same could be said for the podcast host. He struggles to keep up with Jackson’s racing mind, and interrupts his flow several times to ask who an author or philosopher is, and you can almost feel Jackson’s frustration at having to spell out S-t-e-n-d-h-a-l, or perhaps it’s smugness.

Let’s listen to another moment:

This is interesting, right? Jackson is deeply tapped into the very archetype we are discussing. He knows exactly what lineage he is part of. And although he claims to resist our collective mythologising of the chef-as-rockstar, he’s been spending the entire podcast doing exactly this.

The point he makes at the end of the clip, about the eventual burning out of the rockstar chef, is an interesting one. I’ve also noticed this recurring theme – that the pleasure-seeking chef that dominated the turn-of-the-century with their shouting and swearing and drinking and fucking has disappeared not because we’ve destroyed him, but because he’s destroyed himself.

There are many reasons we tell stories. Sometimes it’s for entertainment; other times, as Jackson says, they act as ‘salutary social lessons’; sorts of warnings against the dangers of over-enjoyment, the limitations of excess; and a promotion for something else… conformity.

Trope 3: Good Boys

There is another story that is essential to the Hot Chef: one of saviour.

Generally, we like to think we’ve grown out of the saviour complex. The idea of being saved by a divine force – usually women being saved by men, or men by women – feels regressive. But we can’t ignore that a narrative is being fed to us. In this narrative, the Chef is an explosive hedonist who is lacking discipline and purpose, who must ultimately be ‘saved’ by the order of the kitchen.

This is the principal logic in Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. An addict by nature, Bourdain switches from socially discouraged vices like drugs and drink to the socially sanctioned addiction of work. Jackson Boxer, too, talks about the positive benefits of the militaristic kitchen hierarchy on his mental health. He admits:

For a long period of my life, I resisted happiness because I found it boring. I was almost proud of the fact I wasn’t happy.

This could easily be a quote from Bourdain. Both men cite cooking, and its focus on teamwork and mutual responsibility, as digging them out of depressive states. This really stuck with me. Because we are living in a more individualistic society than ever, and I do worry that our gradual shirking of responsibilities in aid of ‘protecting our peace’ is leading us towards a crisis of human connection. We are lonely and isolated behind our screens. Perhaps giving up our email jobs to take up a shift or two in a kitchen would do us some good?

I still have issues with this narrative. The idea that men’s mental health can be repaired by the discipline of kitchen work isn’t far removed from the old claim that their decline stems from a lack of wars to fight. Both reduce men to creatures who require danger, hierarchy and the threat of destruction to keep themselves intact.

This leads us to the question: what happens next? What happens after the bad boys clean up their act? The answer appears to lie in the very thing they once rebelled against: home and family.

With the exception of Ed, all the Chefs I have profiled so far are, or have been, married, and almost all have children. First, we have Dom Hamdy, who talks lovingly of his daughter and wife. Then we have Jackson Boxer, whose Instagram bio – ‘Cook Thief Wife Lover’ – weirdly straddles both the pseudo-criminality of the chef and his earnest family values. Even Thomas Straker has a wife and three kids.

To conclude this redemption arc, let’s return to the enfant terrible himself, Marco Pierre White. These days, White is living an easy life in his rural Wiltshire house. But a Guardian profile from as early as 2001 shows how quickly he shed his bad boy persona to become just another member of polite society:

Marco, reformed, two years after hanging up his apron. A little more flesh to it. Married and faithful and coyly proud of fatherhood, no longer cooking daily but helping to run a £50 million empire and determined to become the best restaurateur in the land. The Marco who says, now, ‘I don’t lose my temper any more,’ and ‘I leave my emotions at home,’ and ‘I’ve never been happier in my life.’

Reading this, I can’t help but think of the Wife Guy. You know who I’m talking about: the man for whom marriage is not a binding agreement so much as an identity, who performs his faithfulness and devotion to his spouse as a way to brand himself as trustworthy and non-threatening.

I have plenty of thoughts on Wife Guys, as well as how marriage has gone from societal norm to personal achievement. I won’t go into this now. But I will say that the rise of men proclaiming themselves proud husbands runs suspiciously parallel to the MeToo movement, when men’s sexuality and singledom suddenly became a lot more menacing.

‘I love the institution of marriage,’ White tells anyone who will listen, as if he’s trying to convince us, or himself, that he’s no longer a liability; he’s one of the good guys.

We can’t seem to move past the same story. The story of a misunderstood young man being saved by the kitchen, who gets carried away with the fun of it all, who learns his lesson and finds peace in the good life – a country house, a wife and child, a gardening habit. So long as he can afford it.

The new Hot Chefs may be softer and cleaner, well-read and dressed, wealthy and married and, I guess, happier too. And I’m happy for them. I only wish their happiness could exist outside of the same old redemption arc, the one that continues to lure us into conformity. Sometimes a little deviance can be good for us too.

Thanks for reading.

In the Winter issue:

1. Mackenzie Thomas’ one-woman show

2. My inner theatre kid

3. Why we dream of narrative control

I’m Not Like Other Girls, I’m Worse

On 13 February 2026, I went to see Mackenzie Thomas’ one-woman show, I Said What I Said.

Readers of my very first post – The Diarist – will remember Mackenzie, whose screwball Lolita runs tirelessly over the internet and streets of Bushwick. You might see her wielding a selfie stick and wearing a babydoll dress, leaning over a pharmacy counter to buy UTI medication, trying to befriend her hacker, or generally having experiences and uploading them before the high has worn off. To put it in TikTok terms, she is like if Anaïs Nin were an eGirl.

You might also remember that Mackenzie went dark around the same time I published The Diarist in August 2025. She marked her hiatus from blogging by admitting that she was ‘feeling more embarrassment and shame’ about writing about herself. I posted about how this felt like the closing of an era, in which the self is no longer an excavation site that we must dig for content.

I continued to watch Mackenzie’s days unfold via her Instagram Stories, but missed the deeper monthly diaries she would usually post on her Substack. Luckily, her hiatus only lasted until October. Then, at the end of the year, her voice became a lot louder again. She was announcing a SURPRISE in NEW YORK on JANUARY 2ND and to HOLD THE DATE. I was not in New York, but continued to hold the date, wondering what she was getting up to.

The answer was more Diarist-coded than even I could have expected: Mackenzie was hosting a four-hour one-woman show in which she would read out every single one of her tweets between January and December 2025. My mouth dropped open. People could do that? And: people would watch that? The answer was yes and yes. It sold out.

Curse of the Theatre Kid

If you hadn’t already guessed it, I used to be a Theatre Kid.

I’d even go so far as to say musical theatre kid, although I couldn’t really sing and I definitely couldn’t dance. But I did subscribe to the musical theatre way of life: melodrama, performance, a touch of fantasy. Give me a stage and captive audience and I could have a lot of fun. Whether or not the audience would agree, I couldn’t say.

My favourite musicals were Cats, Oliver!, Chicago, Moulin Rouge, The Sound of Music, and Grease, which gives you an idea of what type of insufferable child I was, i.e. the type to put on ‘productions’ and make my parents pay for the privilege. Sometimes I would enlist the help of my neighbours, disaffected boys who had no idea what was going on (I was an only child until age 7, after which I had a half-brother, so I still had one whole parent for whom I was the star of the show).

As soon as I was old enough, I joined youth theatre groups and performed in pantomimes, working my way up from chorus rodent to Snow White. I sent an audition tape to Stars In Your Eyes Kids (as Kylie Minogue????) and cried my eyes out when I discovered I was too young to be considered for the role of Hermione in the UK-wide Harry Potter auditions.

When social media happened, I was obviously getting involved. I joined Bebo and competed in ‘modelling’ and ‘photography’ competitions which applied the concept of America’s Next Top Model to bored regional teenagers.

This sounds dodgy, but I swear it wasn’t – there was no showing skin nor money exchanged. Instead, each week we were given a theme (‘fairytales gone wrong’ comes to mind) and given the rest of the week to run around a forest with a DSLR and our friends, then mess around on an illegally downloaded version of Photoshop on the shared computer, then, minutes before the deadline, excitedly upload our entry.

The following day, whoever ‘ran’ the ‘competition’ would then announce the ‘winner’. What did we win? Nothing, apart from misguided hope in our ascending stardom.

Side note: I have no doubt in my mind that Nadia Lee Cohen was a Bebo girl. Her entire shtick (photographer + model + micro-celebrity + Essex girl done good + total weirdo + friend to the Kardashians) is dripping in Bebo lore. I’ll do a post about her at some point.

You might think I grew out of my performance era when I hit puberty, and you’d be wrong. In fact, this was a turning point for me. I discovered I could actually turn my passion into good grades. I took Art, Media Studies, Drama – anything that would allow me to benefit from my pressing desire to control and distort my image.

It was around this time I came across the fashion industry. It appeared to me, a sixteen-year-old girl from a Northern English market town, to be the centre of the universe. Fashion took place in big, important cities and sat at the intersection of all the other things I liked: photography, theatre, beauty, literature, film. It solved a problem. I didn’t need to choose one of these things, I could just choose fashion.

I didn’t care too much about clothes, but, in 2010, fashion wasn’t really about clothes. The models in my favourite magazine, Katie Grand’s LOVE, were usually naked, or nearly naked, or kissing each other, or tied up underwater. No, fashion wasn’t about clothes. It was, in retrospect, about sex.

Of course, when I did finally get to the big, important city of London to study fashion, I realised that it wasn’t really about sex, and it was unfortunately about clothes.

Nor would there be good grades for donning a trilby to run around an abandoned building with a camera to get the cover image for your pretend magazine called ‘DEFY’. And there wouldn’t be a lot of sex either. Instead, there would be rails of clothes, spreadsheets, and lots and lots of emails.

Still, I got swept up in it all: the clothes, the coolness, and sadly the emails. The desire to perform and play that had been the rocket fuel for my childhood and adolescence was no longer needed; I drank coffee now. It was London, or the internet, or a combination of the two, that had stamped it out of me.

My theatre kid still pops up. The moments when I notice it rear its head are when I’m doing a work presentation or singing karaoke: activities that are considered very different from one another (one formal, daytime, sober; the other causal, nighttime, not sober) but really are the same.

Whether I’m presenting a deck on the Gen Z workplace or rap-singing my way through Can’t Stop by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, I have two things: a stage and a captive audience. For forty-five or three-and-a-half minutes, I am the performer, and everyone’s eyes are on me. I feel alive. I feel, in a weird way, myself.

Losing the plot

I thought I’d missed out on Mackenzie’s one-woman show. After selling out several dates in New York, she took it to Los Angeles, and it was only after seeing the positive reviews that I realised I could have flown to New York to see it. That it could have been a business expense, some interactive Recurring Character fieldwork.

Luckily, she ended up coming to me. The smart women at Polyester magazine also had their eyes on Mackenzie’s ascending star, and booked her for a London show on 13 February. I bought my ticket instantly.

I Said What I Said was structured by month. Each month began with an opening essay, followed by every single one of her tweets (including retweets and meme captions and videos watched in their entirety; this was a defiantly no-skip zone).

I took a toilet break during the month of May, and discovered that motivating myself to leave my seat was a challenge. Mackenzie had stumbled upon a completely addictive formula: a sort of collective live social media experience.

The reason the four hours fly by is the same reason time you disappear into the vortex of your phone; when you look down to check a reel someone sent you, then look up again and it’s midnight. Plus, there were plenty more delicious things. Dancing. Memes. Dresses. Soul music. Gossip.

At the beginning of last year, in my light monitoring of Mackenzie’s social media, I became aware that she had broken up with her boyfriend. Matt Starr is a poet, the founder of Dream Baby Press, and, lol, the creative lead at Substack. It’s no wonder Mackenzie stopped posting her diary entries on the very platform that her ex-boyfriend ran.1

Before seeing the show, I half-expected Mackenzie to have retired her Diarist persona altogether, especially since she had been feeling ‘shame’ for talking about herself so candidly. Perhaps, I thought, she had become a performance artist or comedian instead.

Winter is preventing me from being young.

– @evilmackenzie

But as I sat there on 13 February, I watched as Mackenzie dialed up her Diarist to eleven. ‘This is a show about honesty, myself, and how I feel,’ she began. I quickly realised I wasn’t only about to get the full dispatch on her breakup, it would be my entire evening of entertainment.

Let’s remind ourselves of something: a few weeks before, Mackenzie had performed this same show in Brooklyn, to an audience of people who probably knew her ex-boyfriend. This still blows my mind. Imagine booking out EartH just to tell the girlies everything? Imagine selling it out?

It’s all very Taylor Swift, another theatre kid in recovery. Although Swift loves to tell us she’s an ‘English teacher’ (her engagement post still makes me feel sick) she is fooling nobody. Swift is a thespian at heart. The Eras Tour was nothing if not a large-scale West End show. Taylor Swift doesn’t make music to listen to so much as to perform to. That’s why her songs are so powerful to sing in the car, or, for those who don’t drive, lip-sync on a walk home after two glasses of wine.

Like Diarists, I also capture moments as they happen, but it wouldn’t occur to me to share such intimate writing. I am all too aware of just how wrapped up in emotions I still am that I cannot even begin to know whether it is good or bad writing; nor can I imagine how others would perceive it.

And perceiving, as every good theatre kid knows, is the most important thing of all. What we want more than a stage and an audience is narrative control. Allowing someone to watch as my yarn is unfurling, to watch as I lose narrative control, is a terrifying prospect.

Mackenzie turned her unfurling yarn into art. She left nothing to the imagination, and invited an audience to be voyeurs as she lost herself, in real time, somewhere between the months of March and May. Although wildly different in subject to my own life between these months, it’s somewhat nice to know that Mackenzie and I were going through something in the same timeline.

I’m not going to do a four-hour one-woman show anytime soon, and I don’t have plans to publish any of my more personal writing either. But I Said What I Said reminded me that it is possible to do something absolutely insane, the type of self-centred production only a child would dare to do, and even they would only charge their parents £1 to watch it.

Mackenzie reminded me that claiming a stage as an adult does not need to limited to karaoke or Keynote; it can be a form of art, or play, or a radical new entertainment format, or just a fun evening out. And a very good one at that.

Anthony Bourdain has been following me. Well, his book, Kitchen Confidential, has.

It started with a girl in my book club, who announced she was listening to the chef’s memoir on audiobook. Then I went to a book launch for Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs and spent the entire talk distracted by the familiar tattooed arms reflected in Madeline’s glasses.

Then I was on the tube, drawn to a woman who was engrossed by a book I couldn’t make out. Something about me: if someone is engrossed in a book, I need to know what it is. I can’t get off the train without knowing. Luckily someone needed to get past, so the woman lifted up the book to let them, and there it was.

The final straw came when one day my housemate left a Hatchards bag on the kitchen table. Because I’m nosy and impatient, I needed to know what book she had bought, but she wasn’t around. So, I went over and carefully peeked inside. I don’t know why I’m pretending there is a great reveal here… you already know what book it was!

I read Kitchen Confidential in summer 2023. At the time, I knew of Bourdain like I knew of mythical creatures: he was somewhere between an old-world celebrity, food-bro influencer, and man with grey hair. But that wouldn’t last long.

I loved his memoir, and afterwards I watched his documentary, Roadrunner. And after that I moved on to his TV shows, Parts Unknown and No Reservations. With more than 300 episodes, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking there’s an unlimited supply of Bourdain, that we will be watching him eat and cook and travel for years to come. But of course that is not the case.

I don’t talk about Anthony Bourdain very often. My relationship to him – my instinct just now was to write with him, which should tell you everything you need to know – feels strangely personal. He is a character I engage with alone, and on the few occasions I’ve watched his show with someone else, it’s been a mortifying experience.

Why am I so mortified by it? Perhaps I feel exposed, but more likely I’m facing up to his availability – the fact that someone else, anyone else, can have a relationship with him too. If you’ve experienced a charming friend meet someone new and bestow that charm onto them, you know what a sad and humbling moment it is.

I suppose what I’m saying is that Bourdain can, too easily, become a sort of tamagotchi. Watching Parts Unknown is not dissimilar from POV porn – a boyfriend experience for straight women with a fetish for roaming men with Diarist tendencies and an alcohol / drugs / sex / narcissism problem [delete as appropriate].

I restrict myself to one episode at a time. He must be microdosed. I can’t get too involved, because what if I stop liking him? What if I start liking him too much? Or what if I run out of him altogether?

The thing is, I’m not alone in feeling this way about Bourdain. There are countless Reddit threads dedicated to his memory. People are still queueing up outside restaurants he adored. A biopic starring Dominic Sessa is in production. There are many, many women and men – but mostly women – picking up the memoir that was published a quarter of a century ago.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why we can’t stop thinking about Bourdain, and I’ve managed to channel my thoughts into three theories. In some, I’ve tried to put my bias aside, in others I’ve confronted it head-on. It’s hard to write about someone you feel parasocially so close to, but I’ve had a good go.

Theory 01: Everyone Loves An Underdog

If you aren’t clued up on your Bourdain lore, let me get something sad out of the way. Bourdain died by suicide in June 2018. He was 61, and partway through filming the 12th season of Parts Unknown.

At the time, I didn’t really know who he was, so it wasn’t until years later that I went back in time and immersed myself in the online media circus surrounding Bourdain, his relationship with actor Asia Argento, his (believe it or not, not cancellable) part in MeToo, and his death.

The most shocking thing I learned in this deep dive was that the personal relationship I had claimed was by no means personal. In fact, everyone who knew and didn’t know Bourdain talked about an almost spiritual connection to him.

For the 25th anniversary edition of Kitchen Confidential, the author Irvine Welsh has written a wonderful introduction, in which he confronts the almost holy levels of adoration that Bourdain continues to draw:

Anthony Bourdain’s departure was a signal that those soulless gobshites were in their ascendancy. People like myself, who never knew him, instantly had that “owwhh fuck no” moment; the sense that we had not only lost a kindred spirit but an important one.

For context, by ‘soulless gobshites’, Welsh is referring to the ‘mean, petty, loud-mouthed tyrants and their apologists’ of capitalism. Later, he affectionately coins the common enemy of the rock and roll Chef – ‘spoilt white boys’.

This brings me to the character’s archetype. While the Hot Chef is undoubtedly a Hero, and – although this is much rarer – a Love Interest, let’s get a little more granular and call him an Underdog.

By definition, the Underdog is a person who is expected to lose a competition due to their perceived disadvantages. Against all odds, they come out on top. But this idea – that they are ‘expected to lose’ – no longer feels relevant.

I’d argue that the project of the Underdog has been so successful that we’re now rooting for these unlikely heroes from the very beginning. These days, we’re surprised when an Underdog doesn’t come out on top, when grit + resilience + social disadvantages don’t = triumph. This is also the defining logic behind the Working Class Hero, but we’ll get to them another time.

OK, back to Kitchen Confidential. Welsh goes on to praise Bourdain as the chef of ‘villains’, ‘outlaws’ and ‘rebels’.

While I agree with Welsh that Bourdain does embody the pirate energy of the Hot Chef, there is a world in which Bourdain is bucketed with the cultural elite. After all, he was from a well-to-do Manhattan family. His dad was a recording industry executive, his mum a New York Times editor. He was 6’4, white, straight, male, Alpha.

So what gave Bourdain permission to cast himself as a member of the down-and-out? Is it his drug-snorting? His swearing? His earring? Or are we the ones who cast him? Welsh argues, with accuracy, that the answer lies in politics:

Bourdain instinctively understands something many bourgeois Marxists fail to grasp: harping on to working class people about how exploited they are, and how wretched their lot is, only denies them humanity and pushes them into the arms of the oppressors. Like Orwell, Bourdain clearly saw the spirit of working people, as well as their oppression.

He also writes that Bourdain’s role in today’s democratisation of food culture ‘cannot be overstated’:

His great legacy was instilling in our collective consciousness the idea that political and social inequality could be both informed and markedly remedied by the examination of what and how we eat.

I love these quotes. It’s funny to hear someone like Irvine Welsh, who is normally so suspicious of everything, so happy to worship at the altar of Bourdain. That’s the effect this man has on people, even fellow ex-junkies who’ve seen it all, like Welsh, or girls who have seen nothing, like me.

Putting Welsh’s crush aside for a second, I’d like to come back to my own. To be honest, I’m a little embarrassed to talk about it. Not because it’s a guilty crush, but because it’s such an obvious one.

Until this point, I’ve mostly been talking about the Hot Chef through physical symbols: Dom’s hands, Marco’s intense stare, Jamie’s baby face. But to understand Bourdain and his magnetic effect on people, we need to forget about his looks altogether. They help, of course, but I think his sex appeal comes from something much less visible – charisma.

Charisma is famously hard to write about. Talking about someone’s charisma – or worse, your own – is the right way to dispel it completely. It’s like trying to explain a joke. And yet it is precisely this mystery that keeps me coming back to charisma time and time again. I want to study it. I want to understand it. I want to know its relationship to those slippery things like identity and self-image.1

We often place charisma hand-in-hand with confidence. Consider the way women talk about men’s insecurity as the ultimate turn-off, and confidence as the ultimate turn-on. But Bourdain, as we know from his confessional writing, is one of countless people who are both profoundly charming and insecure. The same thing that’s drawing people in – his confidence – is also the thing eroding him from the inside. We have a word for this now; it’s called imposter syndrome.

So, we have charisma + underdog appeal. It’s a classic combination, but one that is increasingly hard to locate in today’s culture of rich, politically apathetic celebrities and men who perform charisma instead of having it.

Speaking of performativity, I can’t help but wonder if Bourdain’s image – his tattoos, earring, leather jackets – would have the same effect on us today, in the era of Paul Mescal and Post Malone, as it did in the early 2000s.

If Bourdain arrived on our screens in 2026, would we accept him, or would we instead take great pleasure in pointing him out as ‘performative’, as if a man who sits outside a pub reading Simone de Beauvoir with a Guinness at 1pm could simply not be enjoying his life; he must be trying to fuck someone?

There is of course the chance that Bourdain was trying to fuck someone. As we discover in the first chapter of Kitchen Confidential, his most formative memory was not his first oyster, not his first trip to France, nor his first glass of wine, but walking into a commercial kitchen one day to the head chef bending a just-married bride over the steel countertop.

‘I knew then, dear reader, for the first time: I wanted to be a chef.’

Theory 02: Sensualism is Hot

If we can all agree on one thing, it must be this: Anthony Bourdain is a Sensualist. ‘I’d been the culinary equivalent of the Flying Dutchman too long,’ he writes, ‘living a half-life with no future in mind, just oozing from sensation to sensation.’

Anyone who has seen Parts Unknown, or one of the many memes it has birthed, will know about Bourdain’s love for simple yet sensory pleasures, everything from a very cold beer to a late-night shawarma; a long nap in the sunshine to a dip in the sea.

This might sound like normal things for an adult man to enjoy, but in today’s age of flat screens and noisy nothings, where everything looks and tastes richer but feels somehow emptier, the Sensualist is not as common a character as you would think.

In fact, Bourdain’s hunger for life feels particularly pertinent at a time when men are increasingly detached from pleasure. Contrast him with the rise of the Optimisation Bro, who is cold-plunging before breakfast, doing a half marathon before lunch; someone who listens to a motivational podcast, eats slop bowls of salad and two protein, treats the body as a system to be hacked rather than inhabited. This video of men drinking bone broth outside the pub haunts me nearly as much as Dom’s empty stare.

In Bourdain: The Definitive Oral Biography, Bourdain’s friends recount his ultimate dream: sitting alone on the beach with nothing to do and nowhere to be. These days, giving it all up for a new life on the beach (New Beginner style) comes with a glaring red flag of avoidance. In Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert applies the analogy of Dorothy in the Poppy fields to expats drinking the days away in Bali: don’t doze off, or you could spend the rest of your life here.

Bourdain knew about his habit for avoiding responsibilities. ‘When I die,’ he wrote, 18 years before he would. ‘I will decidedly not be regretting missed opportunities for a good time. My regrets will be more along the lines of a sad list of people hurt, people let down, assets wasted and advantages squandered.’

This is a hard line to read. But it’s impossible to talk about Bourdain without talking about his streak of darkness. Although he lived a more than enviable life of travel, good food and plenty of people, he was haunted by guilt.

It’s sad to think that he couldn’t allow himself the mindless enjoyment he so deeply wanted, and how aware he was of his own extreme temperatures, his push-and-pull between extravagance and discipline. Time and time again he refers to himself as an unsavoury character – a ‘monster of self-regard’ or a ‘life-long show-off’ – and didn’t we just refer to him as the villain’s chef?

‘I had field experience, a vocabulary and a criminal mind. I was a danger to myself and others.’

– Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential (2000)

We can’t avoid it – Bourdain’s darkness is essential to his timeless appeal. I don’t want to romanticise his depression, especially since it ultimately led to his suicide, but it does serve as a shadow side to his overflowing, almost overwhelming lust for life. To be a true sensualist, to access the highs of life, you have to have the lows.

One of my favourite Bourdain memes is a picture of him sat outside a bistro in Paris. On the table is a ham baguette, black coffee and pack of cigarettes. He has sunglasses and a leather jacket on and a scarf around his neck. He is quietly enjoying himself.

We can tell simply from looking at this picture that he is planning to sit at the table for a long time, perhaps the whole day. Maybe he will read a book and flirt with one of the waitresses, but he won’t check the time and he definitely won’t go on his phone. When he leaves the table, it will be because he gets too cold, rather than because he has anywhere to be.

Looking at this picture now, it occurs to me that this is perhaps the urban equivalent to the quiet, empty beach of his dreams. I hope so, anyway.

Theory 03: Erotic Vagrancy

For this theory, we have to let the Chef go for a second. Instead, let’s turn our attention to the character Bourdain embodied later in life, when the success of his book plucked him out of the hot Manhattan kitchen of Les Halles and emptied him into the rest of the world.

By 2018, Bourdain was travelling for around 250 days a year. He appeared, at first, to take to this new life with ease, moving seamlessly from disciplined Chef to restless Vagabond. He had a persona that was not only endearing but endlessly endeared towards strangeness: people, cuisines, places. He looked visibly more relaxed during his episodes in Myanmar and Libya than he did in his backyard of Queens.

For Bourdain, the world was not only an exciting place, but a safe one. Of course, there’s a CNN cameraman on standby and multiple insurance policies in place, but there’s another layer to his security: his consistent openness to adventure, his commitment to chaos, his childlike spontaneity. While the stars argue otherwise, he was the embodiment of a Sagittarius.

In many ways, it’s no wonder we were seduced by Bourdain. He combines our cultural desire for the rockstar, misfit, and man of mystery – all wrapped up in one. Although he could, and usually did, speak to anyone, there is no doubt he was, deep down, a real loner. He could be taking shots of ChaCha with a Tbilisi taxi driver one minute and writing brooding journal entries the next.

Like all men you want to, but probably shouldn’t, romanticise, Bourdain’s Byronic Hero tendencies were not as organic as you might think. Of his time at culinary school, he wrote:

My idols of the time had been, all too predictably, Hunter S. Thompson, William Burroughs, Iggy Pop and Bruce Lee. I had had, for some time, a romantic if inaccurate view of myself as some kind of hyper-violent junkie Byron.

Another embarrassing admission: I too have been privy to men who speak of themselves in this way, weaving stories of impulsive and meandering trips across borders, making sure to leave out the less romantic details of Swedish-owned Airbnbs and small-scale scams. But, as I get older, I wonder to what extent I actually want these men, and to what extent I want to be them.

As a spiritual, and actual, Sagittarius, I see a lot of Bourdain in myself, as well as the self I want to be. Travel, food, and people are my three deepest loves. Bourdain not only represents a lifestyle of my dreams, but a handful of micro-dreams too.

He was a man who could always get a waiter’s attention. Who could successfully bribe a security guard. Who could flirt. Who always wound up at the lock-in, or inside an abandoned Soviet building, or on a fisherman’s boat at sunrise. He was part independence, part curiosity, part fearlessness, part stupidity. As a woman, I wish I could travel like this. I wish I could live like this.

There’s also the fact that Bourdain travelled during a time when the world genuinely surprised us. Sure, it’s only been 24 years since his gangly frame lurched around Tokyo for A Cook’s Tour, but think how much the world has changed since then. iPhones, Google Maps, Instagram, Airbnb, Monzo, Uber. We’ve experienced the democratisation of travel, of food, both of which Bourdain likely had a hand in. Over time, we’ve stopped being shocked by eating a pig’s head. Who doesn’t own a piece of merch from St. John these days?

Anthony Bourdain manages to achieve that twee Millennial dream of travelling ‘like a local’. As we flock in droves – to Kyoto for spring, Marseille for summer, Lisbon for autumn, Prague for winter – we try and fail to access the glory days of pre-TikTok travel, a time when everything felt frightening and weird and possible, when there was no oat milk, no pet nat, no queueing for a slab of Basque cheesecake, or pre-booking an exhibition weeks in advance.

That said, I’m thankful that we have shifted back to celebrating basic foodstuff, where unfussy, diasporic, and frequently bread-based dishes – the type Bourdain would have called ‘honest’ and ‘mind-blowing’ in equal measure – are back on the cultural menu. I’m also thankful for Vittles, one of the most important food archivists we have, for documenting this shift.

Back in 2020, the online magazine published an article on the Bourdainification of food travel. Trust Vittles to give us a well-observed criticism of Bourdain and his fetish for the ‘authentic’, otherwise known as ‘cheap’:

It’s pretty rich for a white American to come to an underdeveloped country and strip-mine it for delicacies; to bring with him promise of untold tourist food-dollars, but only on the condition that the country swears not to get too developed in the meantime, or too expensive.

Food writer George Reynolds goes on to describe Bourdain as a ‘transitive verb. He happens to places and people and things, and then leaves once he has what he came for.’

It’s an interesting way of thinking about Bourdain, like a force of anti-gentrification gentrification, or an early ur-text of the socialist creative type patting themselves on the back for bumming a cig from an old man in Napoli, or eating a tongue taco in Mexico City, or letting a teenager on a scooter take them to a bar so underground it doesn’t exist on Maps.

Even though his shows allow us to imagine wandering the world with a man on our arm who, although tall and white and carrying American dollars, can cast himself via the never-to-be-underestimated medium of charm as a quasi-local, we don’t actually want to be his girlfriend. We know – Bourdain has told us! – that he is an irresponsible, explosive person. He would be a nightmare to be married to. What we actually want, I think, is to borrow from him. To travel with our noses and our mouths.

Women too, I believe, are shifting away from the dark, brooding Byronic Hero that had the monopoly on the erotic imagination for centuries. I’ll come back to this fate another time. But for now, who, or what, are women shifting their energy to?

Part III will explore our modern fetish for safe, stable men at a time of global instability. We’ll also identify how the Hot Chef has cleaned up his act, started a family, been reformed. Or so he tells us.

To be continued.

Yes, Chef

There is a YouTube video that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s one of those house tours that usually follow a celebrity through their Brooklyn brownstone or Cotswolds mansion. Only in this case, it’s a three-bedroom terraced house in the Greater London neighbourhood of Leyton, and the owner isn’t a musician or actor, but the young chef and restaurateur Dom Hamdy.

You probably don’t know Dom. I didn’t, before my friend recommended me this video – she further recommends watching it high. But I can safely assume that if you are over the age of 30 and live in London, you probably know a person like Dom, and you have definitely taken your shoes off inside a house like his.

You’ve used the individual Tekla hand towels in the bathroom, then inspected the wedding photos – they are eating at a long table in a European field, obviously – and maybe even snuck a zigzag candlestick in your bag, to make up for all the money you spent at Dom’s restaurants, Crispin and Bistro Freddie.

I realise this is all getting a bit Branded Couple, so let’s put the house to the side for a second. Next, I’d like to describe Dom. He’s tall and wide-shouldered, with tanned skin and dark hair and just enough stubble. He’s wearing loose pinstriped grey trousers and a soft button-down jacket (or is it a shirt?) that is also grey but somehow also green. The promise of a white tee pokes out. Dom is, if you could not tell by the descriptors I’ve borrowed from Jilly Cooper novels, an attractive man.

Before you narrow your eyes at me and tell me I’m being objectifying instead of objective, I’d like to point out some of the video’s top-rated comments:

HOT!

I swear I really wanted to pay attention to the house 😭😭😭😭

I am in love.

The hands…

And my personal favourite:

Shame you had to get married but worth it in the end to get your hands on some of her families old bits and pieces… make sure you keep them in the settlement… drop me a message when you get to the desperate stage and i will give you a good time to take your mind of things.

While I don’t share the views of the Sunday Times audience, their thirstiness is relevant here, as is Dom’s hotness.

The thing is, Dom doesn’t feel like the Hot Chef – or even the suave, boozy restaurateur – we know and love. He’s mum-friendly. Mortgage-friendly. He has short hair and a wedding ring. His world is all beige interiors, French-inspired painstakingly hand-scrawled menus, and a restaurant aesthetic that insists it exists outside trends while participating squarely inside them.

It’s the Hot Chef with all the flames and knives and blood removed. It’s sanitary. It’s nice. But that’s exactly what makes him worth thinking about.

I’ve wanted to tackle the Character of the Hot Chef for a while now, but I can’t say when the seeds were planted. Possibly it was when everyone else’s were – around the time of The Bear, and the subsequent Uniqlo sales and short king summers that Jeremy Allen White’s tattooed arms – or was it his emotional unavailability? – inspired.

Or perhaps my interest could be traced further back, to the Flaubert-reading chef I dated in my early twenties, whose fingers were constantly in plasters from making me fried chicken or tacos al pastor. Or perhaps it goes back even further, to the closest thing modern women have to Michelangelo’s David: Anthony Bourdain.

Before we go any further, let me caveat: this will be a character study, not a trend report. I am well-aware that we’re way past the peak of the Hot Chef. It’s a trend as old as time, or at least 2023 – the year The Bear season two came out, The Devonshire opened, and the year Time Out ran a competition to find London’s hottest chef. It was a big year for people who dedicated their lives to kitchens.

Time Out’s Hottest Chef, if you’re interested, was Sertaç Dirik, one of the two brothers who turned Dalston’s Mangal II from a traditional Turkish ocakbaşı to a lauded modern restaurant. Sertaç left to pursue his own project last year, but Mangal II remains a fascinating and delicious place to eat – or even just to read about.

Not enough restaurants make an effort to mythologise themselves like Mangal II does. Every few weeks, the restaurant publishes a surprisingly personal, compelling, and gossipy newsletter written by the older – and unofficially hotter – brother, Ferhat. Ferhat uses the newsletter however he wants. Sometimes he announces a new £25 set menu, other times he reflects on a breakup. Another common feature is complaining about things restaurants are not supposed to complain about, whether it’s one-star-reviewers, last-minute cancellations, or Hackney’s local drug addict, Joy.

I love that Ferhat doesn’t really give a fuck. He marks what is hopefully the end of our Karen era of Yelp, TripAdvisor and Google Maps and the holier-than-thou reviewers they bred. It reminds us that chefs not only have a voice, but they can use it, too.

While the Hot Chef may seem to like a modern invention, a product of our TikTok-era cooking kink, he’s a much more storied character.

He – I’m afraid he almost always is a he – comes with a long list of tropes, which I will cover over the next three – yes, three – parts:

• In Part I we’ll explore the bad boy beginnings of the Hot Chef, and the enduring allure of bravado, sex, alcohol, drugs, authority, punk, and deviance – all forces that played an important role in the mythologising of men who cook.

• Part II will take a different approach: a cultural deep-dive into one of the main characters of the Hot Chef. Can you guess who?

• In Part III, we’ll look at more recent subversions of the archetype – men who appear to promise a different model of masculinity; one that’s as romanticised in 2026 as messy hair and a bad temper were in 1999.

There will be, of course, plenty of chefs who don’t fit the image of the Hot Chef I’ll be sketching. But the archetype itself – still overwhelmingly white, male, and, well, hot – remains oddly resistant to change. I’m less interested in the reality than in fantasy; the chef of our collective imagination.

Even now, when chefs can be anything at all, we can’t seem to let go of the same few shortcuts. Men keep stepping neatly into the role we’ve written for them, performing not just what a chef is, but what he’s rebelling against, too.

Death of the Rockstar

At the end of the 20th century, something strange happened. The Rockstar persona that had captured the rebellious spirit of millions of young people around the Western world for the previous forty-odd years was disappearing.

Once associated with recklessness, hedonism, sex, drugs, rock and roll, long hair, jewellery, leather, tattoos and the elusive charm of the once poor and terminally lustful, the Rockstar was left behind as social values shifted away from the celebration of pleasure, and towards the celebration of business.

Suddenly, we were on the lookout for their replacement. Who would be our cultural icons now? If not men with guitars, then who would remind us of the irresistibility of risk and danger at a time that was genuinely becoming more risky and dangerous?

Meanwhile, the Chef was stepping out of the shadows. Television plucked these characters from their hot, cramped kitchens and put them in front of millions. The TV Chef was born.

Suddenly a whole new world was available to us; one that, unlike regular life, had distinct, militant, non-negotiable rules. Inside the kitchen, a small war was unfolding every night. Older, more respected men were shouting instructions at younger, bottom-of-the-food-chain boys. Pressure was constant and palpable: all the rush of the last few minutes of a quiz show, but packed into a tight space with no windows and naked flames.

The kitchen makes for great voyeurism. It’s a place where every second of every minute of every hour is vital. Pure exhilaration, high stakes, and drama are happening all the time – just behind a door, while we sip our Pinot Noir and wait for our veal chop. The main characters of these grand performances were, of course, the men who ruled the roost: the equal parts tortured and torturing Head Chefs.

In many ways, it makes sense why the Chef picked up where the Rockstar left off. Both food and music are inherently sensory things. Using your mind is not necessary to enjoy either thing; in fact it probably detracts from it.

Plus, everyone can relate to food – we all engage with at least three times a day. TV chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver were essential to the astronomical foodie-ification of culture as we entered the 21st century. By 2000, Ramsey’s tyrannical fury and Oliver’s toothy grin were well on their way to helping the UK to finally discover what it was to eat. Just a couple of hundred years behind the rest of the world, then.

If you’re thinking: wait, you’re telling me Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver were rockstars? Not necessarily. But they both contributed to a new masculine ideal that was unfolding in the wake of the rockstar’s death. Ramsay’s dominance and penchant for routine humiliation tied into our idolising of misunderstood men who are ‘deep’ and ‘passionate’ but really just angry. On the other end of the scale is Oliver, an early iteration of the non-threatening Softboy, all white trainers and vintage sports jacket and home-cooked Sunday roasts.

Perhaps, then, we can look to Marco Pierre White, with the combination of Oliver’s wild hair and Ramsay’s anger issues, as responsible for turning the chef into the sex symbol we know today. His 1990 book White Heat – credited as the first chef memoir – includes a photo of White topless, a cigarette in his mouth and a dead shark resting casually on his lap.

This image would haunt the Chef for years to come. It gave them a clear-cut role – the Bad Boy – and promised all the perks that came with it, the aforementioned sex, drugs and rock and roll. Like all the Baby Boomers picking up guitars in 1970, young men in droves were testing their knife skills and picking up their aprons, ready to commit themselves to something challenging, exhilarating, and ultimately identity-forming.

But we can’t talk about the Chef-as-Rockstar without talking about its greatest myth-maker: Anthony Bourdain. Not because he was the hottest, or the angriest, or even the most talented, but because he offered something else entirely – an appetite for life that went beyond ambition, discipline, or success.

You can read Part II here.

In Part II, we’ll examine four Tropes that help the Character break free from entrapment –and reveal where they might be headed next.

Trope 1: Another Country

This year, with many big-swing Hollywood blockbusters grasping for our attention, I found myself gravitating towards small films. These are films that are modest and contained, that know their limits, and don’t suffer under the weight of over-ambitious writers. Some small films I saw and enjoyed this year were Pillion, Perfect Days, A Real Pain, and a lovely 1989 film called Shirley Valentine.

Shirley Valentine is an adaptation of a Willy Russell play, which is probably why it feels so slim: it’s intended to be performed on one stage, with one actor. Emotionally, though, it’s huge. And it’s one of the most exciting iterations of the New Beginner archetype I’ve seen.

The story follows Shirley, a 42-year-old housewife from Liverpool who is, you guessed it, bored. She has raised a daughter as well as a husband who expects his steak dinner at the same time each night. She has friends but doesn’t really relate to them, choosing to talk to the walls for company instead.

She’s a sunny and larger-than-life character in a working-class neighbourhood that leaves room for neither. This is important, because you’ll notice that most examples of the New Beginner are insufferable, privileged people who have been given everything they want and don’t like it.

This, I think, is why the genre has suffered in recent years: the eat-the-rich dramedy has taken over from the dissatisfaction drama, because we’re less likely, these days, to feel sorry for people who are depressed in a six-bedroom house.

There is another story that has died a death in recent years: the soul-searching travel narrative. This is a shame, because being somewhere else does lots of surprising and unsurprising things to us. The genre has likely been tarnished by the Eat Pray Love of it all, but we’ll get to that later.

So when Shirley gets the chance to step out of her ordinary life and go on a trip to Greece, she isn’t pulling out her suitcase and packing her swimsuit. She doesn’t even own a swimsuit. Shirley Valentine reminds us that travel can be scary. Disrupting a comfortable, albeit boring, routine isn’t that easy. Shirley has been married for so long she can’t even imagine being alone, let alone enjoying it.

Of course, Shirley goes to Greece, and of course she ends up wearing a swimsuit, and of course she ends up finding herself. But there’s plenty of red herrings along the way: including a surprisingly sweet subplot in which she sleeps with a local Greek man who takes her out on his boat. What starts as a potential romance – will she move to Greece for a man??? – becomes a potential tragedy – does he do this with all the British women??? – and eventually a story of quiet independence.

On the Sentimental Garbage podcast, Caroline O’Donoghue captures this subversion perfectly:

‘There’s such a cliché of a middle-aged woman who goes abroad and meets a waiter and he takes her for everything she’s got. And this is a movie that dares to ask: so what if he does this with everyone? It feels good when he does it with me.’

Obviously, this is a pre-Brexit movie, where moving to a new country to start over is technically possible, but Shirley Valentine feels more relevant today than ever. Middle-aged women are in a time of change. More women are initiating divorces than ever before, and 31% say they are happier than they have ever been.

But not everyone is celebrating. Some conservative media believes that more women are ‘quiet-quitting’ their marriages and selfishly choosing to prioritise their own desires over those of their families. According to these commentators, a book is to blame for this movement. It’s called All Fours.

Trope 2: Another Affair

Sam Mendes, the director of American Beauty, defines the film as an exploration of entrapment. There are many things a person can be trapped inside and want to escape from. One of them is a marriage.

The marriage-as-trap is a classic trope in the Midlife Crisis genre. We’re very familiar with watching a married man attempt to reclaim his agency through an affair. I included some examples in Part I, but there are many more. And while it may look like I am interested in these stories of men’s desire, this isn’t especially true.

Let me try to explain why. In the introduction to her 2019 book Three Women, Lisa Taddeo writes about the repetitive and predictable quality to men’s desire; a quality that, although often strong enough to ‘gamble everything they took a lifetime to build’ on a brief moment of pleasure, makes it rather boring. Taddeo found much more nuance in women’s desire instead.

While Three Women was a popular book in the Covid years, at least in hetero-occupied young readers, the theme of female infidelity didn’t really hit the mainstream until last year, when the American writer and artist Miranda July won over millions with her brilliant novel All Fours.

But before I get into All Fours – which I’m right now struggling to articulate my feelings about, not because they are not there but because they are so there – I’d like to cover some cultural context.

I have a friend, who will not be named, who admits that her favourite women are A) women who date younger, and B) women who cheat. A few years ago, this might have been a shocking thing to say, but nowadays our celebration of cheating women feels like a social achievement, a form of revenge against the centuries of philandering husbands.

According to some dubious research by none other than Esther Perel, there was a 40% jump in women cheating between 1990 and 2017. I imagine it’s only gone up since then. But there’s an important distinction to make, because, for the New Beginner, this isn’t cheating. It’s an affair. More than that: it’s sexual freedom. It’s self-liberation. It’s a fuck-you to men: as a group, as a concept. As my friend says, it’s chic!

This peculiar contradiction made me think of Sofia Coppola’s 2020 film On the Rocks, in which Bill Murray plays an ageing playboy who, in an effort to reconnect with his daughter, stakes out her husband’s infidelity. It’s not Coppola’s best work, but it raises a few interesting questions around cheating as something that is highly gendered and often hypocritical, like this one:

Why is it that, if a woman has an affair, it’s so wonderful that she found someone? But if a man has an affair, he’s banging his secretary?

– On the Rocks (2020)

Now, back to Miranda July, who is a real student of the New Beginner mindset; one of the best we have. All Fours, if you have dared not to read it, is about a 45-year-old woman who leaves her husband and child at home to embark on a three-week road trip from Los Angeles to New York, only to spend the entire time hiding out in a motel about thirty minutes from home.

I have to spoil it a bit here, because otherwise I can’t talk about it. After redecorating her motel room in the style of a Parisian hotel, she falls into an all-consuming psychosexual affair with a man called Davey, who is younger and also married and works at Hertz and is also a dancer.

Rather than focusing on my personal read on All Fours, which was a catatonic mix of feeling seen, horny, devastated, celebratory, horrified, and vindicated (and this was in November 2024; I don’t want to know what would happen if I read it now), I’m going to focus instead on the book’s wider impact, something I’m calling the All Fours Effect.

Formally, this is happening on July’s Substack, where hundreds of women are sharing stories on how the book changed their lives. Rather than connecting with July personally, they’re connecting with one another, looking for guidance on how to navigate perimenopause, leave their marriages, or ‘blow up their lives’.

Informally, this is happening on hundreds of dinner tables and in WhatsApp groups and book clubs. Everyone I’ve spoken to about this book has felt deeply and individually seen by it. And it’s not a commercial book.

One day I really would leave this house, these people, this city, and live a completely different life.

– Miranda July, All Fours (2024)

Part of me was a little upset to realise the personal connection I had with July was shared by so many people, who are also ‘whipping themselves into a froth of longing’ before breakfast, but also, I was pleased. Because the subjects July writes about feel dangerous. She has an amazing ability to bring out secret little things: things we didn’t know we had. Things we didn’t know we were even allowed to have.

Every now and again, when I’m feeling particularly angry or exhausted or enthused, I look around at the relationships people are in and I think: why? Why are we all falling in line with these three or four ways of doing things? Why are we getting married? Why are we breaking up? Why do we have to choose between polyamory and monogamy? Why do we categorise people by whether we have sex with them or not? Why are we innovating in every other area of life, except for our relationships?

Then, I remember All Fours, and I’m reminded that the person forcing us to live a certain way is us. And I’m like: oh, right, yeah. We can do whatever we want.

This might sound odd coming from someone who works in ‘futures’, but I think this book will create (is already creating?) real change when it comes to relationships. It’s not encouraging women to cheat or leave their husbands or even follow their selfish individual desires. It’s just encouraging people to think outside the script.

July takes all of these tropes – the affair, the midlife crisis, the menopause – and untangles them, then offers us something that is new and rare and good for us. Something that doesn’t make us roll our eyes, but open them really, really wide.

Although she subverts the affair – it’s the wife who has it, it’s emotional as opposed to physical, etc – July also reminds us of one of its essential truths: that it is not about the other person at all.

On some level, we all know this already. That sleeping with someone else is really about finding a new part of yourself. Or not sleeping with them, as is the case for July and another writer I admire, Chris Kraus. In the seminal I Love Dick, a book I have embarrassed myself not by reading on public transport but by lending it to several others who gave it back asking ‘really?’ with their eyebrows raised, the central ‘affair’ becomes something else: an art project between Kraus and her husband Sylvère.

The thing is, Dick – who at the start of the book makes the mistake of making prolonged eye contact with Kraus at a group dinner (I, like Kraus, have fallen for this trick, which is really not a trick at all, it is simply called being polite) – is essentially unimportant. He is a prop. And this is what makes I Love Dick such a terrifying and wonderful piece of work. That a person, against their will, can be embroiled in a sexual fantasy that resuscitates then destroys a marriage, and then become the centrepiece for an iconic autofictional novel with a giggling, phallic title. Poor Dick!

Sex short-circuits any imaginative exchange.

– Chris Kraus, I Love Dick (1997)

Thankfully, neither woman is deluded enough to think of these men as viable partners. Instead, the men are what July refers to as crowbars – ‘they get you out’. Out of a marriage or a creative slump, certainty, but most importantly for the New Beginner, they get you out of yourself. At least for a while.

‘There was something wrong with me,’ July writes at the middle-point of All Fours, in between pinging an elastic band around her wrist again and again. ‘I was somehow outside the fold of life, crawling on gravel, dancing.’

And there was something wrong with her, but that was OK. That was the whole point. That was what the New Beginner was seeking all along: a hideout from life. A temporary return to infancy and ignorance. That, and some dancing.

Trope 3: Another Round

I’d like to dedicate a moment to one of the more recent tropes of the New Beginner. While some are using romantic obsession to crowbar their way out of their midlife rut, others are using a more socially acceptable and less hazardous tool… alcohol.

Today, there’s more evidence than ever that going out and having fun is a powerful balm for dissatisfaction. Social health now sits among mental, physical and spiritual health as the key pillars of wellbeing. Running and knitting and book clubs are booming; living with or near your friends is a known way of beating loneliness; and the online cultural discourse is moving away from ‘no one cares if you don’t go to the party’ to ‘just go to the fucking party’.

But among all of this, there seems to be a dearth in stories about fun. It’s strange, because we’re entering the era of the ageing party animal, who is only going to become more prominent as our older population becomes dominated by 90s ravers and the younger one stops going out.

That said, the closest thing we’ve had to serotonin cinema in the last few years is Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, a funny, sad, and life-affirming Danish film released in 2020.

The film is about four friends, all high school teachers in their forties, who decide to experiment with daytime drinking in an effort to recapture their long-lost creativity and spark some joy. The plot is inspired by the Norwegian psychologist Finn Skårderud, who believed humans were born with an alcohol deficit of 0.5%. The friends decide to test this out.

Of course, drunkenness and disorder ensue. There are dance scenes, fishing trips, and tragedy. Things get better, then they get worse. Then they get better again. Because that’s what alcohol does: it temporarily lifts you up. You do become more creative and inspired and brave and alive, but only until the next morning.

Another Round strikes an impressive balance: it celebrates drinking, just as drinking feels like it is celebrating you. It doesn’t moralise or villainise alcohol, but it doesn’t lie to you about it either. For each dance sequence there is a dreadful hangover. You laugh, then you’re crying again.

Having fun is a way of beginning again, of shaking up your boring life, the film says. Only it’s a cycle: there are highs and there are lows. I’ve felt differently after every time I’ve seen it, but mostly I’ve felt the urge to have a drink. To exhale, enjoy myself, maybe stand on top of a bench and dance on it. Just as long as you remember that it won’t solve your problems, that tomorrow things will be different. And the day after that. And after that.

Trope 4: Another Revelation

One of things that fascinates me about the New Beginner is that they are amnesiacs. They are locked in a cycle of continuous self-reinvention.

At first glance, this might not be obvious. Film and literature often sell us the revelation as a one-off event, but that’s because it’s the only one we’re hearing about. The main character – with their Diarist tendencies – is wrapped up in their own grand narrative of change, as we, as mere mortals, usually are too.

Stef Dag, a New York comedian who I’ll come back to another time, sums up our great hypocrisy when it comes to change. She writes:

Isn’t it funny how we (girls) constantly tell our friends that people never change (in regards to their boyfriends), but are convinced we can reinvent ourselves every new moon cycle?

It’s from a post called When does your healing era become a toxic crutch?, which I needed to read, and I think Elizabeth Gilbert needs to read too. But more on her in a second.

New Beginners are often charming and eloquent and passionate, as well as quite loud, so it’s very easy to be convinced by their insistence that we are witnessing A Very Important Time in Their Lives. Plus, we wouldn’t be as interested in reading about an event if we knew it was one of countless versions, would we?

That said, I’ve always had an affinity for stories that play on repetition. One example is the American Bitch episode of Girls, where Hannah visits the house of a famous but recently cancelled male writer whom she once idolised but now condemns. By the end of the episode, the writer has succeeded in seducing Hannah, and as she leaves, the audience watches as many more girls enter the house after her. I like when I go through something unique and intense and emotional, only to discover it’s just another day in these characters’ lives.

OK, back to Elizabeth Gilbert, who is one of our most pervasive and problematic New Beginners. You’ll probably have seen the 2010 film Eat Pray Love, or read the original 2006 book, which I started reading – and I am ashamed to say, enjoying – last week.

That said, I can also see why the book makes people so mad. Yeah, OK, there’s the white privilege of it all (see below quote), but I think what lies beyond that is the notion of having your cake and eating it too.

‘Wasn’t I proud of all we had accumulated – the prestigious home in the Hudson Valley, the apartment in Manhattan, the eight phone lines, the friends and the picnics and the parties, the weekends spent roaming the aisles of some box-shaped superstore of our choice? I had actively participated in every moment of the creation of this life – so why did I feel like none of it resembled me?’

– Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat Pray Love (2006)

Early on in Eat Pray Love, Gilbert admits that she is overly attached to the idea of ‘both’. She wants to experience things that are at odds with one another. And generally, we don’t like it when people do that. Not because it’s impossible. I think it is possible. But I think we are resentful of people who want both; people who, in order to have both, have to start over again, because we don’t think it is fair. Because we, on some level, want both things too.

A few months ago, Gilbert published another memoir, called All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation. I’m sure her publishers were disappointed to discover this wasn’t another bestselling airport read, but a story about Gilbert’s drug, alcohol and sex-love addiction, as well as the death of her best-friend-turned-partner Rayya.

Gilbert made a name for herself as a woman who brought the post-divorce mid-thirties rediscovery to millions of people. As Jia Tolentino wrote in a recent New Yorker profile of the author, Gilbert is a woman ‘who could, in under thirty seconds, locate transcendent human insight in a nuclear-waste dump.’

Unsurprisingly, her latest memoir is no different. Tolentino writes:

And there it is again: the new revelation, the better life arriving once more. If you’ve read any celebrity profiles about youngish female stars during the past decade or so, you may have noticed that each woman, no matter what, is always stepping into her truth and power—she will also be stepping into her truth and power three years from now, when she promotes her next thing, and she will certainly be stepping into her truth and power five years after that. Every time, the person you’re seeing will really, finally be her.

It brings to mind Stef Dag’s quippy one-liner – the reinventing of ourselves every moon cycle. Perhaps it’s a female trait, as Dag suggests, linked to our cyclical hormones. But it’s more likely a result of the way we internalise stories – as linear, with one exciting incident and plenty of strife and after that, enlightenment – and superimpose them onto our lives.

In Japan, there is actually a service to begin again. You can pay people, or ‘night movers’, to help you disappear and start a whole new life. At risk of sounding like Liz Gilbert on one of her whitewashed anthropology lectures, the phenomenon is called Jōhatsu, which translates to ‘evaporation’.

I suspect the New Beginner will continue to be a dominant Character in coming years. The idea of starting again will always have a timeless glimmer to it. That said, surveillance capitalism has made it harder to diverge from the path we’ve chosen. Secrets are hard to keep in the age of voice notes. Going off-map is difficult when we have Find My Friends. People are tied into life-long mortgages. Switching careers after the age of 25 is not so easy.

Not to mention the ever-present memorial that is social media, giving us undue reminders as to who we are, and have been, and will be. It’s hard to actually change these days. That’s why stories of reinvention are grabbing us with both hands and shaking us: it is still possible! they are telling us; in fact they are shouting at us.

I think I’d like to believe them.

As we reach the end of the year, something always happens. We start talking about our next act. The changes we’ll make, the breakfasts we’ll eat, the new coat we’ll buy. All leading, of course, to the (truer) selves we’ll become on January 1st.

It seems like the perfect moment to write about a Character that’s been on my mind for a while. Let me introduce:

The New Beginner

Also known as: the Late Bloomer, the Divorcee, the Second Act

Archetype: Hero

Key setting: A gym, an airplane, or a quiet beach. Reinvention requires alone time, a playlist, and a pensive expression.

Paths not taken

The New Beginner began, aptly, as something else. It was a sub-trope of the Eternal Adolescent. I had planned to track what happens when the whimsical, indecisive Character reaches – gasp! – middle age. But when I tried to write it, I had second thoughts, and couldn’t explain why.

Then, two weeks after pressing publish, along came a study by the University of Cambridge, announcing the discovery of five distinct life stages. Adolescence, according to this new framework, now lasts from nine to 32. It’s ironic and beautiful that in just two weeks I would turn 32, taking me into the next stage: adulthood.

While puberty offers a clear start, the end of adolescence is much harder to pin down scientifically. Based purely on neural architecture, we found that adolescent-like changes in brain structure end around the early thirties.

– University of Cambridge, 2025

The study made me realise the New Beginner wasn’t an older version of the Eternal Adolescent, but something else entirely.

Unlike the Adolescent, whose life is a state of perpetual indecision, the New Beginner has chosen their path. In society’s eyes, adulthood has been ‘completed’: with a marriage, a child, a career, a creative practice; sometimes all of the above.

But, in their own eyes, there’s something missing. There’s dissatisfaction with their choice. Maybe regret. Maybe even imprisonment. Cue the opening bars of a bouncy, upbeat soundtrack, and the sudden desire to just… start over again.

Here, you might be thinking: wait, doesn’t this phenomenon have a name already, and isn’t that name the Midlife Crisis? And yes, in many ways it is.

I’m both endeared and repulsed by the term ‘crisis’. In many ways I’m indebted to it: working in trends, I’m writing the word on a daily basis. Never underestimate the power of a crisis. It does a lot of contextual legwork. You can talk about the loneliness crisis, cost-of-living crisis, healthcare crisis, climate crisis, masculinity in crisis, and you barely need to say anything else. People think: yes, a crisis! And then you move on.

Perhaps because of this, a crisis has struck me as a bad thing. Something to be avoided, to be solved (in trends: with an innovation, activation or a campaign; outside of trends: with funding, visibility, or a campaign.) But I’d like to unpack, and maybe even dispute, this.

First, let’s cover some groundwork. In Part I, I’ll introduce the New Beginner and their historically masculine archetypes. Then in Part II, I’ll unpack the newer tropes, from the transformative promise of international travel to extramartial affairs you actually root for.

As we go, you’ll notice my sympathy, even my siding with these Characters. This might be because they’re our Heroes; by design we’re supposed to side with them. But there’s a personal bias here too – I gravitate towards curiosity over comfort. I am more likely to encourage action that is disruptive and risky than safe and comfortable. Change, I think, is to be embraced. Surprise is a net good. I could blame digital technology or surveillance capitalism for the decline of surprise (the surprise crisis?) but that’s what I do for work, and I’m not here for work. I’m here to have some fun.

So, when did I become interested in this Character? When did my preoccupation with the dissatisfied and reawakened begin? Oddly enough, it began well before I turned an adult at all. In fact, I was sixteen; I was at school. And I had just watched a film called American Beauty.

Sports cars

There is a version of the midlife crisis we all recognise instantly.

It involves someone – usually a man – who buys an expensive sports car. Who gets his ear pierced or bleaches his hair or gets a tattoo. Who finds a younger mistress and takes up lifting or DJing. Who wakes up one day questioning his vitality and virility and goes to look for these things at Burning Man.

It’s funny how quickly these things come to you; how entrenched the midlife male experience is on our cultural consciousness. It’s also funny how I’ve borrowed most of these attributes from the 1999 film American Beauty.

I can’t quite emphasise how much I loved American Beauty. In retrospect, my parents must have found it strange when their teenage daughter’s favourite film was about a middle-aged man rebelling against polite society, who stopped to watch dancing plastic bags, and named Sam Mendes as her favourite director.

Now, it makes sense why I liked it so much. It’s a film about bad people, lust, consumerism, boredom, the trap of perfection, ugly friendships and horrible families, and, of course, it’s about beauty.

It’s a great thing when you realise you still have the ability to surprise yourself. It makes you wonder what else you can do that you’ve forgotten about.

– Lester Burnham, American Beauty (1999)

I hesitated to rewatch American Beauty at the now-officially-adult age of 32. Part of me was worried its sexual subplot would be muddied by the downfall of Kevin Spacey, but mostly I was worried it would be a bad movie.

I didn’t need to worry. To be honest, I didn’t even need to rewatch it. As soon as its opening shot began to track across its all-American suburbia, I realised I knew every single beat. In fact, I probably could have reenacted the whole thing, like the play it most definitely is.

On my rewatch, I was most surprised by how camp it was. First, there’s Spacey’s sarcastic, bitchy Lester Burnham, using his voice and body in ways more akin to a sitcom than an Oscar-winning film. It’s a domestic farce, and every one of the cast is contributing to its satire, whether it’s Annette Bening’s Carolyn sobbing her eyes out at her failed open house, or Wes Bentley’s dead-eyed local weirdo, Ricky, selling drugs and secretly filming his neighbours.

No wonder I loved it so much as a teen: it’s basically a teen movie for adults.

Then there’s the soundtrack. I’m not usually one to comment on music, but the tinkling of the opening sequence does something to me on a physiological level. It makes me feel like I’m Lester, living the last day of his life, waking up in his beautiful home and looking at his family and criticising them, then criticising himself, and then criticising them again.

I can’t say how exactly this film shaped my idea of adulthood – as something that is fundamentally lacking and boring, at least until you quit your sensible corporate job and spend the day playing video games and getting jacked, developing a (very) inappropriate crush, then taking a job at a fast food chain – but it certainly did.

While Lester’s retreat from the showroom Branded Couple lifestyle represents an undeniably masculine dream (see the video games, sports car and garage-turned-gym), I don’t think I internalised it as entirely masculine.

Instead, it sparked a larger idea in me: one that life isn’t set, that you have the ability to bend time, or at least age; that subscribing to the markers of a midlife crisis will make everyone around you roll their eyes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. There is nothing stopping you. There is always time to start again.

The last hours of summer

Another classic example of the New Beginner archetype – particularly as it intersects with the Eternal Adolescent – is Neddy Merrill, the ageing yet perennially boyish protagonist of John Cheever’s short story and 1968 film The Swimmer.

The story follows Neddy, who ‘might have been compared to a summer’s day, particularly the last hours of one,’ as he spontaneously attempts to swim across the county, from swimming pool to swimming pool.

What starts as a fun short story about a giddy man with too much energy turns into something much darker. If American Beauty gives us a pastiche of the midlife crisis, The Swimmer turns it into a horror story. I won’t give it away, but you can read it here.

It reminds you that you can go from being in your prime to losing everything, all ‘within the course of an afternoon,’ writes Susan Cheever, his daughter. In September 2025, she reflected on her father’s story – as well as, surprise surprise, his own capacity for country estates and summer antics with blonde women – for Vogue.

Susan writes about her father’s ability to capture ‘the nightmarish quality of ordinary life’ – isn’t this very Lester Burnham? Then she writes this, which I think pinpoints the very place at which the New Beginner and the Eternal Adolescent meet:

My father had a wandering heart, the soul of a renter, and perhaps he knew that no pool he built could rival the neighboring pools, where we all swam as if we owned them.

– Susan Cheever, via Vogue

Is it this sense of rivalry Susan points to – the knowledge that other lives are always shimmering nearby – that helps explain why so many Eternal Adolescents fail to build something of their own: a house, a family, a career? If you can’t be the best, why even bother starting? We could call it Millennial perfectionism, but it’s probably much older than that.

But back to the New Beginner. When I first read the story, I was instantly caught up in its fizzy, sun-drenched excitement. Like most readers, I was charmed by Neddy and his stupid idea to swim from pool to pool, functioning on a mild hangover and one too many Old Fashioneds.

Susan knows this. She finishes the Vogue article by pointing out that, although her father’s story has captured a cult audience, they ‘never, ever talk about the ending.’

The Swimmer isn’t remembered for how it ends, but for what it seems to promise: wet skin, smiling wives, garden parties, the endless sense of summer. We like to think about images of renewal and hope and optimism. We tend not to think so much about the part where it comes crashing down.

Stay tuned for Part II.

Forever young

When was the last time anyone truly came-of-age as a teenager? This is something I’ve been thinking about recently, instead of doing things like buying coasters (I’ve been using one I stole from my local pub, which means I can’t have both water and coffee on my desk at the same time) and working out how to set the heating timer in my shared house (no one else knows either).

For years, adolescence has been sold to us as the most important time in our lives. A time when we learn to think, feel, love, hate; when we learn how to learn. The coming-of-age genre is defined as a teenager moving into adulthood and experiencing psychological and moral change along the way. The idea is that these characters enter the narrative as unformed child-people, and leave with an existential understanding of the self.

This concept is told to us again and again. It’s in E4 teen dramas, YA fantasy novels, our own nostalgising of our teenage years. It’s even in the epigraph of one of my favourite books:

In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything.

– Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Volume II

No, I haven’t read Proust. This is the epigraph to The Idiot. No, not that one either. I’m talking about the Turkish-American writer Elif Batuman’s 2018 bildungsroman (fancy way of saying coming-of-age), which, if you haven’t read it, you definitely should.

I realise that recommending a book that begins with a Proust quote is not the done thing. In fact, such an epigraph would normally make me groan and consider putting it down entirely. (A Proust quote? For an epigraph? Groundbreaking.) But by the time you get to the final page, you realise that Batuman has thoroughly earned such a pretentious first page. She, like all my favourite writers, is in on the joke.

The Idiot is about an 18-year-old called Selin, who is embarking on her first year at Harvard in the mid-1990s. Perhaps it’s a strange choice to begin an essay about a Character who is defined by not being an adolescent. But Selin, in both The Idiot and its even more impressive sequel Either/Or, has been a hugely defining figure for me.

There are plenty of good and bad answers to the question: ‘why do you relate to this confused 18-year-old so much?’ But I think what underscores my connection to Selin is that she’s helped me to understand what adolescence actually is, or rather – is supposed to be.

For context: Selin spends both books questioning everything, but mostly herself. And her crisis couldn’t be more appropriate. She’s 18. She’s a virgin. She’s away from home and meeting unfamiliar people and falling in love for the first time.

Although Selin is academically smart, she doesn’t understand a lot of things, like language, or sex, and she definitely doesn’t understand what binds them together. Most of the novel focuses on an email relationship – this feels too soft, it’s really a world – she builds with a student called Ivan who she has a crush on. Those who’ve read The Idiot will know that ‘crush’ is too soft a word too.

What I mean to say is: Selin is having, at 18 and 19, experiences that I can only now, in my early thirties, begin to relate to. If I’d read it at Selin’s age, I wouldn’t have. I’d barely get past the Proust quote! But reading The Idiot for the first time in 2020, and for a second time this year, I realised that I too have been going through my own adolescence, only ten years too late.

How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?

– Elif Batuman, Either/Or (2022)

I don’t think I’m the only one to feel like this. It’s not like I’m particularly immature or inexperienced, but I’ve started to wonder if I’m a product of a larger generational imbalance; a sort of age dysmorphia.

Everything around us seems to worship youth. In wanting to look younger (see: botox, hair removal, sunscreen), we are also dressing and acting younger. We’re clutching onto youth with two hands; praying that if we look like Bella Hadid we can’t become that meme of Steve Buscemi.

To make something clear: it’s not that I believe we’re a generation of adult babies lying in wait of great maturation. I hate the phrase ‘adulting’. But rather that many of us are going through periods, whether it’s at 27 or 57, of mental development that feels alike in shape and size to the ones we are told we are thankfully over. Even teen dramas are boring nowadays, because, unlike Proust says, all of the actual learning happens later.

Back in 2018, a scientific study claimed that adolescence now lasts from the ages of 10 to 24. As well as brain development happening well into our twenties, the study cites the delaying of life milestones like marriage and having children as key reasons.

Since then, things have sped up. Not only are we living longer, but we’re subscribing to longevity diets and bone-density workouts so we can live even longer. It’s no wonder we are going through puberty again and again. More people are coming out. Getting divorced. Transitioning. We are being given second and third chances, fresh starts, finding and losing ourselves, blowing up our lives. We have accepted that life is not linear, that adulthood is not a state of stability, that the fun isn’t over. That there is so much more to get wrong before we get something right.

And so we arrive late to our own coming-of-age. That is, if can even decide what it is we want to become.

Trope 1: Age of Indecision

One of my favourite moments in cinema is in Frances Ha, the 2012 Noah Baumbach film that I can safely assume if you’re reading this that you have seen. Around the film’s midpoint, Frances swaps New York for a weekend in Paris, where she manages to do absolutely nothing.

The setup is perfect: someone you meet once at a dinner party casually mentions their pied-à-terre in Paris and extends a polite but vague invite to stay, should you ever find yourself there. After the party, you – or Frances: 27, jobless, homeless, listless – leave the party and book a flight using a credit card.

You spend the next two days in Paris, mostly sleeping off the jet lag, but also trying to get hold of a friend who lives there. ‘I can meet you literally anywhere!’ you smile into voicemail. The friend never gets back to you. You have to fly home on Monday for a meeting with your previous, but potential future, boss, who, it turns out, nearly cancels the meeting herself because of a tickle in her throat. You’re paying off the debt on the credit card for the next year.

I’m so embarrassed. I’m not a real person yet.

– Frances Ha (2012)

What makes it such a genius moment is that it captures our modern weakness for possibility. We are obsessed with possibility – and its cousin, opportunity. Frances sees a glowing opportunity in Paris: a free apartment is like a sign from the universe, to drop everything (otherwise known as nothing), to borrow money for a plane ticket, to go to Paris not next week or next month but to go right now.

Like anyone who gets emotional while watching Frances Ha, I’m guilty of this attachment to possibility. I’ve never flown to Paris on a whim but I have made snap decisions based on perceived windows of opportunity. It’s less that I’m trying to slip through these windows before they close, and more that the closing mechanism is my own rationality. I’ll soon realise that it’s a bad idea, and that there are other things I not only should be doing but would prefer to be doing. I am outrunning my own reason.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. The paradox of choice is a simple term for a complicated problem. We don’t take it seriously enough, the effects of giving ourselves too many options. Perhaps because it’s a privilege to be living in a state of decision paralysis; we are reminded every day that millions of people don’t have such opportunities. But many of us do, and we don’t know what to do with it, all this supposed liberty.

I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what to joke about, what not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in, who to vote for, who to love and how to tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong.

– Fleabag (2019)

In a way, it’s this indecision that keeps people young: in failing to pick a lane –marriage / kids / career / home ownership / indefinite youth – we are defaulting to the final option. As Satre says, not choosing is a choice too.

While I’m certain they’ve existed in all centuries, I think of the Eternal Adolescent as a Millennial creation. Perhaps this is to do with her floral dresses and self-entitlement and penchant for Unconventionally Attractive Fuckboys played by Adam Driver.

But as our decision paralysis spirals, more of us are turning to Reddit and ChatGPT for answers, according to Dazed. I wonder how this will shape the next generation, who will inherit not just our obsession with youth but obsession with possibility. As we live longer and longer, will picking a lane become easier, because we know we can simply swap later, or will we opt out, and refuse to form ourselves at all?

Trope 2: Running, planning

One of the key motifs of the Eternal Adolescent is movement.

It’s no coincidence that the lasting image from Frances Ha is the character running through streets of New York to a soundtrack of Bowie’s Modern Love.

The Eternal Adolescent loves to run. But they aren’t doing a 5K. These are people who are impatient and forgetful and unfit and live their life twelve minutes behind schedule, who need to get somewhere (otherwise known as nowhere) fast.

They’re people who are embarrassed by their own sense of legend – when Frances leaps and spins into the air, tell me she isn’t performing for an imaginary camera – but they are also people who are running from something as much as towards it. They picked a lane and they didn’t like it, so they bolt, towards the next one, which will – it always is, isn’t it? – be the right one.

Frances isn’t the only woman on the cusp of 30 running from one decision to the next. There’s also Julie from The Worst Person in the World, a 2021 film that feels like a more elegant European sister to Frances Ha.

She was thinking about how, at the age of 30, she’d just compared herself to Bambi.

– The Worst Person in the World (2021)

Unlike Frances, who is hellbent, to everyone’s discouragement, on being a dancer, Julie is clueless about her future. In the first five minutes of the film she tries her hand at medicine, psychology, and photography. Eventually she chooses the role of ‘girlfriend’ and spends the rest of the film wondering why she isn’t fulfilled by it. We all know people like Julie, who don’t know who they are without someone sleeping next to them.

Running is another recurring motif: a famous scene shows Julie running across Oslo, literally from her current relationship to her next one, and therefore committing to her only consistency – ‘inconsistency’, says writer and director Joachim Trier.

Let’s talk about Trier for a second. The Norwegian director is certainly about to take Hollywood, Yorgos Lanthimos style, with his latest film Sentimental Value being heralded as ‘the best film of the year’. Sadly it’s not out in the UK until January, but I’ll be in the cinema the moment it is.

There are several commonalities between Frances and Julie, but one is that they are both fictional creations of men in their mid-forties. Obviously this isn’t very shocking: most films are made by men in their mid-forties. But it is interesting that they are two depictions of female pseudo-adulthood that a certain type of dreamy, iron deficient, Substacky woman has seen herself in – and latched onto.

I have so much to do. I think I’ll probably read Proust... Because sometimes it’s good to do what you’re supposed to do when you’re supposed to do it.

– Frances Ha (2012)

So, what’s behind this? How did these men do it so well? Firstly, both Baumbach and Trier wrote the characters specifically for their lead actors, Greta Gerwig and Renate Reinsve, who also helped shape the screenplays. Plus, for Gerwig and Baumbach, a slow-burning romance no doubt contributed to Frances Ha’s magic.

Speaking of magic, there is a touch of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl to the Eternal Adolescent. I’ll save my full download on her for another time. But they share traits: they’re messy, optimistic, annoying, adorable. Both Frances and Worst Person succeed the era of the MPDG, which I would put at 2004–2010, and I wonder to what extent they are a reaction to it.

Clearly, both directors are enamoured with the natural charm of their actresses. In the past, they cast these women as prizes for their Sensitive Leading Men – Ben Stiller in Greenberg for Baumbach, Anders Danielsen Lie in Oslo, August 31st for Trier – to chase after. Now, the women are front and centre. They’ve become the Heroes.

That said, the women still function as muses; only this time the only men they’re inspiring are the ones behind the camera. Baumbach got rid of his male stand-in entirely, while Trier relegated his to Love Interest.

I wonder to what extent these directors are repenting for previous sins. Whether by shining a light on the quirky girl they lost, or at least under-appreciated, they can reach her. There’s a moment in Worst Person when Aksel, once again played by Trier’s stand-in Danielsen Lie, tells Julie: ‘If I regret one thing, it’s that I never managed to make you see how wonderful you are.’

This isn’t to say I find either film skewed by the male gaze. Baumbach and Trier have done a brilliant job at creating such effervescent and enraging characters. They might be making movies to try and understand or pay tribute to these predictably unpredictable women who are drifting their way to thirty, but in doing so, they’ve succeeded, and, as audiences, we understand them too.

Perhaps characters like Selin, Julie and Frances have justified our own late blooming, normalised our inability to choose, and given shape to our culture of Eternal Adolescents. But in recognising our own patterns, we can at least laugh at ourselves while we navigate them. We may as well.

Welcome to Afterthoughts. This will be a seasonal interlude to reflect on the Characters so far, and capture some half-formed theories that might otherwise slip away.

In the Autumn issue:

1. The End of Self-reflection – why self-mythology is due a backlash

2. Welcome to Husbandland – the marriage plot returns

3. Desire is Being Policed again – the shame of wanting something

Knowing nothing

As most researchers know, the best evidence for your hypothesis typically arrives on the internet the very second you press ‘publish’. Over the last few weeks, many essays, memes, films, and books have made themselves known to me, and offered new perspectives on the posts that I’ve already written.

Some of them I let go. I read the headline or watch the trailer and decide it’s irrelevant. But others are stickier. These viewpoints taunt me, like life paths not taken. If only there was a way I could go back and let my original ideas be guided by them, but there isn’t. So, I’m giving them a post of their own.

But first: a note on my process.

Even though I’m supposedly a researcher, I’m extremely good at not-researching. Or, I should say, stopping researching. Even when there’s still a few tabs left open, tabs that held such promise, or a book on my desk, or a film judging me from my watchlist as I put on another episode of The Summer I Turned Pretty.

Why do I do this, and limit myself from ideas that are possibly very important? It could be because I’m lazy and impatient. But it could be also because I don’t want to risk losing my train of thought, or trade it in for someone’s better, faster, stronger one. There is quite a large chance that other people’s voices will prove me wrong or remind me how little I know. Sometimes I want that; other times I don’t.

Knowing little is not always a problem. It can be a skill of its own. If you want to convince yourself of this, think about artists who made their best work when they were young: Zadie Smith, Paul Thomas Anderson, Lorde.

One piece of unsolicited advice I like to give, when it comes to research, is to let yourself be biased. Keep a good grip on the theory you have invented in your mind. Because that’s what it is, at the end of the day: something you have invented in your mind. If anyone thinks otherwise, I don’t trust them.

When I started working at a trends agency, there were times when I’d wake up on a Thursday morning and realise I’d forgotten to prepare anything for the weekly pitch meeting. This wasn’t too much of a problem, because I was 23 and optimistic. I would feverishly pull something together on my commute. I called these train pitches.

Train pitches shouldn’t be relied on. They’re only for emergencies. But they taught me something useful – that, if you really need to make something, all you need is 20 minutes in a tightly packed tube carriage. Part of the magic comes from the lack of internet and laptop; you’re forced to adapt your methodology, to look at people for clues, or close your eyes and poke around the inside of your brain.

Then suddenly you have it – an idea! – and you run with it, there’s no time for another one. You focus on the shape it makes in your mind. You fossilise it. It’s just a sketch, but you’ll fill in the gaps later, when you have Google and no one’s elbow in your face.

That’s all to say, while I continue to find the shape of the next Characters, I wanted to share where some unfinished thoughts, sorts of train thoughts. They might help to further orient the Diarist, Branded Couple and Hetero-optimist in your own imagination, or maybe they will merely validate my own.

1. The end of self-reflection

Afterthought on: The Diarist

Since writing The Diarist, I’ve been thinking about what comes after this period of great introspection, where understanding the self, in all of its glory and failure, is considered the purest and most important of work.

Already, anonymity is starting to creep on the toes of celebrity. I wrote about this in the final section, in which I profiled Tao Lin as an example of a master Enigma at work. But Lin clearly understands his persona enough to purposefully distort it. What I’m seeing emerging simultaneously is something else… it’s a reclaiming of ignorance.

Think of it as a challenge to the Examined Life. A rejection of self-awareness. A stripping back of all the accumulated context we mistake for identity.

The appeal of the clueless is already happening in celebrity culture – we love it when nepo babies don’t know how much milk costs, or when Mariah Carey has no idea what day it is. And there’s fetishisation at play too: think Portia in season two of The White Lotus, admitting she would date a caveman, for the reason they are ‘totally ignorant of the discourse’.

This era of constant cultural commentary and need to always have a take is drying up. It’s time to be a little naive again, to smile and not-know. There’s only so much narrative we fit into selves that are, Joanna Lumley puts it, ‘as dull as dishwater.’

Signals:

• ‘You guys might be thinking about yourselves too much’ – Jemima Kirke. I had this taped to my wall at the start of the year, lol.

• Substack is morphing into a collective girls’ diary

• This video of Joanna Lumley – ‘If you keep trying to find out who you, it’s quite a short road. I’m as shallow as a puddle.’

• John Malkovich’s iconic interview in The Face this March:

Emerging Characters:

• The Idiot

• The Side Character

• The Offline Boyfriend

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2. Welcome to Husbandland

Afterthought on: The Branded Couple

When working on the Branded Couple, I flirted with the idea of unpacking its heteronormativity.

I don’t mean that Branded Couples are necessarily straight, but the ease with which they’ve embraced a social script based on comfort and convention is part of what makes them so annoying – and fascinating – to me. It’s funny to think they share so many attributes (creative, cosmopolitan, etc.) with the once-rebellious Bohemians.

When I was working on the post, I did a quick search to check whether marriage rates were up. They weren’t, but, spiritually, they were. Maybe this was a classic case of a youth-clutching woman entering her thirties, but I could have sworn more people – especially young people – were getting engaged. In the end, I couldn’t find evidence, so I dropped this part. Then, a few weeks later, I saw a headline on Dazed. It said: Why are young people getting married again?

This isn’t the only signal that young people – who we were told would shift norms and save the planet – continue to view marriage as the prize. There’s also the Substack essay Pop Enters its Wife Era, which questions not only how music will change when its biggest popstars (Charli, Lana, Taylor, Dua) are wed, but what effect this will have on the millions of young fans watching them.

This summer, I spoke about the allure of Margaret Qualley on Emma Baker’s podcast STARGIRL. We ended up talking about the actor’s attitude towards love, and her marriage to music producer Jack Antonoff at the age of 28.

On one hand, Qualley’s belief in the importance of marriage is highly traditionalist, and speaks to the more conservative leanings of Gen Z. But that’s not to say it’s problematic. In fact, her refusal to subscribe to the way women over the last decade have gotten married – with an ironic twang, a tail between their legs, or actual guilt – felt refreshing, and even progressive.

After all, with a generation unable to commit to a gym or winter coat or second date, who can’t even decide what to eat from a menu, the idea of making extremely earnest and legally binding vows to another person is pretty huge. Maybe, at the very least, we will learn how to commit to something.

Signals:

• Why are young people getting married again? – via Dazed

• Pop is in its wife era – via Substack

• Boyfriendland – the 2024 phenomenon where girls treated social media as shrines to their boyfriends

• The popularity of Love is Blind, Married at First Sight et al.

• Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp – an unhinged novel that turns the quest to find a boyfriend into some sort of literary Brooklynite video game. I hated it!

Emerging Characters:

• The Pop Wife

• The Young Traditionalist

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3. Desire is being policed again

Afterthought on: The Hetero-optimist

Heteropessimism is still alive and kicking, as confirmed by a Vogue article that went viral last week for asking the question: Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now?

I wasn’t so much disappointed in the article itself as I was disappointed by its reaction; the amount of people jumping at the chance to share it, either to proudly proclaim their singleness – confusingly sandwiched between memes about yearning for true love – or to apologise for being in a relationship.

It’s funny to me that women are banding together to lament boyfriends en-masse when they’re also pawing over pictures of Charli’s wedding. But, irony aside, I’m actually somewhat concerned about this behaviour – specifically the way we are policing desire, both our own and that of others.

In apologising for our desire, we are also shaming it, and women’s sexuality doesn’t really need further shaming – even if it’s ‘normative’ and ‘trad’. And this is coming from someone who typically uses those terms with a tut of disapproval.

Desire is being monitored elsewhere, too. We’re often told that young people are breaking down the binaries of sexuality, but I’m not so convinced. These days, desire is measured on a moral scale: it’s good or it’s bad. (Mostly it’s bad). We see this in the way Gen Z express blanket disapproval of things like pornography, kinks, age-gap relationships and depictions of sex on TV.

When asking why this is, it’s easy to say ‘MeToo’ and move on. But, in a really good essay for Lux Magazine, Kate Wagner goes a step further, and makes a compelling case that Gen Z are not so much afraid of sex, as they are afraid of exposure.

In the opening, she tells a story of an erotic moment she experienced when having her hair brushed at a salon, a confession that’s met – by her younger friend – with horror.

“They had no idea you felt something sexual about them,” she said. “What if they found out? Lowkey, I hate to say this but: you took advantage of them.”

I was shocked. I tried to explain — and it felt extremely absurd to explain — that this had happened in my body and in my thoughts, which were private to me and which nobody had the right to know about.

She goes on to list other ways friends have ‘internalised the internet’s tendency to reach for the least charitable interpretation of every glancing thought’ and, as a result, pathologised normal experiences of desire.

But the blame isn’t on individuals. It’s a socio-technological problem. Every day we engage with an online world that routinely exposes intimacy – intimacy that’s designed to be private. People are uploading text messages to ChatGPT, or screenshots of Hinge profiles on Instagram, or tracking a partner on Find My iPhone. Then there’s the entire Bonnie Blue discourse, and the proliferation of revenge porn and AI deep fakes. This is all working together to create a link between sex and fear.

It’s no wonder young people are frightened of desire. We’re in a period where both the erotic and the romantic are being met with shame and punishment.

Signals:

• Is having a boyfriend embarrassing now? – Are women hating on their boyfriends to make single people feel better, or to detach themselves from their own desire, because female desire is inherently embarrassing? There are no right answers.

• Bringing Sexy Back – why a lack of privacy is to blame for our unerotic culture

• This damning review of Polly Barton’s book Porn: An Oral History. I haven’t read the book but after this I definitely won’t be:

Emerging Characters:

• The Softboy

• The Femcel

I’ll be back soon with another Character.

The radical act of liking men

This summer, my algorithm started to feed me lots of videos of Celine Song talking about love. Many of the videos are versions of the same thing – interviews from the screenwriter and director’s press tour as she talks about mathematics, love as the last remaining form of spirituality, and how you can ‘fall in love in front of a bodega truck’.

But there was one video that caught me off guard. It came from the A24 podcast, where Celine was having a conversation with fellow writer-director Eva Victor:

Eva Victor: What I don’t like is watching anyone, but particularly men, chug water. And watch it go down their throat like *glug glug*

Celine Song: I think I like men a lot. Because I see that, and I’m like: that’s great.

Let’s just pause on that for a second. I think I like men a lot.

Ever since I heard this soundbite, it’s stuck with me. It’s such a ridiculous thing to say. Because on one hand it’s so obvious – straight women, by definition, do like men a lot! – but on the other, it’s so rare to hear someone say it.

Today, we’re more likely to echo Eva’s sentiment: we’re happy to laugh and grimace at the weird things men do, even (especially?) when that weird thing is drinking water.

But back to Celine. I think I like men a lot. When was the last time you heard someone say that out loud? In a public interview? Without… embarrassment?

Heterosexuality is embarrassing

I have been thinking about heteropessimism from the moment I heard the term. It was lockdown and, like many twenty-something British women who liked both reality TV and the work of Zadie Smith, I was listening religiously to The High Low.

The pop-culture podcast, which started in 2017 and would go on to finish at the end of 2020, was hosted by author-journalists Dolly Alderton and Pandora Sykes. At first listen, the women looked and sounded like the same person. But one of their key differences was their relationships: Pandora was married with a child; Dolly was perennially single.

This made for interesting discussion when they brought up an article called On Heteropessimism, published in The New Inquiry by the writer and academic Asa Seresin. In the piece, Seresin coins the term for the first time, although it’s since been renamed hetero-fatalism.

You can read the essay, but by now you probably know: heteropessimism is the cultural consensus that being straight isn’t cool. More than that, it’s embarrassing.

Heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience. Heteropessimism generally has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem.

– Asa Seresin, for The New Inquiry

Does this sound familiar? It should. Women in their thirties – the most vocal of the heteropessimists, and usually the most married too – are most likely to remember this period. Think Florence Given and Britney’s ‘dump him’ t-shirt. Think memes about men doing the bare minimum (bad) or paying for dinner (good).

Seresin goes on to talk about how queerness is fetishised by the heteropessimists. Life would be ‘easier’ if they were gay. Even on the academic side of things – Seresin is a PhD student working on a book about, yes, heterosexuality – he notes how queer theory is sexier than studying straightness.

In many ways this is progressive. We are correcting centuries of heteronormativity and patriarchy. But, equally, the more we dissociate from a cause, the more we are – in refusing to make actual change – accepting it the way it is. Seresin notes:

If “heterosexuality” becomes shorthand for misogyny, the proper object of critique falls from view. To be permanently, preemptively disappointed in heterosexuality is to refuse the possibility of changing straight culture for the better.

This has been my problem with heteropessimism: what made me question both my willingness and reluctance to embrace it. How do we expect to have good relationships with men when we are actively preempting their downfall?

Heteropessimism was clear in pop culture too. It coincided with many problematic male characters: from You’s Joe to Euphoria’s Nate and Gone Girl’s Nick. But tides are shifting, and creators are trying to change heterosexuality for the better.

Narrating hope

In thinking about the Archetype of the Hetero-optimist, it could be tempting to label this Character a Hero or Love Interest, and for some they might even be a Villain. But I don’t see them as existing within the story so much as telling it. They are spreading an agenda – in this case, hetero-optimism – through narrative.

That’s why I needed to add another option to the list:

• Narrator – they tell the story

If you’re unsure whether Narrators are even Characters at all, consider how they insert their own creations into the cultural repertoire, all while playing their own part. More than anyone, they understand how their persona can be excavated for meaning. Whether they like it or not, their personalities are often inseparable from their work.

A good example of this is someone we’ve already mentioned: Dolly Alderton.

Trope 1: The Hopeful Romantic

Like Celine Song, Dolly Alderton likes men a lot too. It’s one of the many things made her 2018 memoir, Everything I Know About Love, a bestseller. And rightly so, it’s a very good book.

Friendship is important to the titular ‘love’, so I don’t want to write Dolly off as boy crazy. Although it’s worth keeping in mind that the very first chapter is called Boys, and later chapters follow Dolly getting a taxi to a crush’s house halfway across the country at 4am, nearly moving to New York for a guy she met six hours ago, and falling in love with a guru via WhatsApp.

This might sound self-destructive, and it is. But it’s also coming from a place of genuine belief in love. To her own detriment, Dolly has committed to life of passionate, messy Bovary-esque affairs that are at risk of going extinct in our curated era of Branded Couples. I would call her a hopeful romantic, and I think she’d agree.

During the late 2010s, Dolly was the token single woman of London. You could hear about her latest break-up in the Sunday Times. You could say her name in a club toilet and hear a crowd of women cheer. If you spent enough time in Soho, you could see her in a fur coat, chain smoking and rating the Sex and the City boyfriends out of ten.

But after the pandemic, something changed, and Dolly is no longer the media industry’s Millennial Women Whisperer.

In 2023 she published Good Material, a fun, High Fidelity-esque romcom told from the perspective of a male comedian. It was a turning point for a writer who has been unpicking her complicated relationship with men – that common blend of idealising and derogating – for years, admitting to finding them ‘mystifying’. The protagonist of Good Material was totally normal and even a little boring… in a good way.

It reminded me of a moment in the TV adaptation of Everything I Know About Love, where the fictional version of Dolly is pawing through the room of a boy called Street, whom she is infatuated with. She finds his passport and sees his real name – something like ‘James’ – and a photo of a big-eared teenage boy, shattering all of her girly illusions and bringing her right back to reality.

Dolly no longer writes about dating. She doesn’t podcast anymore either, except to drunkenly spar with her friend Caroline O’Donoghue, and even then she avoids talking about her personal life. She has come to the realisation that publicly writing about love doesn’t tend to yield good results. At 37, she’s a semi-retired Diarist.

But Dolly’s entire career has revolved around that tension between hetero-pessimism and optimism; it’s not easy to quit. Her latest project – a Netflix adaptation of Pride & Prejudice – suggests she’s still searching for the balance, rewriting the story that first defined the emotionally unavailable man. But have we already moved on?

Trope 2: The Emotionally Available Man

Like most Girls fans, I watched Lena Dunham’s Too Much this summer, and was inevitably disappointed. But a few elements worked, and one of them was the show’s love interest, Felix, played by Will Sharpe.

To sum it up, Too Much centres on the hot mess Jessica, played by Meg Stalter, who has gone through a bad breakup in New York and moves to London to fulfil her fantasies of Jane Austen and Richard Curtis. And, inconceivably – like literally on day one – those fantasies come true.

Well, if the fantasy is a failing indie musician – and I would argue many of them are. The thing is, Felix isn’t painted like other struggling artists, say Chris Evans’ John in Materialists, who is also broke but in much less romantic way. Felix’s economic situation isn’t important, because he has something that women today have been conditioned to see as extremely desirable: emotional intelligence.

Discussing Too Much in a podcast about the modern romcom, the critics at the New Yorker agree that Felix is a refreshing creation in a time of masculinity in crisis.

Felix is equipped to care for Jess. He makes her tea, listens to her, has a gentle touch. This is presented as a winning version of contemporary masculinity.

– Alexandra Schwartz, via Critics at Large

I won’t get into the believability of Felix’s good nature and patience with Jess, who acts like a maniac and somehow keeps the interest of this man – who, in one of Dunham’s most realistic writing decisions, has a wealth of attractive and interesting women lining up to sleep with him.

The New Yorker critics go on to call this masculinity ‘soft’, which begs the question: is Felix a softboi? After all, he has messy hair, a collection of neck chains and 8+ housemates.

But I’m hesitant to give him this label, because, as I’ll investigate in a future post, I’ve always detected a maliciousness to the softboi. A sense of performance or trickery. Felix might be a little fucked up, but he’s by no means malevolent.

That brings me onto another Character that Felix reminded me of.

Trope 3: The Manic Pixie Dream Boy

Two years ago, I read Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld. It was a fun, silly book, even if it was lacking in the erotic jump scares of her previous novel Rodham that had myself and many other women Googling ‘Bill Clinton young’ and feeling very confused about the results.

But Romantic Comedy introduced something that, to my early 2023 brain, felt fresh and even radical: a modern depiction of the manic pixie dream boy.

To give some context: the book is set at a fictional version of SNL. It takes and subverts the idea that many of the late-night show’s balding and fart-joke-making male writers end up married to some of Hollywood’s most gorgeous women, like Emma Stone and Scarlett Johnansson.

Rather than finding this annoying, Sittenfeld found it funny, and decided to write a book where this happens to a female comedy writer instead.

Sally is in her late thirties, clever, mediocre looking, and – and this is key to the hetero-optimistic setup – cynical about love. Enter Noah: a pop star who is so blonde and ripped and – you guessed it! – emotionally intelligent that I couldn’t even really imagine him, and I’m good at imagining things.

Noah likes Sally, but Sally can’t quite believe it. And who can blame her? She’s divorced. She’s tired. She’s been raised on the protective balm of heteropessimism. Surely a guy so attractive and famous and kind wouldn’t be interested in her, would he?

I felt like Sittenfeld was doing a public service in writing Romantic Comedy. Although she’s a married Gen Xer, she seemed to be taking it upon herself to imbue her female readers with hope: that good men exist, and they want to go out with you.

Trope 4: Girl Delusion

If the Hetero-optimist is playing on her readers’ desire for wish fulfilment, this creates an essential problem: a lack of conflict. Stories need drama – they need stakes.

Romantic plots tend to introduce obstacles like emotional unavailability (Pride & Prejudice), or another woman (My Best Friend’s Wedding), or missed connections (Normal People), but the Hetero-optimist is introducing a new sort of conflict: self-sabotage.

As Canadian author Scaachi Koul writes in her review of Romantic Comedy:

Sally’s worst quality has nothing to do with her looks; it’s her inability to get out of her own way. In Sittenfeld’s world, unlike in other romantic comedies, the antagonist isn’t a villainous ex-boyfriend or a ruthless manager; it’s us.

Here, Koul gets at something quite terrifying. In this argument, heteropessimism has got it wrong. It’s not that straight women been given a selection of variously toxic or childish men to choose from – it’s that they are perpetuating a problem that they themselves have created.

This brings us to where we are today. Meme culture – the barometer of our times – has moved on from heteropessimism, and shifted toward what I will call girl delusion.

Examples of girl delusion include:

Is his potential in the room with us right now?

girls be asking ‘would u still love me if i was a worm’ to guys who don’t even love them as humans

‘I can fix him’ girl fix your sleep schedule first

ur in his dms? I’m not allowed to say his name or my friends will hit me

This solves one of the problems of heteropessimism that Seresin raises, arguing that assigning 100% of the blame to men is ‘one of the myriad ways in which young women – especially white women – have learned to disclaim our own cruelty and power.’

Embarrassment and regret of loving men is still a community activity, but women are now aware of the part they’ve played. As much as we’ve been ridiculing and demeaning ‘mediocre’ and ‘mid’ men, we have also been chasing after them.

Back on The High Low, there’s an interesting moment where Dolly suddenly becomes aware of how her own work is ‘soaked in heteropessimism’. She examines why, and admits using it to protect herself. Against what? Against hope. ‘Hope is a very vulnerable place to be,’ she sighs.

I think this gets to the bottom of why so many straight women default to cynicism. It’s hard to admit to wanting something, especially when that something is a guy who doesn’t even own a lamp, which is why it’s so tempting to obscure your longings with displays of psychiatrically questionable melodrama.

I don’t see so many memes about broke boys and man-children these days, but I do see more memes about yearning and wanting. They might be stills from Wong Kar-wai’s In The Mood For Love, or pictures of Luigi Manigone decorated with hearts.

But they have one thing in common. In admitting to being helpless and foolish to romance, they are letting hetero-optimism creep its way back in.

In Part II, we break down the Character’s four tropes and predict where they’re going next. Let’s jump straight in.

Trope 1: The Aesthetic Arrangement

We all know a couple that’s too beautiful for its own good. For me, Don and Betty Draper are exactly that. This is one of the things I like most about Mad Men, my favourite tv show of all time. Not their beauty itself, but because their beauty is there for a reason. The show doesn’t pretend not to notice it, but pivots around it.

From their red-doored house in the commuter town on the Hudson River, to the dimpled boy-girl kids, to their jobs – Betty: model turned housewife; Don: salesman turned adman – The Drapers are the perfect post-war couple. Neighbours talk about them. Co-workers ogle at them. Strangers are jealous of them. They are, in many ways, the epitome of The Joneses.

We never see the origin of Don and Betty’s relationship, but, as viewers, we recognise its hollow façade. I get the impression they didn’t so much marry each other as the idea of what they make together, that picture-perfect image of The Drapers.

Don needs a beautiful wife to complete the picture he’s painting (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, watch season one), and Betty needs a high-powered husband to complete hers. They’re different pictures, but they look the same: green lawns, roast beef, a barking dog. There’s a strategy to their coupledom, and one that I suspect is more common than we think.

As much as I disliked Celine Song’s Materialists, I’m glad it’s got us talking about marriage as an economic arrangement again. But I’d go even further and say that marriage is, for many people, an Aesthetic Arrangement.

I see mirrors of Don and Betty today, made possible by dating apps and how they’ve supplied us with PDFs of our potential partners. And for a while, these PDFs worked – around 16% of couples met their partners online.

In my friend Rafa’s review of Materialists – and meditation on the depressing state of romance today – she cites a stat from Experian: 63% of 18–35-year-olds believe social media has influenced people to date for money and materialistic reasons over love. If you think this means young people are pairing up for pragmatic reasons, then consider that 43% think they’ll end up in a picture-perfect relationship, according to Match.com. Even with our realist hats on, we’re still expecting perfection.

‘My mother always said: you’re painting a masterpiece, make sure to hide the brushstrokes.’

– Betty Draper, Mad Men

Let’s take a closer look at Betty, who’s shaped herself into the Perfect Housewife. As a result she’s constantly over-dressing, role-playing, and worrying what her neighbours are thinking. She lives in a state of social comparison, because what else is there to do? Betty did everything she was told to, and, on paper, she has exactly what she wanted. But there’s one problem – she isn’t happy.

For a lazier show, this would be Betty’s season-long narrative arc. But not in Mad Men. That’s where the series begins for Betty; with the perfect life already attained. What happens when you already have everything you want, when you have curated your life until it looks like a toothpaste commercial; what happens when you look around and realise you don’t like it? What happens then?

Trope 2: Domesticity and its Discontents

I was nervous about reading Perfection. As a freelance creative-something who travels with my laptop more than another person, I already had my guard up, ready to protect my life choices from being torn to shreds.

Perfection is about an expat couple living in Berlin. It’s a satire of Millennial culture and the liberal gentrifiers who are subscribing to a lifestyle that is absolutely, definitely much less normative than the one that people in their hometown are living. Or so they keep telling themselves.

I had mixed feelings about the book’s publisher, Fitzcarraldo, otherwise known as the little blue books (sometimes they’re white, if they’re feeling crazy). I worried that the sameness of the covers was stripping authors’ identities. And not only that: the books were becoming a symbol for somebody who thinks. They were not-like-other-books. The Pick-Me Girl of the publishing industry.

But after reading Perfection, which I liked more than I expected, my opinion of Fitzcarraldo changed too. I realised: it’s in the joke. It knows it’s contributing to a homogenous mass of ‘good taste’ and aesthetic intellectualism. And Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection’s Italian author, knows too:

GQ interviewer: When, and why, did you move to Berlin?

Vincenzo Latronico: In 2009, out of conformism – because it was cool and cheap.

I laughed at this. It made me like Vincenzo. I wish more of us could be so honest about why we do things.

In fact, I laughed a lot while reading Perfection. It isn’t a funny book; I actually think it’d have benefited from a more cutting satire, rather than its sympathetic one. But I laughed at the names of its protagonists: Anna and Tom. I laughed again at the description of a design job that consists of ‘making tiny tweaks to existing frameworks’. And I laughed even more when they don’t go to a protest because it’s in another neighbourhood and, oh wait, they have a client call anyway.

Like the Fitzcarraldo books, the couple has no individual markers. They do everything they’re supposed to: they freelance as graphic designers. They have an ever-changing cast of friends from every European country except Germany. They go to Berghain and consider polyamory. They eat takeaway pho at their desk, and later get really into home fermentation and tahini.

The novel is repetitive and generic, but it’s supposed to be. It was the curated claustrophobia of the domestic scenes that stuck the most with me: the Danish armchairs, old copies of Monocle, white enamel plates with blue rims, the plants.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been perplexed by the Branded Couple’s attachment to the domestic. Shouldn’t people who choose to live in a big city be out and about? Why are they so homely? Why are they so trad?

London readers will be familiar with Real Housewives of Clapton, a meme account that laughs both at and with the creative class of East London. It has a quarter of a million followers, because when people are triggered, they hit follow.

These days, the account acts as moodboard of the 30-something experience, and it doesn’t look how you’d expect. Staying home to cuddle underneath an Arket blanket, sipping from a Yogi Tea and putting a big stew on at 4pm is much cooler than going to a party in 2025. I know the housewives reference is a joke, but it’s kind of spot on.

But why is the home so romantic to the Branded Couple? Is it because we’re in a housing crisis? Or have we just grown up? In Perfection, Latronico makes the case for the tangibility of the home and its material objects in a life that is so immaterial:

‘The environment where Anna and Tom slept and worked, and which they themselves had chosen and shaped, was the one tangible manifestation of who they were. That apartment and those objects provided a foothold, proof of a grounded lifestyle, which, from another perspective (that of, say, their parents’ generation) appeared loose.’

So, that’s it: the branded apartment is proof of a life that, by historical standards, is about to float away. People are in corporate-creative jobs they can’t define, they can’t commit to marriage, aren’t sure if they want kids, they have no deep ties to community, few values to speak of. They live in a bubble of nice things and good hand soap. They look in windows a lot: at themselves, at other people.

Trope 3: The Couple-as-Brand

There was a point when, during the pandemic, I was following a number of couples who acted like a ‘brand’. They weren’t trad wives exactly – I’ve always engaged with them from afar – but these couples were closer to my actual life, which makes my relationship with them veer into parasocial territory.

As time went on, I began unhooking myself from them. Either I stopped caring, or they had kids. When I went looking for them again, I discovered that, like reality stars whose dramas we were once so invested in, I’d forgotten their names. In fact, the only couple I could remember were Anna Shaffer and Jimmy Stephenson, and that’s because they run Hector’s, a wine bar in East London’s De Beauvoir.

I’m not going to spend too long on Hector’s, because I do go there, even if I leave with a mental checklist of how I can get 50% hotter, a stomach ache from eating cheese and anchovies for dinner, and £37 less in my bank account. But I also have a strange connection to the wife, Anna.

When I was about 16, I had a brief stint as an extra on the soap opera Hollyoaks. It only happened a few times, when my dad agreed to drive me to Liverpool at 5am, but it was exciting. I wore my hair big and curly, which I thought would work in my favour – I’d stand out in the busy school scenes, and someone would scout me for a lead role!

In the end, I was asked to step out, because one of the actual leads, Ruby, the bad girl at school, had big curly hair, and two girls with curly hair was too confusing, they decided. Ruby was played by Anna Shaffer.

It was a weird coincidence, but it drew me closer to Anna and her husband Jimmy, a classic wine boy and Branded Couple hubby – otherwise known as a Norman.

By no means are they the only couple to turn their creative vision into a brand. Another Creative Power Couple I’ve been thinking about are Mette and Rolf, who co-own the Danish homeware company Hay. If you don’t know Hay, you probably do. It’s been quietly pervasive for the last few years, responsible for adding flashes of colour to a Millennial interior that was once white and grey and pastel pink.

I always thought of Hay as the North Star of my Branded Couple thesis – how it’s bright but bland, colourful but samey, quirky but extremely easy to copy (as H&M knows). I had no idea it was actually owned by a husband and wife, much less ones that looked like an AI-generated Branded Couple.

Suddenly it all made sense. Hay was not just selling yellow storage crates and green sofas and blue tote bags, but an entire world. A world where everything is comfortable and cosy; a world where the only pain and difficulty comes from spats that are settled by a nice dinner; a world where all you need is a partner and dog and apartment and enough money to buy branded candlesticks, and voila – you can have It All.

Cue the ennui. Like Perfection’s Tom and Anna, who flee Berlin for Lisbon and Sicily, many couples are seeking fulfilment in new places with warmer climates and lesser-trodden paths. The Hays recently left Copenhagen for Italy, where they joined forces with another Danish couple. Together, the ‘arbiters of contemporary cool’ (the FT’s words, not mine) bought and restored Villa Colucci, a 19th-century palazzo in Puglia.

I expected the palazzo to look like a White Lotus version of a Hay store, and in a way it does, but the Hays have moved away from the Danish aesthetic, or at least blended it with an Italian one. It’s a little culturally schizophrenic, but, well, I’d stay there.

The crossover of the Digital Nomad and Branded Couple is not unexpected. They’re both blamed for flattening a place’s culture, for living in a bubble that isolates them from their surroundings. I wonder what will come next. Whether the disintegration of Tom and Anna’s urban exodus is a dream sequence, or a cautionary tale.

Trope 4: The Decoupling

Although it could be considered dehumanising to treat couples as a unit, rather than two individuals, it makes for interesting new ground for storytelling. Once, stories revolved about one complex hero, someone like The Diarist, but now we’re seeing couples move from NPCs to main characters. This opens opportunities for stories that aren’t romcoms or marital dramas, but explore relationships as stand-ins for fulfilment.

Or a lack of it. One film exploring the demise of the Branded Couple is Sick of Myself, a brilliantly original film by Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli. It revolves around Signe and Thomas (yes, another Tom), who look like the coolest couple you know. They wear crisp unisex shirts and collect art. In fact, they’re both artists, only Thomas is more successful, and Signe is jealous.

The film descends into dark places, as Signe is driven to extreme measures by her desire to be seen. Because the film is set in Scandinavia, it deals with the Law of Jante – a mostly unspoken social code that warns against standing out. According to some friends in Copenhagen, this mindset continues to breed fear around expressing individuality, which is why so many people, and the things they buy, look the same.

But this fight for independence doesn’t mean the end of the Branded Couple. It’s a natural reaction to building a life as a unit. We want partnership until we want individuality; to stay inside until we want to go out; we buy things until we throw them out and want other things.

I expect their setting will shift too. Once products of the suburbs, then the city, they are now right at the city’s edge, years or months from being priced out altogether. They’re quitting their jobs, liquidating businesses, looking up houses in Tuscany or Cornwall or the Aegean, moving home, breaking up, looking for something else, looking for… something. They aren’t sure what yet, but then, who is?

Thanks for reading.

Conformism gets creative

After kicking things off with The Diarist, who has written themselves into history time and time again, I wanted to take a different approach for this second Character, who represents this project’s more current and culturally responsive – as well as contentious – elements.

For a while now, I’ve been watching, admiring and resenting a new type of couple, who I’m calling the Branded Couple. Whether you frequent their key setting – a gentrified neighbourhood of a large, usually Western city – or not, you’ll probably know who I’m talking about.

Maybe you’ve attended a ‘tablescaped’ dinner party in their white-walled two-bedroom apartment. Or heard them arguing in a wine bar over the last olive. Or liked their photo of a Dua Lipa-recommended book lying open on Tekla sheets. Or maybe you’ve stroked their dog, or admired their matching Onitsuka Tigers or adidas Sambas, or exhaled loudly when they’ve started a video call in an overpriced bakery-cafe that you’re also working from. Or you’re one of them, but probably not.

At this point I’d like to introduce a framework called Archetypes. Here, I’ll fit each Character into one of five simple archetypes that we’re already familiar with:

• Hero – they lead the story

• Villain – they block the hero from what they want

• Love interest – they desire/are desired by the hero

• Sidekick – they provide allyship or comic relief

• NPC – they are a backdrop or comparison point

Last time, we established that the Diarist is a Hero who is at risk of becoming a Villain. The Branded Couple is an NPC.

NPCs, or non-playable characters, are people who make up the setting of a story, like extras. No one wants to think they are an NPC: they represent conformism and obedience. They exist only to provide a backdrop to the Hero and their journey.

This is where I add a disclaimer: the Branded Couple are not real people. Sure, we watch their Stories, attend their ironic-but-also-not weddings, check out the restaurants or record shops they co-founded, hear them call the names Otto! or Athena! in the park, but the couple is largely a construct of our collective imagination.

They exude perfection: a blend of beauty, creativity, and good taste. They appear to balance liberalism with wealth, domesticity with freedom, contentment with adventure, even when we know it’s all for show. As Sherry Ning points out in her brilliant essay, no one can own that many beautiful things and have values, can they?

It would be easy to say the dream of the Branded Couple is a new creation; that we have Pinterest, or Acne Studios, or Apartamento magazine to thank for them and the way they make us feel about ourselves (unattractive, messy, poor). But, like most Characters, they’ve been around for a while. People have been Keeping Up with the Joneses for as long as social capital has existed.

Funnily enough, the idiom comes from a 1910s comic strip where the eponymous Joneses were Unseen Characters. They existed only to inspire envy, desire and aspiration in their social-climbing neighbours. Sound familiar?

I’ll be looking at history – well, Mad Men – and the corporate production of the Branded Couple in Part II. Before that, I want to go back to today’s hyper-branded world and establish the main cultural driver that lies behind the Character, and explains why they’re still so important… and so infuriating.

But first, I have two questions. If the couple represents our desire for fulfilment, why does that fulfilment have to contain so much stuff? And why does all that stuff – whether it’s from Temu or Muji – look exactly the same?

We need to talk about taste

Trend forecasters love talking about ‘taste’ right now. There’s also a lot of Substackers telling us about the homogenisation of music or food or design and the monoculture we’re living in as a result – and I don’t disagree. Most things do look the same. Take coffee shops:

‘I would land in a city and always find a particular style of coffee shop: a minimalist cafe with subway tiles on the walls and midcentury Scandinavian furniture and handmade ceramic mugs, and the weird thing was, this wasn’t the work of a parent company, it wasn’t a Starbucks or global chain. Instead it was all these independent coffee shops who had decided to mould themselves into the same aesthetic.’

– Kyle Chayka, author of Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

This is from an episode of The Ezra Klein Show on How to Discover Your Own Taste, which changed the way I think about liking things. At the start of the episode, Klein admits something quite unexpected: that, until recently, he didn’t know his own taste. ‘I thought having good taste meant you had to have the same taste as people who have good taste,’ he said. And honestly, I think I did too.

Let’s go back to the Branded Couple for a second. They are the embodiment of these coffee shops. Go to most cities in the world and you can find them: independently minded, visually the same. They're interconnected within ‘a new network of digital geography’, as Chayka says. Think freelance creatives with visa-friendly passports and 10+ hours of screentime (more on this later). They’re keeping up with the Joneses of Amsterdam and Mexico City and Lisbon and Melbourne and Seoul.

Or, they’re clones, according to Mackenzie Thomas, from Part II of The Diarist. She appeared on Subway Takes earlier this summer, urging people to ‘just be normal’.

She described it badly, but I got what she meant: it’s fine to copy other people, but not if the reason we’re doing it is because we’re ‘terrified of chilling with our default settings’. We’re outsourcing not just our style these days, but entire personalities. The show’s host, Kareem Rahma, 100% disagreed, along with the comments section, who accused her of being the same person she’s complaining about. And, as much as I love Mackenzie, I think they’re kind of right.

Delete the Depop cart. Do you like those clothes? Are you marching to the beat of your own drum, or are you copy-pasting someone else’s?

– Mackenzie Thomas

In putting together this post, I asked a friend if he had any examples of people who embody this Character. He suggested… me. When I got over my initial horror – I’m not even in a couple!!! – I realised there was some truth there. To adequately critique something, you need to be an insider. Not only to understand it, but to care enough about it. I’m adjacent enough to the Branded Couple to find pleasure in picking their moodboards apart, even if I’m screenshotting some of the images in the process.

This helped me work out what this Substack actually is. From now on, if something makes me feel angry or emotional or personally attacked, that’s a sure sign that I’m on the right track.

Overconsumerists

Over the last year, I’ve tried to get a better grip on my relationship to materialism. I’ve looked at my things and wondered why I have them, who I was trying to be when I bought them. That’s why watching the Branded Couple buy their way to an apparently perfect, apparently fulfilled life makes me confused and a little sad. Do these things make them happy, or are they fooling themselves?

I did an undergraduate degree in fashion, so it’s fair to say that’s where I was radicalised into the brand ideology. We’d barely sat down before we were mapping out the Diffusion of Innovation and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I thought that was what fulfilled people did: pick a brand, from a verified list, and consume it.

So I picked one, then another one, then another. None of them felt right, but I still wanted in. Into what? Coolness, I suppose; that elusive non-community of ‘early adopters’. Looking back, I’m not sure I wanted to be cool as much as I wanted to understand what it was, and why we wanted it so badly. And to understand it, I needed to be inside of it.

To buy your way to fulfilment is an impossible task. That’s why the Branded Couple feel so socially damaging, even if they’re gorgeous and throw really good dinner parties. Chasing a carrot that keeps moving will only exhaust or bankrupt us, and we’re already pretty exhausted and bankrupt.

The ‘all’ we can supposedly have isn’t just material; it’s about new ways of life: from 1950s suburbia to the digital nomad fantasy, nuclear families to creative partnerships. Pick a dream, from a verified list. It’s always just out of reach.

In Part II: Scandi everything, freelancer schadenfreude and what happens when the couple reclaims individualism. Read it here.

In Part I, we introduced the character, established their place in today’s culture of self-exposure, and met their most familiar archetypes.

In Part II, we’ll go deeper. I’ll lay out four tropes to the Diarist – The Confessor, The Performer, The Narcissist, and The Enigma – to track how they’ve gone from trusted narrators into characters who are playing with our understanding of truth.

1. The Confessor

The Diarist doesn’t need to be a Writer, but it helps. They could, and often do, use film or music or comedy to tell us their secrets. Some of my favourite films, like Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir or Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, function almost as moving diaries of their creators.

I’m mostly drawn to the Diarist-as-Writer, probably because I’m not a filmmaker or comedian. Plus, as we saw in Part I, there’s intimacy to reading someone’s words as they’ve been written, without all the flashing lights. It feels purer. More honest. And, as we know, ‘honesty’ is one of the Diarist’s greatest tricks. They like to present themselves as honest-to-a-fault, like they can’t help it – it just pours out of them.

This brings up a tension I’ve been imagining between the Diarist and the Writer. Not a rivalry exactly, but a historical disagreement that makes them closer to enemies than friends. Many writers, especially female ones, resent the assumption that their work is autobiographical, and spend a lot of energy proving otherwise. As Writers try to shake off associations with truth, Diarists revel in them.

Roland Barthes, in his essay The Death of the Author, argues that we should decouple text from its author, who is ultimately just a narrator or mouthpiece. We must stop mining their work for ‘answers’, he says. But this is not so easy in an era where Taylor Swift is inescapable. I apologise for bringing her up so soon – and it won’t be the last time – but we have to admit she is one of the most prolific self-mythologisers we have. She lays clues and traps and ‘answers’ for her fans to find – and boy do they find.

Swift has created an empire on the commercialisation of thoughts and feelings that usually stay locked in diaries. Watching her at the Eras Tour in 2024, it felt almost voyeuristic. I wondered if so many of us are drawn to her because she’s living out a secret, sick human fantasy – of being celebrated for confessing all.

This brings us to the next trope. When diaries move out of the page and onto a stage, or screen, or feed, what was once private starts to feel more like a show.

2. The Performer

Anyone who has been on the internet in the last decade will know that blogs are essential to the theatrification of the diary. You could extend this to vlogs, Tweets, Instagram Stories. Actually, you could extend it forever. But, for some reason, I didn’t want to.

Maybe this was snobbery, or the fact I have been writing about ‘social media’ in some form or another for years – the way it splits us in half and half again, or how it makes us lurk or bare all, and nothing in between. I decided that I’d run out of things to say. Until I found Mackenzie Thomas.

I don’t remember how I came across her, but my first impression was that blend of admiration/envy that makes me certain I’ve located a Stargirl. With her bob and micro-fringe and babydoll dresses, Mackenzie looks like a character I invented in my mind when I was thirteen. Add in sailor collars and live turtles and a knowing smirk, and she gives the vibe of an annoying little sister who visits for the weekend and ends up living the big city life you’ve always wanted but never achieved. She recently bought a selfie stick, which tells you everything you need to know.

Although she lives in New York, most of Mackenzie’s lore is based in her bedroom, which is a key setting of the Diarist. It’s perpetually 1am, with a diary or laptop open on the sheets, next to balled-up tissues and lidless lip balm and empty wrappers of individually packaged rice crackers.

Mackenzie is a generation younger than the e-Girl, the resident confessionalists of the 2010s, who watched too much Sofia Coppola and over-indexed a little too hard on the ‘art’ of being a ‘girl online’ (see: Molly Soda). These days, the Camden-by-way-of-Tokyo aesthetic and the *.:｡.✿`°¤,¸.•*´¯ ironic and random*.:｡.✿`°¤,¸.•*´¯ vibe has, thankfully, grown up.

Well, somewhat. Mackenzie may not play Animal Crossing and dot her Is with tiny hearts, but she does radiate a screwball girlishness that is at once very TikToker-vs-the-girlboss and at the same time oddly timeless, or at least from the 1930s.

She started, as 26-year-olds do, on TikTok, where she took to reading out excerpts from her teenage diaries. Having struck a chord with a generation who were taught, like me, to be embarrassed of our childish melodrama, Mackenzie gained a lot of followers quickly, and soon a journalist from The New York Times published her profile under the headline Fame for her Shame.

The diaries are cute and funny in a way that makes you miss a time when our grandiose sense of self-importance didn’t come with a side of guilt. But it’s Mackenzie’s Substack, I WILL DO WHATEVER I WANT, that caught my eye. Her monthly posts begin with a short narrative essay on how she’s feeling, then descend into bullet-point ‘notes’. Here’s an example.

Although it’s laced with an irony that I’d argue isn’t even generational these days, just human, what drew me to her writing was how she hides moments of raw sincerity among her screwball-schtick. The things she confesses to – like getting a crush, feeling ugly, not writing enough – aren’t new, but something is. I’ve tried to put my finger on what, and I can only settle on this: she writes like no one is watching.

I don’t know how I’m meant to feel when I read her posts. Am I sad she believes that if someone fancies her ‘they must have a deeply flawed relationship with good taste’? Or happy the steps at her subway stop finally got cleaned?

So much of what we consume today is supposed to elicit a reaction. I like this idea of audiences being somewhat devoiced and defaced, turning the internet back into an empty void for a writer to scream into. Isn’t that what a diary is all about?

3. The Narcissist

‘I’ve written myself into my screenplay… It’s self-indulgent. It’s narcissistic. It’s pathetic.’

– Charlie Kaufman, via Adaptation (2002)

It’s easy to see why we think of Diarists as navel-gazing. Their creative output is, and I say this as a sometimes-diarist myself, not that creative. In a culture of oversharing, there’s still stigma assigned to diary-writing: at best, it’s a preoccupation with ourselves; at worst, a lingering association with mental illness. Anaïs Nin described her diary as ‘a product of my disease… an engraving of pain, a tattooing of myself.’

This is where we get into dangerous territory. At the end of Part I, I hinted at the Diarist as a threatening character. Now it’s clearer to see why.

Diarists scare us for two reasons. First, they have power over us. The same things we label as weaknesses – lack of filter, modesty, embarrassment – are also their weapons. By exposing themselves, they earn the right to expose others. Opening a notebook or Google Doc lets anyone turn their skewed perspective into ‘fact’. This is unsettling. A horror trope in the making. But it is also a lot of fun.

Like most writers, I’m guilty of using writing to gain narrative control. I start out by interrogating my own bias and usually end up accentuating it. I leave so many things out. ‘Writing is either a way to shed my self-delusions or a way to develop them,’ Jia Tolentino wrote in the introduction to Trick Mirror. I think about this every day.

That’s why it’s unsettling to think that diaries are sold as truth, even history. Diarists may be self-absorbed, shameless creatures who are choosing to disgrace themselves, but that’s it… they are choosing to do it. And they can choose to disgrace you too.

When Karl Ove Knausgaard first published My Struggle, a six-volume series of autobiographical novels, his home country of Norway turned against him. In writing about himself, his lovers, his friends and family, he had broken an unspoken social rule. As he writes in The Guardian in 2016:

‘If I went in that direction, simply writing down things I had experienced, using my own name, it was as if all concerns about style, form, literary devices, character, tone, distance, at once ceased to exist… all I had to do was write.

But it wasn’t only the freedom of this that now fuelled the writing, it was also the unprecedented nature of it, the fact that to a large degree what I was doing was forbidden.’

Knausgaard goes on to describe himself as a ‘nobody’, which is in some ways true – he started the first book as a relatively unknown author – but it’s funny to think he has dedicated nearly 4,000 pages to his nobodyness.

This brings us to the second reason we are afraid of the Diarist. They force us to confront one of our biggest fears – that we are in love with ourselves.

There’s an interesting gender bias here. Female Diarists are likely to be criticised for their immaturity or performativity, while male Diarists are labelled narcissistic. I’ll come back to The Narcissist – and their role in heterosexual dating – at a later date.

Although My Struggle isn’t strictly a diary, it borrows many traits: it’s detailed, a little boring, manically confessional, ‘true’. All six of the books were published between 2009 and 2011, meaning you can read about moments in Knausgaard’s life just months after they were lived. Yes, it reads as self-indulgence, even if its evil cousin, self-loathing, is probably more accurate.

To be candid, I shied away from reading My Struggle. Its scale intimidated me. I also suspect my reluctance had something to do with that popular idea that straight white men who are made to choose between Their Art and Their Family are quite annoying.

But Knausgaard is a good writer, and I’ve been listening to the audiobook while I cook and clean. Like the Norwegians, who protested the book but also bought it in their millions, I too can’t resist reading something I probably shouldn’t.

4. The Enigma

I’d like to finish this Character Report with a confession and prediction. I already had a sense of the Diarists’ future long before writing this. I knew that, if they continued as they were – sharing everything and waiting for applause – they risked becoming maligned, even feared, characters. I’ve been tracking a cultural shift back toward privacy for a while now, as we realise we’ve exposed too much. I’ve been waiting for secrets to make a comeback.

In the post-oversharing era, Diarists will have to adapt if they want to stay relevant. I don’t think they’ll stop writing about themselves – that’s not something you can switch off. But they’ll likely scale back their public image, finding ways to mystify themselves through a careful blend of revealing and withholding.

The American writer Tao Lin is an interesting example. I never got on with him as a novelist – I barely made it 50 pages into Taipei – but as a human, he never fails to intrigue and baffle me. I recently subscribed to his Substack, a very strange place, where he recently posted something called My College Diary with The Paris Review.

It is, as you’d expect, his literal college diary – only most of the content has been erased, leaving just a line from each day. The effect is the opposite of the examples I’ve shown so far. It’s sparse and weird. Distant and mysterious. Rather than learning more about the writer, you seem to learn less.

This, as it turns out, is his whole thing. The writer Hua Hsu captured this quality to Lin in an article from 2010, aptly titled Terminal Boredom:

‘At a moment when we are able to give so much of our identities over to public view, Lin seems to overexpose himself, as a way of distracting from the fact that he's revealing nothing.

There's something unusual about a writer being so transparent, so ready to tell you every insignificant detail of a seemingly eventful day, so aware of his next novel's word count, yet also remaining so opaque, mysterious, inscrutable.’

After reading this, I was vindicated. This was where the Diarist was headed – towards mystification, an obscuring of the character we feel entitled to know so much about. The article was from 15 years ago, but, as we know, things don’t change that much.

Then, a few days later, I got my monthly Substack email from Mackenzie. What had she been up to in August? Who had she kissed? Which cool parties had she not been to? Then I read the headline, disappearing for a bit, and realised I wasn’t going to get an answer.

‘I’ve been reflecting on my relationship with sharing a lot over this summer.

As the end of this month approaches, I find myself feeling exhausted and panicked every time I think about the blog, and I don’t really like feeling that way about something I’ve enjoyed doing so much for the last year and a half.

I’ve been feeling more embarrassment and shame lately than I’m used to. I don’t like it and I hope that can change.

I’ll be back.’

After I finished reading, I closed the tab, opened a new one, and started writing this post.

My first diary

Last year, on a trip to Paris, I bought a book by Anaïs Nin. I didn’t know who she was at the time, but buying a book by a vaguely European writer with a naked woman on the cover felt like the kind of thing I should be doing in Paris. At the same bookshop, my friend bought The Diary of Adrian Mole, and later, we posted an Instagram Story of our very different purchases: ‘there are two types of girls’. It wasn’t until then that I realised my book was a diary too.

The book was called Henry and June, and, exactly as I’d hoped, it followed a series of affairs that Nin had between 1931 and 1932, most prominently with the writer Henry Miller and his wife June. In reading it I learnt the word ‘expurgated’, which means to have controversial material removed from a text. Henry and June was from Nin’s unexpurgated diaries. I could tell. The married couple were probably the least of her transgressions.

In the week I read it, it sent me a bit mad. What I had picked up as erotica was more like psychology. Nin wasn’t so much having the affairs as watching herself have them, tracing the patterns of her mind and body as they lurched between exhilaration and despair. What started off as forbidden, sexy and very French became a day-by-day account of a woman who had taken things too far.

Before this point, I didn’t really care about Diarists. I hadn’t read any real diaries, like those of Anne Frank or Virginia Woolf and definitely not Samuel Pepys. My sense of diaries mostly came from fiction: Bridget Jones, Adrian Mole, Belle du Jour, and, in her own way, Carrie Bradshaw – characters who use the diary as a narrative device, to confide in you, to tell you a story.

But this was different. It was like nothing I’d read before. There was no plot, like in fiction. No reflection, like in memoir. Everything was still happening, decisions were in the process of being made. It was so immediate. Something I had read countless times – the present-tense first person, the propulsive I am – was being used exactly as it was intended.

I am sick of my own romanticism!

– Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

At the same time, I had to keep reminding myself it was a diary. Who had given me permission to read it? There was all this supposed truth – this unsaid promise that it was real. I had this recurring image of Nin scurrying away to her bedroom to untangle the last hour. The effect was like receiving a live commentary from a friend on a date: part investment, part vicariously living through them.

I finished Henry and June while eating a baguette on the Eurostar, feeling exhausted, like I was the one to have the sexual awakening, when really I had spent the weekend at Disneyland. That was when I realised how powerful diaries can be.

The trick of the diary

A few months later, a picture of Anaïs Nin appeared on the Instagram of Dream Baby Press, a too-cool-for-you literary group whose Love/Hate lists you’ve probably loved/hated. As a new fan of hers, I should have been proud, but I was kind of jealous. In reading her diaries, I’d gained a sense of protectiveness over Nin – after all, hadn’t I lived through the years 1931–32 alongside her? I hadn’t even really told anyone about it. It would feel wrong to share, like breaking a promise.

Once I realised I had been swindled by the trick of the diary (we’ll come back to this later), I was able to see why the picture had elicited a reaction. To quickly describe it: Nin, likely in her late-forties, stands in a bank vault behind a pile of her diaries that reaches the height of a small human. She is smiling slightly.

That was it: the smile. Everything I had been told about diary-writing seemed to go against this smile. Like, aren’t they for teenage girls? Aren’t we supposed to say ‘journal’ now? And shouldn’t we be keeping all of this quiet anyway? Shouldn’t we be ashamed of ourselves?

The idea that Nin, who had admitted to some of the most romantically disturbed thinking processes I had encountered in the written word, was not embarrassed to have thought and done such things, much less to have written about them, was shocking. I was shocked. And I was thinking: Wait… we can do that?

Introducing… Character #1: The Diarist

Also known as: The Main Character, Narrator-Protagonist, Writer

Who they are: Someone who writes about their life as they live it.

Archetype: Hero

Cultural drivers: The death of secrets, main character syndrome

The Diarist feels like the right character to begin with. Their reputation for being both secretive and truth-telling makes them complex and contradictory, while also undeniably cringy – traits that all of my Recurring Characters will be. They are Heroes and Narrator-Protagonists, or so they claim. But as our cultural attitudes shift, I have a feeling they could end up as tomorrow’s Villains.

Before we get into that, let’s set some context. Diarists have been around for centuries – so why are we talking about them now?

No more secrets

There’s something very 2020s about the concept of exposing all of your secrets to an audience of people you don’t – or worse, do – know. Anyone who has spoken to me recently will know I love talking about our ‘culture of oversharing’ almost as much I love oversharing.

This isn’t a new thing. It had a moment in the late-2010s with the explosion of the tell-all personal essay, which Caroline O’Donoghue recently wrote a great piece about in which she simultaneously puts the onus on writers, readers, and editors for driving (then driving into the ground) a market for exposing everything:

‘The Metro wants your piece on bulimia. Buzzfeed has emailed, asking if your tweet about your one-night stand could possibly be a 1,000 word piece. Vice wants you to review every dick pic you’ve ever received, using a scale of 1-10!’

Add to this the day-in-the-life-ification of social media, our unquenchable thirst for gossip of the DeuxMoi and close friends variety, plus the mass adoption of therapy, and we have found ourselves at a time when simply the concept of a having a secret is more shocking and offensive than the secret itself. We don’t just welcome confessions these days; we expect them. Sharing details of our inner lives – bad break-ups, family trauma, IBS updates – is how we laugh at ourselves. How we bond with friends. It’s how we establish trust.

I’m sure many of us recognise that feeling of arriving home from a social event and feeling emptied of things that, until hours ago, lived only inside us. Now they are outside, in the world. They are other people’s. This is scary. But it is also, as many of us know, scarily addictive.

Main character epidemic

I’ve been trying to work out whether our confessional culture is a result of the Diarist, or the Diarist is a result of our confessional culture.

On one hand, the romanticisation of the Diarist (I am looking with raised eyebrows at our friends Bridget and Carrie here) has helped to convince us that we too can be the main character. The Diarist tells us that our lives are overflowing with content; that even its dullest parts are rich with comedy and tragedy; that, if only we had the time and budget, we could adapt it into an HBO show, or at least an eight-part miniseries.

In a way, this is a good thing. Thinking of ourselves as the main character makes us feel good. It democratises self-importance. There are, of course, downsides too, like egotism and narcissism, but we’ll get to that in Part II.

I’m not sure the diarification of our personal lives is directly responsible for the character’s rise to prominence – the Diarist has appeared throughout history – but it’s certainly made them more relatable. Once seen as niche, observational introverts who saved their thoughts for their Moleskine notebooks, they have been pushed into the limelight by our hunger for detail. Or is it their hunger? After all, secret diaries aren’t really discovered anymore – they’re quite literally published.

As readers, Diarists seem to give us access to something rare: uncensored intimacy, or at least the illusion of it. But there’s another illusion I keep coming back to: the illusion of truth. As the character of the Diarist takes centre stage, it’s worth asking why we’re so drawn to truth – or someone’s version of it.

Continued in Part II. Read it here.