I spend more time than I should thinking about this Substack. So does my friend Tammi, probably against her will, because half the time I spend thinking about it I am also in her What’s App inbox talking about it. I really want to get it right, but I am not sure what right is, and honestly, I don’t think it’s supposed to be that hard or complicated. And yet it feels like it is, because I am finding it hard to nail down my niche. There are so many things I want to write about.

When I hit publish on my last Field Notes post however, I feel a satisfaction I don’t ordinarily feel. I enjoyed writing it. It started as a draft with one or two segments, and progressed throughout the month, and ended up being a collection of things I noticed, read, did and so on, as part of my everyday life and as a writer.

*

A few hours after I posted it, my friend Jane sent me a message to tell me it was her favourite so far.

“Mine too,” I wrote back. “I wish I could just re-brand again and make it just a week on week of Field-adjacent notes, which seems to encompass everything anyway.”

“Do it,” she told me. “Most of us won’t remember what it was supposed to be about anyway.”

This was at the beginning of August. Now, as I edit this entry (and all the rest), I wonder if the ship has sailed. I think about being one of many millennials haunted by the concept of a ‘brand’.

Why did they do that to us?

*

At least two Young Adult authors I follow post rants on their Instagram accounts about how they, and many others, have always catered to boy readers. I realise that a certain influencer-turned-author, who was the subject of an episode of Australian Story, has ruffled some feathers by saying the opposite. I think about the people that offered him the book deal, and whether or not they were there on the day. If he doesn’t know the market — and his peers — as well as he should, then they need to brief him. He’s not entering a barren desert: I can count, without even thinking about it, a whole list of authors writing for middle-grade and young adult people of all identities.

*

A new semester begins at uni. For the first time since 2021, I teach a subject called Writers at Work. It’s one of my favourite subjects to teach, because I am a writer working across multiple avenues, and because the act of doing the work — what that looks like, how it’s done — is deeply fascinating to me.

One thing I manage to weasel into nearly every subject I teach is CJ Hauser’s The Crane Wife. I am a massive fan of the personal essay, and this one is a personal favourite. Published in The Paris Review in 2019, it details the reasons the author calls off her engagement, alongside details from a research trip she takes to study the whooping crane. It’s a pleasure to teach: the structure of the piece is what we might refer to as a Double Helix, because it contains two threads that converge to make one story.

*

I am invited to the exclusive preview screening of Super Troopers 3. My husband insists I should go. I’d only watch this with you, I say, and I don’t think I can bring a guest.

You could do with some comedy in your life, he explains.

“I laugh constantly at the ludicrousness of my current reality,” I say deadpan.

His eyes flick over at me and he shakes his head. I was far less sassy when we met; the years have made me more dramatic.

*

My new series, Amira Swift, comes out. My publisher, Angie Masters, had been encouraging me to try my hand at a very commercial junior series for months, thinking I’d be good at it, before I sat down to prove her wrong, and had a good time doing it.

When I tour bookstores to sign copies, booksellers tell me it’s doing really well at the book fairs. I think it’s because the character is mixed-race, but they say it’s probably all her hair clips and the fact that she loves to dance.

Her surname apparently helps too, which bothers me somewhat because it is not at all based on a certain musical billionaire. I take care to tell everyone I have a conversation with that Swift is my husband’s grandmother’s maiden name, and the first book is dedicated to her.

*

My TBR pile is crazy and I am reading so many books concurrently to keep up. There’s the library book (I eat the stars, Sarah Wilson); the audiobook (An Academic Affair, Jodi McAllister); the book I really want to read but read closely and my brain’s not absorbing it (Kin, Tayari Jones); the book I have to review (Foreign Return, Neha Kale) and the shiny new one I just bought (French Exit, Patrick deWitt).

*

I am the mother who will take an actual tea cup and saucer to the park. In a basket. And then spend the time while her kid is playing browsing the Fortnum & Mason and Betty’s Tea Rooms websites, to see what fancy biscuits I can ship from the UK to have with the tea.

I'm lucky to have a box of beautiful chocolate-covered almonds to distract me in the mean time. These were a gift from Lebanon, from my friend Karima at Sunday Kitchen.

If I get diabetes, no one will bat an eyelid.

*

We have a marking moderation meeting for one of the classes I teach. Another staff member tells us how she set an in-class writing task, and then watched as a student in front of her input the prompt straight into chat GPT.

“They literally can't handle sitting in front of a blank page,” another staff member says.

We murmur in agreement. How do we tell them that this is normal, that this is how we whittle away our writing days, until the words come?

*

The Lebanese Film Festival opens. I am delayed to the opening night by a multitude of tasks at home and tell my children how cranky I am about it as I fly out the front door. I’ve missed the red carpet photos which thrills me, but I am also incredibly concerned that I will also miss grabbing a pistachio-topped ice-cream from Abu Hassan, who is there every year in his tarbouche. I love watching him scrape the stretchy gelato into the cone or cup, then expertly coat it in finely-crushed pistachios, and serve it with a smile. I rush through the crowds to his little stall, and forget how cranky I am as soon as I bite into the booza. Later, I sign copies of my new book for the children of the festival organisers, who brought them along hoping to run into me. I am thrilled.

I've booked tickets to a movie called A sad and Beautiful World, which I'll see with my husband. The day after the festival, we go to the Palace Cinema in Leichhardt to watch Palestine36. His ideal daytime dates with me involve sandwiches bulging with meat and cheese, not sad movies with subtitles.

I blame colonialism and dispossession and the legacies of hungry empire, and not the fact that I don't like going anywhere at night.

*

I was a practising writer for a long time before I knew about grants. I credit Dr Michael Mohammed Ahmad of Sweatshop Literacy Movement for first informing me that they 1) exist, and that 2) that heaps of writers apply for them, and that I should too. The last time I applied for a grant for my writing was in 2020, and I was given money to work on a novel for adults that I am still toying around with (only because I want it to be very good). I then felt guilty about applying for grants again for a long time, and took a five year hiatus. Recently however, a friend has been encouraging me to try again for one, reminding me that I have done a lot of unpaid advocacy in my industry, and that eats into time I could spend writing. I decide that grants are a really good way to suss out a project’s viability. Forcing myself to write them, even if I never submit the application, is very good for scoping out and plotting the work and my intentions for it, so it's never wasted effort.

*

My son tells me it is the 31^st August and that it’s his birthday soon. I freak out: How is September here already? How was it that I spent so many of my days in high school bemoaning how slow life was going, and anticipating the days of getting my licence or going to uni or going to the pub (turned out I was never really into the latter), and now time is hurtling me ever so quickly towards...old age?

*

But, it’s also Christmas soon and that for me, makes everything better. I am already thinking of how excited I will be to decorate the house, and then how sad I will be to take everything down. I've also started thinking about what snacks and treats will be released for Christmas. Flour and Stone does biscuit tins and jarred peaches; the David Jones food hall is a favourite place to visit for imports and seasonal snacks.

The mince pies I like have already started appearing at Coles. They are apple and rhubarb. Last year I bought about four boxes and had one almost every day. This year I have realised that each one has about 300 calories in it. I find that very slack.

For the last two years I have had my eyes on a gorgeous 12 Days of Christmas table runner and for the last two years I have faffed about until it sold out. Who has a spare $90 for a table runner? Are they not buying boxes of mince pies?

*

I watched a show called Pride and Prejudice (sort of) at the Sydney Opera House with my friend Sara Mansour earlier this month. It was fantastic: the best kind-of adaptation I have seen in years. Before Sara arrived I went to the Adora chocolates on Loftus St and bought a bag of assorted loose chocolates. I ate everything except a chocolate-covered blood plum, which I put in my handbag and remembered to eat on Friday night. It was absolutely phenomenal and I was still thinking about it on Monday, so I ring the Adora in Croydon on Monday afternoon and ask if their store has them, and then go and buy a bunch before my evening university class.

“Were you the one who rang us?” the lady behind the counter asks. The curiousity about this person who rings about chocolate is apparent in her demeanor and I feel judged.

I admit that yes, it was me, and that I was afraid they were going to run out. I can’t tell if I am supposed to feel sheepish, but I don’t, and when I come home from uni and get into my pyjamas, I eat them slowly and blissfully while I watch Saving Mr Banks (again).

I go to bed and when I wake up, it’s September. Time really is moving too fast.

It’s a dreary Monday morning from where I write you. Outside, the drizzle is incessant and the footpath is dotted with puddles and wet chip packets that have blown down the street from the school up the road. I am wearing a brown Uniqlo lounge set with a thermal underneath, and as I brew my pot of tea in preparation for writing, I wonder why I can never make a matching set look good.

I then stop and ask myself ‘What is looking good?’ and wonder who defines it, especially in a society increasingly dictated by algorithmic tastes. The feedback loop of social media is not just quashing originality and flattening points of difference in aesthetics, but feeding into the increased dissatisfaction we are more frequently having with the ordinariness of everyday lives.

I contemplated this in an Ikea (of all places!) on the weekend. I had found myself there because the Tempe store was opening its new Småland play area, and I thought checking it out would make for a decent rainy day activity. My eldest, too old for the play area at 12 (it’s for kids aged three to eight), needed a desk and I had a voucher, so we browsed through the store while the younger two played downstairs, and after we picked them up, we sat in their cafe eating fish and chips and chicken tenders, watching the planes come and go from the airport.

It was while browsing that I found myself getting distracted by a beautiful office chair. It was stylish yes, but new and therefore clean: a world away from the chair I’d had for years that had all sorts of stains on its fabric that I couldn’t get off. I thought about buying it, and then thought of mine sitting in landfill for the crime of not looking new/clean enough, and took a step back. I reminded myself that my chair was structurally sound, that it was comfortable, and that it did its job. It too was an Ikea purchase that I had once found beautiful. Who was I to abandon it now?

Like many women my age I spend a lot of time on social media, and I am constantly hounded by content that promotes optimisation by consumption. Everything warrants an upheaval, from my morning routine to my pantry to the things I put in/on my body. I’ve been, and continue to be, susceptible to so much of it, but in recent times I have been thinking about ‘enoughness’ and how that is a conscious choice that I can make on repeat. Optimisation is never-ending, there’s always something bigger and better and newer. And while I get the appeal of matching glass vessels and an aesthetic everything, I have realised it doesn’t stimulate my creativity the way repurposing does.

What we’re losing in the optimisation sinkhole is fascination, and purpose, and problem-solving skills, things which I believe are essential to a creative life, and creative work. As a working author, I have fabulous new ideas (akin to fabulous new chairs) on a regular basis, and it’s easy to abandon good, working ideas for the buzz of something new. But when I sit down and contemplate my existing WIPs, I am once again fascinated by them, see their purpose, and am better able to problem-solve my issues with them.

This happened to me last week when I opened the beginning chapters of a manuscript I started three years ago. It was so different to my usual subject matter (a murder mystery!) and I remembered how enthralled I’d been by it in those first few feverish hours of starting it. Life got busy and I stopped working on it, and a short while later, an acquintance also published a murder mystery exploring similar themes, so I felt like I had to let go.

But opening it again last week made me realise that although there was some overlap, our explorations of said themes were markedly different. Two different novels, I reasoned, could still explore the same subject matter.

This, dear reader, is the joy and creativity of the second chance. When I returned home from Ikea on the weekend, I looked at my own chair in an entirely new way. I thought about Whitney Leigh Morris’ newsletter, Rightsizing, and realised that if I were creative and clever enough, I could use scrap material from a dress that my little one no longer fits into, to make a stretchy washable cover for the seat. I don’t know how to sew, so the endeavour is somewhat flawed, but just the idea of learning to sew invited me to think about more mindful, creative choices.

Now, as I sit down to my cuppa, and reach into the biscuit tin I keep on a stack of books under my desk, I realise with satisfaction that I have already been practising this sort of creativity, on a much smaller scale. My family often jokes about how much I love salvaging a glass jar, and how much I love reusing a tin. I tell them it’s cultural; that there are memes dedicated to ethnic grandmothers like mine (and theirs), and the repurposing of a biscuit tin as a sewing kit. And when my mother-in-law starts clearing out her mother’s house, and offers me her own grandmother’s clay-ish vessel that’s 100+ years old, I take it. I pop it in the kitchen next to the vase that some flowers arrived in on my 30th, that I’ve since re-used as a utensil holder.

Perhaps then, it’s not so cultural. Maybe it’s human nature to be creative, to repurpose things, to find enoughness in what is already there instead of heading out for more!more!more! Maybe we have all been like this all along, but we all got caught on a feedback loop, and our phones made us forget.

Other things from my working creative life:

• The Sydney Morning Herald ran my review of Yumna Kassab’s Parramatta Dictionary over the weekend (see image above). I can’t explain how much I loved this book: think of it as field notes for every letter of the alphabet, somehow connecting the physical place of Parramatta with more globally consequential things, like the war in Gaza, and what it means to be a woman parking your car on a night out. The review finishes with my favourite line from the book.

• Tickets are now on sale for the annual Australian Lebanese Film Festival. This event is a highlight in my calendar every year, and the team, which run it as a non-profit side-hustle in addition to their regular jobs, works exceptionally hard at putting on a great program. This year’s Opening Night selection is Disorder, but I have purchased tickets to A Sad and Beautiful World, a multi-award winning movie I have been dying to see for months now, which will be showing at the Sydney Opera House. See here for the program.

• For work last week I attended the launch of Amazon’s new, Australian-friendly Alexa. Let me caveat this by saying that while I believe AI is capable of powerful things, it is also something I have many reservations about. That said, seeing Alexa work in the flesh (for the first time) intrigued this working mother, and I am not fully prepared to write off what it can do in my home (like make reservations, or add events from the school newsletter straight into my calendar) to make this little life of mine a little bit softer. I was given the opportunity to try it for myself at no cost, and I will be doing so soon, but ever-so-tentatively.

• I am down and out with a cold ahead of a number of book week events. I made a big pot of Emily English’s brothy rice which I saturated with lime juice. It’s protein and veggie-rich, has enough carbs for comfort, and fantastic when made with good quality bone broth and topped with fresh herbs. Made a big batch and am eating bowls and bowls of it on the couch while watching Netflix’s My Brilliant Career.

• My new junior fiction series, Amira Swift, is out now, and I am chuffed that it’s the August Kids Book of the Month at The Rose Read Bookshop in Summer Hill. I’ll be there this Saturday at 10am for their regular Storytime. If you’re in the area, bring your kids down for a little reading session and, maybe, a chat about the merits of the cheese room down the road.

• It’s Father’s Day soon, and my picture book Everyday is Special with Dad, illustrated by Kate Moon, might make a great read for the little ones in your life who are celebrating their fathers and father figures.

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It’s 100 Days of School and the kids have to dress up. My son, aged 8, refuses to wear an old man wig and goes to school in a tracksuit, but my daughter, 5 and in Kindy, is thrilled. She wears an old lady wig, some glasses and a poncho from the country road kids department.
“Can I wear my slippers, Mama?” she asks. I’m panicked; they are her only inside shoes, but I can’t say no to her because her voice is too cute.
Later, during the parade the Kindergarteners do, she does an old lady wobble with her hand on her back. I am frustrated because the number of events at schools seem excessive (I can’t keep up with them), but once in a blue moon one of those events is worth it. Today, because of that old lady wobble, this is one of them.

*

My friend is going overseas and wants to sell some clothes at Glebe Markets beforehand. We get up early and pack my car with her clothing racks and hangers. I have my husband’s camping chairs, a bag of clothes I pulled together haphazardly the night before, and Miu Miu stilettos and Jimmy Choos, both of which I forget to display. We are two hours in and still can’t assemble the picnic chairs, and have no luck with the handful of men who pass by. Finally, a gruff fella does it for us, and as he walks off looking chuffed he’s been of service, I make a mental note to pay closer attention to my husband’s instructions.

The markets have changed a lot since I’d been there last. The ladies at the stall next to us are similarly perplexed by the fact that people don’t want to pay more than $5 for anything, even Zimmermann dresses and Isabel Marant tops. I sell a Chloe bag which feels like an achievement in a sea of odd (to this millennial), very Gen-Alpha outfits that don’t seem to coordinate.

I realise later that the girls shopping the markets are probably wearing shein and expecting a similar sort of pricing. My friend takes a photo of me, sitting in a camping chair and observing the young thundercats — like I am a washed-up starlet in a Clint Eastwood film — and sends it to me that night. I tell her my absolute highlight is knowing I’ll never have to say “You just had to be there” to her for the rest of my life.

*

The school holidays arrive. I have made no plans with other parents and have not registered my offspring for any activites for the first time. It helps that they, like me, rarely want to leave the house. Instead, they want to learn how to cook, watch Toy Story 5, and play on the Nintendo. This suits me fine in this weather. We bake two chocolate cakes (one to eat and one to freeze), make a bunch of tragic-looking handpies with some apples on their last legs, and make lemonade scones. Eggs are scrambled every morning, and while on some days they’re more rubbery than others, they’re building a (somewhat-inflated) confidence in the kitchen and maybe two years from now will bring me breakfast in bed on more than one weekend per year.

*

Two years ago I fell in love with the re-issued purple-sequin Fendi baguette. The purse first made an appearance in a Sex and the City episode where Carrie gets robbed, but I didn’t appreciate the look of it until I was well into my thirties. But it was pricey! I did a whole powerpoint presentation of pros and cons about it before I committed, which my husband paid about as much attention to as I did his picnic chair demo. I crunched numbers and included shots of it from ad campaigns and from people’s modshots. I watched the ad for it over and over again, and then I bit the bullet and bought it, which I still don’t regret. Now, The New York Times has run a story titled “Is the handbag over?” in its pages, and the accompanying image is of my purse’s pink sister in a still from And just like that. I feel offended for my own purse, which still sparks so much joy. I pull it out of its box and dustbag and set it on the settee I got from the side of the road some months ago, so I can stare at it every morning when I wake up. I tried to resist this part of myself for so long because I didn’t want to seem shallow. But now I have decided to embrace, because I know who I am. And I don’t care if they are $12 or $7000, some purses are like art to me.

*

I finally start Caroline Palmer’s Workhorse. It’s a debut fiction title published earlier this year, set at a prestigious New York fashion magazine in the early noughties. But while this would normally draw comparisons to The Devil Wears Prada, Workhorse is so much darker, like the former meets The Talented Mr Ripley. It might give some mag girls a little PTSD and it’s way too long (I’m surprised it was published at its length in this publishing climate), but I liked it.

*

Speaking of, more and more I am seeing agents explicitly state that they won’t look at submissions/queries for manuscripts over 100,000 words. It’s such a sign of the times.

*

On the Thursday night of the first week of the school holidays, I drive to Ashfield to buy a bottle of a ‘non-alcoholic’ spirit, visit the new Rose Read Bookshop in Summer Hill (gorgeous; can’t wait to visit again), and drive further along to my friend Karima’s for dinner. She is raiding her fridge before she too goes overseas and I give her girls the first copies of my brand-new book series for early readers to read on the plane.

Amira Swift, the titular character of the series, is a precocious seven-year-old with a Lebanese mother and Anglo-Australian father and a little brother named Zayn. I am petrified people will think I have named her for a certain billionaire musician, when her surname is actually the maiden name of my husband’s 96-year-old grandmother Marjorie, whom I adore.

*

The second week of the school holidays arrives and we’re all off the wet and dreary weather. My husband reminds me it was my decision not to go away this winter. I bemoan his commentary and cheer myself up with the Christmas episode from Netflix’s new Little House on the Prairie adaptation. I would wear half the dresses the Ingalls girls wear in that series, if everyone I was related to wouldn’t make fun of me.

*

My friend Sara has the dreamiest birthday party for her little girl. There is a braid station, manis and pedis, a jumping castle and lots of pink. Plus a henna station for the mums, which means I get to do henna for the first time ever. I stick tortoiseshell-tip nails on to celebrate.

*

The contracts lady at my publishing house emails me to ask if I signed the contract for the new book they’ve acquired. I have had it in my inbox for one month and not even opened the email. It’s like I don’t want to get paid.

*

That of course reminds me that I haven’t signed the contract with the new agent I’ve decided to represent me for any new works moving forward. He is a former student who had always supported my work and done agent-adjacent things without being asked. I need to get on top of my paperwork.

*

The school holidays are finally over and my friend Amani and I schedule an artist date. This is often an excuse for us to eat something delicious, though we do talk about our work too. On this particular one, we head to a Lebanese sweet shop which plays the best songs from our motherland and has every dessert you can think of, and split a pot of dark Lebanese coffee. I get panicky when faced with so much choice on a menu and usually pick something I have had before. But today I take a risk and try the chocolate knafeh, which is just regular ashta knafeh layered with chocolate. Normally I wouldn’t mess with such a dessert but this is magnificent. When I get into bed at 10:13pm that night, it’s all I can think about.

*

I write out my shopping list, which includes snap lock bags in a couple of sizes. Now that I have written them down, I forgot what I need them for. I’ve tried the reusable ones, but the plastic ones are actually easier to wash and dry than they are, so I reuse them too (following a method for washing-and-drying them that Sarah Wilson wrote about, which involved sticking up to windows while they’re wet until they dry and fall off).

*

I’ve gone to the supermarket three times since and have not bought the bags. I think I wanted them because I planned on making more things for the freezer in the school holidays. But we ended up eating nearly everything I made. I really do have a growing family, thanks be to God. The big one, almost 12, will try anything at least once, but her brother, almost nine, will chuck a tantrum over it, before gobbling it up cheerfully and acting like he’s loved it all along.

*

My daughter’s birthday is coming up soon. On Friday night I panic that I have not sorted anything and hop online to order the gift we’ve discussed getting. I decide to use a rewards app I have but the app keeps glitching with that particular store and I have to keep opening and closing it. When the sale finally goes through, I realise the postage address is my friend’s old PO Box that’s no longer in her name, in a suburb neither of us are close to. I send panicked emails to the retailer. Later, when I divulge this catastrophic mistake of mine to my husband, he asks me how much I saved going through the rewards app.
“Six dollars and ten cents,” I admit, sheepishly. He says nothing in return.

*

Saturday night. I’m thrilled to have no plans. I go to Mass at 5pm and see my baby niece there, wearing the cutest pink jacket. I hold her from the gospel until the consecration, and then hand her back to her mother. I am at good at being an aunty to babies, but once they start talking and asking too many questions, I feel like they sense my weariness and the affection between us wanes.

My best friend, who is off on a seven week vacation in Lebanon, texts me from the airport to say she was over her luggage limit by four kilograms.
“You had overweight luggage and I am wearing a puffer jacket over my pyjamas at home while reading an article about “grandma hobbies” in The New York Times,” I text back. “Everything is exactly as it has always been.” I send a photo for good measure.

*

It’s Sunday morning and I decided to have a go at a recipe for cottage cheese bagels. They turn out pretty good but I tell my husband they are kind of small.
”They’re not that small,” he says, and if he says it, it must be true (truly).

This makes me realise my perception of appropriate portions is still coloured by my Lebanese upbringing. That in turn makes me think of my late grandmother salting a humungous salad (an image that lives rent-free in my brain), and I miss her.

*

I’m still thinking about the effect that portion sizes can have on a person when, while clearing and organising my Google Drive (a process that has been ongoing for days) I find photos of myself from like 15 years ago, when I had a blog. I look so much thinner than I am now, but I look at myself in the mirror and don’t feel like I am all that different. Are there any mirrors out there that tell the truth?

*

The retailer that I ordered my daughter’s gift from emails to say they have updated the address and the parcel will come to our house. I breathe a sigh of relief. All feels right with the world, and I have an extra six dollars.

On Friday, I received an email from the Contracts Manager at my publishing house, enquiring about a contract issued to me for a new book acquisition.

“I’m sorry,” I wrote back. “I haven’t even had a chance to open it. Can you give me until Monday?”

I felt ashamed. That contract had been sitting in my inbox for five weeks, and I had no justifiable reason for ignoring it for so long. I’d spent so many days in that period taking long baths, streaming shows on the projector my husband would set up for the exact purpose of my contemplative soaking, and drinking tea or eating popcorn. I knew that contract was in my inbox: I just felt incapable of processing it. In the tub of my upstairs bathroom, I was cocooned from the consequences of what that meant — sheltered from an inbox, and a digital world, that felt so ridiculously demanding of my attention the moment I emerged.

I know I am not the only one seeking such such cocoons, whatever they might look like for others. A friend recently returned to her city job from a long weekend in the country, where her phone was not on hand, and immediately wished she could go back to a phone-less existence. My husband has brought up Brick with me a couple of times, and the possible benefits of a dumb phone at least three. I deleted the Instagram app from my phone again (I still browse it on Chrome but it’s more annoying to do so that way; I know I’ll have to reinstall it soon) and read Alison Larsen Rice’s Substack about the years she’s getting back now that she’s deleted Instagram.

It seems we’re all collectively exhausted by the constant barrage of information, of news, of access (even to things we sought ourselves). It’s not even just Meta related. Updates on schooling, for example, used to come home with the students, but now our phones ping at all hours of the day from the school app and the classroom app and even parents’ What’s App groups. This, for me, is six separate channels of information all pinging with double-up content.

No wonder my brain can’t interpret a contract, on which hinges the remuneration for my labour. I feel like I am at a crisis point. My attention span has been decimated: A novel I read now has to work harder (and faster) than it ever has before to get me to stay with it. Ditto a show that wants my full attention, a conversation which warrants it, my children who deserve it. And yet, for all the noise my phone brings, metaphorical noise I won’t tolerate elsewhere, it is still so strangely addictive to me.

How do I emerge from this stupour? I have asked myself. How can I take back control of my life?

The answer of course, is a mechanism/learning tool on which every writing workshop depends. Subtracting. It is the tool of an excellent editor; one that ought to be more frequently employed in this day and age. In my university classes, I put my students’ drafts up on the screen (with their permission of course) and remind them of Francine Prose’s advice that every word must be put on trial for its life. As we filter through sentences laden with excess (or a lack of detail and specificity) they realise how efficient sentences can be, at no cost to their beauty.

I realised during those long baths that my life needs to be scrutinised in much the same way. Last week I opened the second drawer of my bedside table, and found a fifth box of incense sticks. I thought I only owned the two that I had bought, once after a trip to Byron Bay, but then I remembered the pack that came in a gift from a friend and the pack that came in a PR package. I couldn’t even place the fifth packet, but I knew I didn’t purchase it because it wasn’t ‘pretty’.

My second desk drawer is similarly incriminating, except this one is brimming with boxes of Loco Love chocolates and beauty samples. This is in addition to the basket of beauty products that sits on the chest at the top of my stairs. All of these nooks and crannies are evidence of a life that needs editing, all of them pose questions that warrant an almost-existential crisis: How did I end up with so many candles? Does this make me a lady cliche? What’s with all the face serums? Do they even suit my skincare needs? Should I hold on to them, just in case, just because they were free? What about all the lip balms, and the thing in the bookshelf from the Mother’s Day school stall that serves no purpose but I can’t bear to throw away?

And how does it all connect to my perceived inability to read a contract, or to get back onto one of many WIPs? I have literally started and abandoned four novels; books that might have generated an income, or changed my life in some way, as all stories do (and I do not mean financially). I have spent so much time on writing-adjacent work, some of which could be considered noble, at a cost to the career I could have, and should have, been building.

And yet, I never saw all this intersect.

Why?

Everytime I sat in that bath, I was subconsciously subtracting myself from the work and the world. I was opting out. And in that space, I realised how much more I could edit and subtract. I thought about how little I needed (seriously, some sunshine and a good book and a pastry), and how much has been sold to us (apps to track our movements, apps to put our phones away, a newer, better, shinier everything at every turn) and how I felt like I had to buy something at every small shop I ever visited because I felt guilty just browsing, and how when I needed a dopamine hit I would hop online and add things to my cart and if I was able to come to my senses and close the browser, the shop would email me the next day via a Shop account I don’t remember setting up to tell me they had saved my cart.

When you think about it, there is so much we can subtract from our lives in addition to social media. Fast fashion, regular nail appointments, the pressure to get botox, more than one vase. We all have a poison we can filter out, and things we can justify keeping in.

Subtraction is not just a creative tool, but the facilitation of one. But just for good measure, I’ve also added something in as well, and signed with a literary agent. I didn’t think too much about who and went with someone who has supported my work (with no benefit to himself) for a long time. I guess in that way I was also subtracting myself from the pressure to read a contract. Sure, it will cost me, but the benefit of good editing is this: when you do it enough, you understand the worth of what you keep.

I’ve always liked to read what people were up to: what they were obsessed with, what they tossed out in council clean up, what they had on their desk, what they were working on. I wanted my newsletter to feel like a conversation: like sitting down with a friend (I have friends in mind as I write it) over coffee, to talk about what we’d been up to. And that felt like a ‘lifestyle’ sort of newsletter. But I agonised over that too, because I was also becoming an increasingly conscious consumer, someone who didn’t want to plug things unnecessarily, and who didn’t want to fill her life with things or be responsible for someone else doing the same thing. When I tell you I think deeply about the right blue shirt I want to bring into my closet space, I mean it. But the more I thought about the things that make my face light up (finding a timeless jacket, discovering a lovely bakery, buying a fancy purse I saved ages for), the more I realised I wasn’t doing that here.

This is what I am trying to do now: chronicle my pursuite of a creative, well-edited life, the things I give my attention to, and the choices I make in order to be my most creative self. Which brings me to this new series, Curated, in which I regale you with the things I have consciously consumed, and in some cases, what I learnt from them.

This month, I share the things I have spent my money on to make this cold July a little more hygge and tasty.

What I bought:

Farmer Jo X Elizabeth Hewson Porridge

I love a bowl of winter porridge and while you’ll often find my baking my own fruit and mixing my own flavours, I could not resist the Elizabeth Hewson X Farmer Jo collab, mostly because I had no idea what a custard oat was. Interestingly, the smell of custard hits you as soon as you open the bag, but this was not a sweet porridge mixture and because it doesn’t come with directions, you’re left to your own preferences in terms of how you make it. I didn’t mind my first bowl, but I think I needed to put a little more effort to dress it up. While my usual bowl of porridge is something I can make a stellar breakfast out of, I expected this to do a lot of heavy lifting, and it turns out, it needed a hand.

Hey Darl Bars

I will often make my own muesli bars but when I came across this small biz making bars over in Byron Bay, I thought I would offer my patronage at least once. I purchased a pack of their dark chocolate and cherry bars and their lemon macadamia ones. Both were absolutely delicious and I know they’ll go a long way when uni classes are back and I need snacks for my bag.

Yorkshire Tea Malty Biscuit Brew

If you’ve read for a while you know my favourite tea is the Harney & Sons Paris tea, which I buy loose leaf. But sometimes I need something a little heartier (and am too lazy to properly brew from leaves) and Yorkshire Tea makes a good, strong brew. I love malt so of course when I saw this flavour while browsing the DJs food hall (a fave pastime), I had to purchase.

Gewurzhaus Glühwein Gewürz for mulled wine

I found this by accident in Canberra last year and I’m so excited to use it again this winter. I buy a super cheap red for it, and I love that it makes a delicious cup and does not need any additional ingredients (except fruit if you want it).

Mary Valley Food Co Dried Oranges

A purchase for all seasons, in that it goes in a mulled wine or a mocktail. I tried to be more economical and make these myself with a dehydrator my husband purchased many moons ago but I ate way too many of the oranges in just two days, so it turns out spending $60 odd dollars on a jar is actually the more economical choice because it shames me out of gluttony. These also stay way crispier than any other variation I have tried or made.

Uncle Stan’s Blackberry Jam (not pictured)

You’d think a jam is a jam but the moment I started drinking tea more regularly, I realised I needed to up my jam game. This is a 100% Indigenous owned-and-operated jam made from surplus fruit that would otherwise end up in landfill, and it tastes delicious. I love it on my scones and I love it on my toast and I love it on a fresh baguette with butter. I have not tried the other flavours and in all honesty I purchased this one because I love the book Pamela Allen’s Mr McGee and the Blackberry Jam but I have no regrets. It’s not too chunky and it’s not too sweet either, which I really need in a jam.

And what I didn’t:

The Flour and Stone Travelling Malty Brew Cake

When Flour & Stone, one of my favourite Sydney bakeries, announced their gateaux de voyage/travelling cakes many years ago, I was thrilled. I have purchased a few of these, both for myself and as gifts, over the years, so when they announced a bunch of new flavours, including a ‘Workaday Malt Loaf’ made with dried fruit, malt and treacle, I thought it would be a perfect winter treat. But, in the spirit of being sensible, I decided it would not be wise to be paying $90 for a cake I would eat by myself over tea, especially when the whole point of the cake was that you send it to someone else.

I am writing this on a Sunday morning where I have had the pleasure of being the only one awake for the last 40 minutes. I am drinking my hot lemon water in my lemon mug, and soon I will get up and boil a couple of eggs and make two slices of toast. I will have these in a Robert Gordon egg plate that sparks so much joy. I like to eat and drink on/from vessels I really love, because it’s a reminder of the absolute blessing it is to be able to eat, to eat what I want to, and to have the means to do so. This, my friends, is something I feel strongly about, and I see eating as such a privilege that I am very strict about food not going to waste in my house. It’s also a reward for labouring over a meal (even though when my husband cooks, he also takes care to serve my meals in a more exciting plate).

If you’ve been with me a while you know how much I love sparking joy and elevating as much of the mundane as I possibly can. And on this here Sunday, I am trying to make the most of the quiet before the rowdiness descends down the stairs with questions of what’s for breakfast / are we going anywhere today / do I have to get out of my pyjamas / how many minutes can I have on the Nintendo/ no, I don’t want to make my bed first /it’s not fair, she doesn’t have to X,Y,Z.

Making the most of that quiet has involved opening the window so the crisp winter air comes in (oddly, it makes me feel cosier, probably because I rug up as a result), writing a quick meal plan and to-do list for the week on the fridge, and watching the light very slowly creep into my west-facing living room. I’ve got Tilly Pamment’s Handfuls of Sunshine on my coffee table and I plan on making and freezing a batch of her pumpkin and prune scones with some leftover pumpkin. When I get up to refill my mug I catch sight of how dirty the rug under the dining table has gotten and make a mental note to find a professional steam cleaner to clean it because I still love it so much. I remind myself that it does not take much to make me happy.

I need to be reminded of this frequently, because when the rowdiness descends the stairs [I just heard an upstairs door open] it won’t take long before I feel exhausted. I especially need to be reminded of it during the school holidays, because my battery is easily drained by my (very cute) overlords. My son’s neurodiversity is especially challenging; there’s rarely a moment where he is not stimulating every single one of my senses, and sending the entire household into a spin, like a helicopter whose rotary blades scatter things willy-nilly as it soars overhead. But I digress.

I find it interesting that the physical demands of early-years motherhood have rarely tired me. I am descended from peasant villagers and I think hard work is in my DNA. I never minded getting up in the night for babies, or all the nappies I had to change. I do so much brain work on my books or research that the physical labour of washing sheets, scrubbing sinks or cooking meals is sometimes a relief. It’s the mental load of parenting them in this age, and at their respective ages, and with my son’s ADHD, that I find difficult. As I told a mother at the school gate this week, having a girl-boy-girl family, where each child is separated by a three-year age gap and a different gender to the one before/after them, makes this season of parenting tough (she was saying she loves the school holidays because she has only boys, and they’re all close in age). None of my kids are into the same things and the fighting that ensues of a day warrants my wearing of the overstimulated cap I was gifted on Christmas. It makes trying to do creative work — my work — so much harder.

[I stop writing at this point to make boiled eggs for everyone, to dress my son, and to tutor him (again) in the clearing and tidying of his bedroom (shoes in this basket; books in this one, etc etc). By the time I sit back down to write, I realise how much time has passed, and this particular newsletter changes direction.]

Which brings me back to the point of this newsletter: my absolute determination to make these school holidays so much more productive than holidays gone by. And I don’t mean productive in the traditional sense: although I have two significant deadlines to meet (a long-form non-fiction essay and a picture book), it’s not my writing I am considering here. Instead, it’s the future: future holiday breaks, future deadlines, future mornings, my children’s future, my own. These school holidays, I’ve decided, I plan to spend a lot of time investing in my time.

Allow me to explain:

On Friday — the last day before the kids went on break — I went to assembly and then I took a long walk, followed by a hot bath. I followed that with a whole pot of black tea and a nice chocolate, then set about doing a menial task (all the filing and invoicing and tax stuff I had been putting off). That put me into a bit of a flow state, and shortly after I found myself taking a box of book donations to the library, posting things at the post office, and distributing things that I had (tupperware, etc) back to their owners.

What a thrill it was!

That little flow state led me to more. I pared back my closet (a regular undertaking; I am trying to whittle it down to as little as possible), then put on an audiobook (Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear) and set about organising two baskets that had made their way under my desk, distributing things I had set down and forgot about to their rightful places, binning papers that had piled up there. All that remained (mostly tote bags, and some fancy muesli bars not fit for lunchboxes because they won’t be appreciated) fit into one basket. I walked to the library and borrowed my children a bunch of books to read during the holidays, and popped them in a spot where they can be returned when they were done.

Afterwards, I thought about my deadlines, and how it was ironic that while all the admin I’d just done put me in a better place to meet them, the school holidays meant I probably wouldn’t have time to. I made peace with that (other people can write books, only I can mother my children) and decided to spend my time these holidays extending that flow state to my household. Perhaps, I thought, I could use this time to teach my children things that would aide me in the long term: chores and skills that would free me up later down the line, give me the softness and ease I craved but rarely had time for. I wrote some of these things down, and the list included editing + restocking our freezer staples (like Lebanese breakfast pizza dough), teaching them how to boil an egg, showing them how to keep the sink in their bathroom clean. The list included fun things too, like trying out new games and taking away pastries from a cafe they wanted to visit so we could eat them on a picnic blanket in the park.

It sounds incredibly boring, but I am very conscious of my desire to raise kids who are resilient, who know how to live, and who understand that life is not about having people — their parents; their partners; whoever else — service them. Two weeks ago, I told my daughter that I wanted her to one day marry only because she wanted to, and not because she felt she needed to because she couldn’t take care of herself. It was a spur of the moment comment that I now can’t stop thinking about, and it reminded me of Nawal El-Saadawi’s quote: “Teach your daughters financial independence so they would look for a life partner not a provider. And teach your sons how to do housework, so they would look for a lover not a domestic worker.”

Not long ago I taught this daughter how to make me a cup of tea (fresh water; a teaspoon of leaves; steep for 3-4 minute max), and it’s a real joy when she does it. I suspect she will grow out of wanting to do it soon, but for now, when she says she wants to learn how to boil eggs so she can make me breakfast in bed, I want to stop being the self-sacrificial mum and say yes. I suspect her brother might push back on the things I wrote down on the school holiday list, but I also suspect that if I see it through, the rewards for both of them, and me, will be worthwhile. I have written about the role of care-giving and its impact on creative work, so this pursuit, could potentially ease the immediate burden of having to do all the things they need while trying to work on all my things, but also soften the worry all parents have about what their children are capable of should something happen to them. (I never thought about this before I turned 40!)

All it’s taken is a little list, but what I have done these last few days is open myself up to the possibility of a different kind of care: one that is mutual in its give-and-take. Maybe this is not the way it has always been done, but is that necessarily a bad thing?

When I entered that flow state on Friday, I was clearing my home and clearing my to-do list to focus, for a short time, on some immediate deadlines, but it turns out, I was also easing myself into some consequential longer-term ones: raising children who can take care of themselves and one another, which in turn, means I am taking care of future me.

Ofcourse, these plans of mine are all trial and error; a test if you will. Perhaps, if I remember, I will report back. Wish me luck.

A few days ago, the UK edition of Harper’s Bazaar published the winning entry of its 2026 short story competition, chosen by an “all-star judging panel” that included the magazine’s editor-in-chief Lydia Slater and features director Helena Lee, Women’s Prize-winning novelist Ruth Ozeki, literary editor Erica Wagner, and Michelle Kane, a publishing director at the 4th Estate imprint that falls under HarperCollins.

I could tell this winning entry had some AI input by the last line in the first paragraph, because it carried the kind of (iykyk) language typically seen by any writing produced, or refined by, a large language model. But so much of the piece carried the hallmaks of artificial intelligence, thanks to sentences like:

“She understood now – not all at once, not cleanly. Just enough to stop pretending she didn’t.”

and

“The garden behind the small concrete house in Quatre Bornes was not large, but dense with intention”.

When you read these sentences at a surface-level, they don’t sound bad. They actually sound kind of neat. But if you are a close reader, as most serious readers, editors, and writers who study the craft of writing are, then you notice it immediately. The absence of any concrete meaning in the motifs, and the syntax and structure to the sentences.

It’s incredibly obvious to anyone who has been teaching or mentoring writers too. I have spent the last few years marking large numbers of creative writing assessments as part of my work as a sessional academic at multiple universities. This means I have read more AI than most, and I don’t even need the universities’ (sophisticated) AI-detection tech to figure it out anymore. When you’ve read a handful, you’ve read them all. They all start to sound the same. And shelving any concerns about the ethical use of AI to make art aside, I do wonder what it is doing to our palates: if we keep going down this road — ignoring and rewarding this rubbish — we are going to lose the appreciation of, and taste for, good craft (which, I suspect, is what artisans were saying when they started mass-producing flat-pack furniture).

And honestly, that would be devastating.

But the injustice to me is not so much about rewarding or even mainstreaming this kind of writing. I don’t care if someone takes a shortcut and we arrive at the same place. I would toil for my art any day and every day. I like seeing the progress I have made in my work; I love labouring over the right words and sentences when I write something. This work gives me a satisfaction I can’t easily obtain, and it is worth the hassle. Reading something more refined and more beautiful is a lot like eating a meal that was perfected by a chef using the best ingredients, versus some random takeaway shaken out of a deepfryer and into a cardboard box (I love fries though, ngl). The joy I get from a well-written novel is like the joy I get from a well-made vintage purse that outlasts a mass-produced one by more than three decades.

It is incomparible.

That doesn’t mean I am not frustrated though. I am frustrated because some people are still trying to convince me that it’s just as good, when it is clearly not. I am frustrated because I remember a time when teenage boys I knew of were downloading songs in the childhood bedrooms of their Meanjin/Brisbane homes and being sued by music companies in the United States over those illegal downloads, or when every DVD I borrowed from Civic Video had contained the same ad that reminded you how morally wrong it was to “steal” a film.

And yet, by way of one example, tech conglomerates like Meta have pirated millions of books (including all three of my novels) to train their AI models. Meta had wanted their AI to be as competitive, if not better, than ChatGPT, and knew it needed the best writing, but they felt that acquiring the books legally would be “incredibly slow” and “unreasonably expensive”, so they obtained them from the biggest pirated books database in the world.

I am frustrated because we are expected to swallow concerns about the environment, about theft, and about worker’s rights because big-tech says so, all while it continues to milk us of our money, our time and our taste.

In his encyclical Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV prompted us to be aware of the “proper and critical” use of digital tools, reminding us to centre humanity and the promotion of truth. Warning that tech can reduce the human person to “a resource to be used and exploited”, the Pope invited us to remember what the human heart, when seeking good, is capable of.

Our hearts genuinely deserve so much more.

The irony of this revelation (or lack thereof) from the Harper’s Bazaar comp is in what people are speculating about: that those judges probably outsourced the reading of entries to AI, which means the tech was probably biased in its own favour. That the result comes from a fashion magazine, a purveyor of taste and peddler of fine things that are, arguably, artistic, is even more more ironic.

When I think of an AI-generated (or enhanced) story winning a writing prize, under the noses of people who should know better, I want to weep. Not just because it’s frustrating and unfair, but because it’s a matter of taste.

Ofcourse, I still needed to cook. When we settled into our new place, I purchased a cheap, stainless steel ‘interim’ pot from Ikea for something like $16 (it was 2010) and used that, alongside a non-stick frying pan, for most of our meals. Not too long afterwards, we found our fancier cookware set. It was made of “functional ceramic”, featured cool straining holes on the lids that you can adjust with a latch to strain or evaporate with, and cost hundreds of dollars. We thought it would last forever, but it didn’t. Not even close.

The Ikea pot, however, lives on. At over 15 years old, it’s a little knackered. There are marks on the bottom, and a small, ball-shaped dent in its side from when I dropped it on the floor once. It’s been used on average four to six times per week, every week, since its purchase, and honestly, I can’t fault it. It’s the easiest to use and the easiest to clean, and it’s so incredibly lightweight that if I want to take it camping, I could.

A couple of months ago, Ikea released its global cooking and eating report, based on interviews with more than 30,000 people across 31 countries. The report was very validating, revealing that nearly one in five people eat dinner on the sofa, and suggested that “screens, space, and shifting routines are quietly transforming one of our most human rituals”. To celebrate the report’s release, Ikea sent me a brand new set of Hemkomst stainless steel cookware (Nagi from Recipe Tin Eats raves about the frypan in this range, which I have since been using), and my husband thought it was the perfect opportunity to part with our old pot.

“No, please don’t,” I begged him. “It’s been too good to us.”

He raised an eyebrow in my direction. “But you’re the one who always wants to declutter,” he told me. “One thing in, one goes out, and all that?”

I nodded, but still took the old pot out of his hands.

“Maybe I’ll keep it in the garage, in case,” I told him.

Two days later, it was back in the kitchen. And I haven’t stopped using it.

*

The absurdity of my attachment to a cheap pot is not lost on me. I’m not averse to spending money on good things (as my handbags would attest if they talked) but I also don’t believe that good things have to cost a lot of money in order to be good, nice or worth it. Even though there’s a shiny new cookware set that is more exciting and has better features in my cupboard now (the new set conducts heat faster, has glass lids so I can see what’s going on without removing the lid, and has a pouring spout to drain liquids like pasta water), I don’t want to forget the pot that has served me well, even though it’s been around a long time.

It’s kind of the way I feel about my author career at the moment. When I signed my first two book deal for two young adult titles, my then-agent and I discussed that my career writing for teens could be a stepping stone to writing for adults. I had a lot of ideas in the contemporary and historical fiction pipeline (and I still do) and we worked together on the basis that that was where I would naturally gravitate to (those genres were kind of her specialty). Except, that didn’t happen. I went the other way, completely, and since then, I have written five children’s picture books, with two more out later this year.

I never planned for any of that. Writing my first two picture books was an ‘interim’ decision, a temporary move, just like buying that Ikea pot in 2010. And in the same way I have come to love my Ikea pot, and understand that it serves me well, I have come to see so many benefits to the unintentional pivot I made to writing for kids, even if it does not look as industry-cool or as intellectual as writing for adults.

I started writing for kids because that was what felt more doable at the time, because taking on a bigger project wasn’t something I could do (in the vein I wanted to do it in) while raising my family. My current mental capacities mean I still can’t give my adult novel ideas the space and attention I want to give them, to develop my craft as a writer of contemporary fiction with the care I want to do that in.

But writing for kids has not been the consolation prize. In fact, it has been a great joy. It’s also allowed me to (more quickly) set up the bookish equivalent of a passive income, and kept me in the orbit of kids and teens (via school talks and other official channels) who are incredibly receptive to conversations about critical thinking and narrative intimacy, two things I am extremely passionate about, in the way adults are not. When I walk into a school, and give my signature talk about literature and colonisation, and reading and the Cronulla Riots / the Holocaust / life in Gaza (a talk I had been delivering before October 2023, I might add), I can see students’ minds ticking. Sometimes, I come home to lots of DMs about what I said. Children’s authors in Australia have been incredibly outspoken about injustice too, and are part of a beautiful community that collaborates and connects beyond the written word. In the face of AI threats and all the celebrities penning kids books, and the big questions we are asking ourselves of late, local kids authors are reminding us of our capacity for love, our abilities to make this world fairer, the depths of our imaginations, and most importantly, of dedication to craft and readership, in spite of what is happening in the industry.

If you’re thinking of dipping into writing for kids but are unsure consider my experience your nudge. I have had to remind myself that I am no less a legitimate writer because I am writing for kids, or because I am writing commercial kids books rather than literary masterpieces. I have so enjoyed my time in this space, which has reminded me to slow down and enjoy the gift of writing and reading. It’s also allowed me the space to advocate for other authors, as both an ASA board director but also as a reviewer and workshop facilitator who regularly draws on the work of her peers to make her points.

Writing for children has taught me and blessed me. And although all my bigger ideas still look shiny and exciting, they, like my new cookware set, will eventually have their moment. I just want to enjoy the now, no matter how old or trivial it might look like on the outside.

I turned 40 just over a week ago. I celebrated with my family and a handful of my closest friends, at one of my favourite restaurants in Sydney, where the atmosphere is always good and the Lebanese music an all-night jam. I bought myself something I wanted for a long time. I renewed my passport and vowed I would go clearer-eyed into this next decade.

Nearly every day since, I have been buoyed by a contentment I have not known in months and probably even years. It’s all been incredibly weird, like the turn of a dial that rewired my whole self, and in the moments I catch myself feeling happy (a foreign feeling of late), my brain captions the feeling with the words ‘This is 40’.

I did not want to celebrate my birthday in such an obvious way, but it wasn’t because I was afraid of getting older. I was old when I was young but I think I’ll always be young at heart and I do believe there’s a difference. In fact, I had felt like I was in a sort of limbo, and I had been waiting for what other women have called their second act or second life. I just didn’t feel up to ‘throwing’ a party.

‘This is absurd,’ my friend wrote me, after I told her (again) that I really wasn’t in the mood. She’d been pestering me about it for weeks, and (as I found out later), texting my husband about it without my knowing. ‘People want to celebrate her,’ she’d write to him, changing it to ‘People want to celebrate you’ when texting me.

‘I can do something later,’ I told her. ‘When I feel up to it.’

‘If you don’t plan something,’ she told me. ‘I will.’

I felt coerced, so I planned the most low-effort but high-vibe thing I could: a minimal guest list, set-menu dinner with drinks, dessert and music; my favourite cake; a little black dress. I had a fantastic time. And yet, I still spent the weeks leading up to the birthday dinner bawling my eyes out and wanting to cancel. I would have nightmares about it and wake up in a sweat, my mind torturing me in the dark as my husband slept soundly next to me. None of it made sense, and I knew that. Perhaps I was afraid of what might be coming.

What has come has been wonderful. I’ve been sitting in a clarity I am unaccustomed to; a contentment I can’t describe. It’s prompted me to think about the shifts we unconsciously make, and those of our own efforts, and to deeply contemplate what I want for myself this coming decade. I bet the list will evolve with my needs, and I am really looking forward to seeing who I become. I’ve shared some below, but if you’re over 40 I would love to know: can you relate? Did this happen to you too?

Wake up to the sun

This is a super low-effort one, but it’s one of the best things you can do for yourself in the morning and yet most of us just…grab our phones. I’m going to try to commit to actually going outside for five minutes as soon as I wake up, even if it’s cold.

Stop over-explaining myself

Gosh, I am so bad at this, and truthfully, it’s an eldest-migrant-daughter anxiety response. I want to remind myself this decade that ‘no’ is a complete sentence, and that I don’t have to tell people why I think or feel something. Everyone is on a need-to-know basis.

Build a mutually-beneficial relationship with social media

Here’s the thing, I love being off social media. I feel better, I work better, I parent better. But I have to be realistic, I need it to do my job. It’s not just a promotional tool for my books but it’s the way I gather case studies and collect research. One of the things I would love to do in this decade is think about how I can use it, without letting it use me, and make it good for me in the way I need it to be.

Invest in my breakfasts

I don’t have a bad diet, but our needs change as we get older and I can now feel it when I don’t have enough good stuff in my diet. I sometimes feel like there’s so much to keep track of when it comes to things like protein and fibre (and these things are constantly changing) but I have made it a mission to invest more of my time into preppable breakfasts, as that’s the meal where I am likely to skip. I might also have to convince myself that I will like a chia pudding (yep, never tried one).

Finetune my beauty regimen

Like most people my age, I have lamented the loss of collagen and skin elasticity of my 20s (and wish I took more photos!). But although I have a lot to work with, my skincare routine is very lazy (most nights, my ‘routine’ ends at cleansing my face). Unfortunately I’ve amassed a lot of products trying different things and I want to make it my goal to make it about quality not quantity. I don’t want a ten-step evening routine, and I don’t want a drawer full of make-up. I think I’m close to nailing what my must-haves are and I’ve figured out the treatments that work for me. I’ve got a prescription retinol in the mix, I’m still deciding between serums, and I feel like I am close to deciding what I want for myself longer-term on the make-up front. It’s going to feel so good to whittle everything down to the bare essentials, which makes this goal both a physical shelf/mental space one. I just want less stuff.

Match people’s energy

You know that person who has to learn some hard lessons about other people? I have always been her, and I am sick of being her. This is literally on no one else but me, because I was always a people pleaser and never too good at putting up boundaries. In the past couple of years I have been reflecting on the relationships with friends, family or even colleagues that I invested too much into, only to realise the other person’s output was not the same. Not because they didn’t care, but because their own baseline and mine were so at odds with eachother, that even when they were giving something their all, it wasn’t the same capacity as my all. I guess what I am saying is I am going to be accountable for what they actually put out, not what I interpret.

Use my beautiful things

Last week, I told my brother-in-law that my taste was ‘curated maximalism’, and I think I really believe that. I have amassed beautiful things: beautiful things in my kitchen, beautiful things in my closet. But I don’t want to only enjoy them on occasion. They are there to give me pleasure and I shall derive that pleasure from them as frequently as I can. I should be able to drink from the fancy, expensive tea cup and carry a sequined Fendi purse in purple on a random Tuesday, right?

Walk with a weighted vest

I know, I know. Resistance training is the thing we should be doing more of at this stage in life, but I can’t always be bothered to deadlift (or risk doing it wrong). I love walking and flaneuring so I think the weighted vest is the easiest way to do some weight-bearing exercise I will actually commit to.

Stop hiding myself

This one’s a big one. I feel like I have spent the last two decades hiding parts of myself and not really embracing all my contradictions because they didn’t make sense. I think this is an affliction most, if not all, women face, but I think it’s magnified for those from culturally and racially-marginalised backgrounds growing up in the west, and magnified even more so depending on social class or where they are in their family line. A few days ago, I decided to reintroduce myself on Instagram, which was my first step towards owning the fact that I come from a very traditional culture and faith, which brings its own intricacies, but that I am also a person who cares about things like late-stage capitalism, decoloniality, Indigenous rights and artist wages, who tries to follow BDS principles, and who will also still drop a lot of money on a handbag (after very careful research) or wants to eat on a nice plate. I guess the best part about getting older is becoming more aware, and accepting, of who you are. I can’t think of a better milestone birthday present.

I didn’t expect to find it so bittersweet. For days afterwards, I ruminated on what magazines have meant to me over the years, and how that’s evolved with my research into belonging and identity. When the first movie came out in 2006, I was in university, doing a Bachelor of Media Studies in Writing. I had started publishing the odd column in the university magazine, and dreamt of a job as a Features Editor on a women’s lifestyle or Sunday liftout magazine. To make it happen, I interned two days a week, working for free alongside my studies in an attempt to get my foot in the door in an industry that, even in its decline, still seems very elusive and insular.

My parents never understood why I had to work for free to get a job. Like other migrants before them, these people laboured over work so that I could have an education and an easier life. My degree was supposed to afford me access to secure employment; an ease they never had. They would never understand the world I was going into week after week, and the sense of disconnect and displacement I felt in some of those magazine offices, where some staff were elitist and rude, and so at odds with the words and messages they preached in their pages. The prestige of magazines - their seats at fashion shows and the freebies that flowed into the offices multiple times throughout the day - afforded them a freedom to behave that way, of course, which is probably why they never interrogated how out of step they were with genuine feminist and intersectional principles. A million girls did want those jobs, and there was always a stream of bright, young women coming through those office doors, gazing in awe as Sydney’s own clackers swiped in and headed up to desks to dictate what women should be wearing, eating, doing, reading and the like.

I felt this sense of being on the outside more than others as a culturally and racially-marginalised person who didn’t have the benefits of private/elite schooling behind her, but of course I didn’t know that then. My research has allowed me to look back on that time and workplace culture with a clearer, more intellectual perspective. While some celebrated how the film was more inclusive than its predecessor (particularly in terms of body image), I watched it thinking about how that inclusivity seemed conditional: that although the characters like the assistants (of both Miranda and Andy) were from culturally and racially-diverse backgrounds, they were only coming from margin to centre in what bell hooks calls a “service capacity” to the white people in charge. There have been other criticisms of the film in this respect, of course, and while I know that culturally diverse people have ascended to some fancy roles at prestige publications, sometimes those roles have been precarious no matter how hard you’ve worked for them. In that world as in the broader one, BIPOC people experience things differently, as evidenced by the late Andre Leon Talley being iced out by both Winour and Lagerfeld, he himself writing that the former left him with “huge emotional and psychological scars” in his memoir The Chiffon Trenches.

And yet, for all those scars that many in that industry probably carried, magazines still hold so much appeal. I still get super-excited when I find a really well-done issue of a women’s lifestyle magazine, because it transports me right back to that time where the world was one of possibility and beauty. And I was lucky that I was a bit naive when I was starting out, because not recognising some of those early microaggressions and experiences for what they were meant I was able to pursue a different path in as a freelancer, rather than turn my back on that industry completely. (I also had some fabulous editors, some of which are still a part of my life.)

So even though this movie was a bit heartbreaking because I am nostalgic for a kind of medium and a journalism that does not exist in the same way, the commitment to taste, elevation, intellect and creativity is still somewhat there, scattered as it might be. As Miranda Priestly says:

“Maybe some things will not change. A commitment to beauty, artistry, the best of human achievement.”

Magazines and their editors might not the sole tastemakers (or dictators) they once were, but because the space is a lot more democratised, it is so much more possible, and achievable, for a million more girls.

Elsewhere in work and life

Art Guide Magazine published a reported essay I wrote on the juggle of art and care-giving. The piece was my longest commission in a while (apart from books) and it unpacked so much of what dominates my conversations with creative friends. I am so grateful to the interviewees for perfectly articulating what I wanted the piece to capture. Here, a couple of stand-out quotes:

“Most of the Arab creatives I know have been responding to crisis in our homelands and redirecting resources to activist efforts [over the last few years],” she says. “I often wonder what we might have created if we weren’t forced to live in this defensive state. I resent that creative work from marginalised communities often ends up focusing on representation and humanisation instead of all the weird and wonderful world-building we would otherwise be able to do.” - Amani Haydar

“The core issue is that art often doesn’t pay—or it pays in prestige, not money—and caregiving just makes that reality harder to outrun. You can subsidise childcare and that helps, but it doesn’t solve the central mismatch: we live in an economy that consumes culture constantly while structurally underpaying the people who make it.” - Rachel Hills

What I’ve been reading

Like every other woman on this planet I was immediately drawn into Belle Burden’s Strangers, a memoir of her twenty-odd year marriage, and how it ended during the pandemic when she received a phone call one night from a man telling her his wife and Burden’s husband were having an affair. The book is an honest, somewhat self-deprecating look at what went wrong, and Burden takes us into her childhood/family history, and the way that marriage was modelled to her, to paint a picture of her expectations and the lessons she learnt about herself along the way. Think of it as a service to women everywhere.

I borrowed Erin Somers’ The Ten Year Affair on Borrow Box (hooray for libraries!) and read it on my Kobo. Somers set out to see how millennials perceive infedility, whether it’s a done thing or whether they’re “too well-intentioned, too hung up on domestic equity, too strapped for cash, too determined not to repeat the mistakes of their parents”. There are two parallel narratives to this story: in one, the novel’s protagonist Cora, cheats on her craft beer-drinking, evening drug-taking husband with a dad she meets at playgroup; in the other, she puts up with her mildly dissatisfying life (so-so job, ho-hum relationship, etc etc). I’m glad I didn’t buy this book, but I didn’t mind reading it, although it wasn’t in that feverish must-find-out-what-happens-now way. I felt like the cheating part was less pronounced than the social commentary on millennials, which I kind of preferred.

Rebirth by Antoun Issa recounts his mother’s story of living in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war. I am reviewing this for The Age/The Sydney Morning Herald so won’t say too much on it here, except that it’s quite frank and depressing and uncomfortable, in the way that war narratives should be, especially when they pertain to the experiences of innocent civilians. Issa wanted to explore the unexamined reality for the poor, who are often victimised by war twice, and I love that he didn’t necessarily buy into the shame of telling it how it is (as is so common in our Lebanese/Levantine culture).

Antoinette Lattouf’s Women Who Win is an exploration of women who have taken on various systems of power to force or inspire change. Drawing on her own infamous court case, the book is part history lesson, part motivational talk. You’ll learn a lot from it.

And what I’ve been buying and eating

• I bought myself my first pair of shoes from Bared. These boots are a lovely colour (kind of like a cross between burgundy and brown?), with the perfect toe (not pointy, not square) and a decent heel height. They boast hundreds of positive reviews. I look forward to wearing them with jeans and a blazer, but they also look great with a wide-leg pant and a long-ish skirt. My husband called them ‘witch shoes’ which only made me want them more.

• I tried Rhode’s lip contour and I think I didn’t hate it? Admittedly it has very little staying power but this was a trade I was willing to make for the crayon-like texture that I don’t get with a traditional pencil.

• If you read my work at The Guardian, you might recall that I did one of their blind taste tests on supermarket sauage rolls a few months back, and the winner that came out on top was National Pies. They had better fillings and a flakier, buttery crust, and most of us were unanimous in naming them our favourites (and were surprised we hadn’t really noticed/heard of the brand). Now, Tasmanian Bakeries, the home of National Pies, has announced the awaited return of its cult-classic Cheeseburger Pie. Back by popular demand, it will be available exclusively at select Bunnings Warehouse Cafes nationwide for a limited time only. (When it was first introduced in 2022, the Cheeseburger Pie broke records, outpacing the brand’s iconic Classic Beef pie, resulting in a complete sell-out across Bunnings Warehouse Cafes within weeks of its debut). The pie is made from 100% Australian beef, a signature dash of tomato ketchup and American-style mustard, plus dill pickle juice and a rich cheese sauce, all encased in National Pies’ famous 128 layers of crispy puff pastry and topped with poppy seeds and a savoury sprinkle of parmesan cheese. I KNOW.

• Loco Love’s new Strawberry Vanilla Burst might be their best bar yet. It was my favourite flavour in the heart box they released earlier this year (yes, I have mentioned it in a prior substack) so I am so glad they made it into a bigger bar. Available online or at your nearest health food store.

• The team from My Mother’s Cousin have recently opened a brand new pasta bar, also in Bexley, called Sugo. I visited with friends on Sunday night and can absolustely recommend it for their baked nodka pasta, zesty iceberg wedge and incredible garlic and sesame bread (hot honey addition also great). Thick chicken cutlet a big hit too

  

• I also really loved Frankly Nick’s, a new-ish pizza bar is on a quiet-ish little corner in Hurlstone Park. I went for the baked vodka pasta (delicious) and stayed for the Sacrilege pizza, which featured proscuitto and fireball-infused pineapple. It’s BYO and there’s a bottle shop next door, so you can make a date night of it if you’re so inclined.

It’s that time of year that sends husbands, fathers and children into a tailspin, but it need not. The logic around a mother’s day gift is actually quite basic: she wants a break from the mental and physical load. You should do your best to facilitate that break1, ideally on an ongoing basis, but if you can’t then your next option is to buy her something she would actually like (not something YOU think suits her, or that she’d need), to distract her, or something that will elevate other parts of her life. I’ve put together a list of doable, practical gifts that I would love to receive, or that I myself would gift, across various price points. Some you can mix and match to make a bigger gift, others can make a statement on their own. I am a big fan of beautiful, useful things that will last, but I also really love something cheap and cheerful that can add some oomph to the ordinary (hello, dried oranges). Please feel free to make your own suggestions in the comment box. My favourite will win a copy of Amani Haydar’s excellent memoir, The Mother Wound.

1. Treats she can have with a cup of tea or coffee in the days and weeks to come. Think a box of macarons or madeleines (these are great; also sold at Harris Farm), a collection of high-end biscuits and fudge (like this), a six month cake subscription (that comes in the mail!) from Flour and Stone, a Loco Love Lover’s Box.

2. Fancy jammies. My newest pair are a Kimono-style that my husband got me from a department store in Japan, but I always love the range at Piyama. This set is adorable but they have so many nice ones.

3. A natural perfume (or body oil) that won’t disrupt her endocrine system. I love the ones at Recreation Beauty. If you don’t know what to pick, you can buy the selection box and you get a voucher to put towards a full-sized bottle for the scent most loved. It’s like two gifts in one!

4. A luxe scarf, in cashmere or silk. There are some beautiful ones at Sezane. I’ve splurged on a couple from Hermes in the past and I have no regrets: I wear them or I frame them as art, and they bring me so much joy. Lots of lovely ones on the vintage market too.

5. A monogrammed knit or oversized white shirt, like this one, also at Sezane.

6. A night away at a hotel with all the amenities. In-room dining, a big TV. If you’re a man tagging along, don’t bring your stuff.

7. A basket bag, with her initials on it. There are some lovely ones handmade in Morocco on Etsy.

8. Her favourite aperitif/alternative (I like this one) and some cocktail garnishes, so she can enjoy an aperitivo on the weekends in a more elevated way, and bring back some slowness to what is probably a chaotic life. These dried oranges are my favourite: they have so much flavour on their own.

9. A year of reading book box or ongoing book subscription, ideally from an independent bookstore. Or maybe a Kobo, with a voucher for books she can order if she prefers a digital read.

10. A decadent hot chocolate mix, a pretty mug (only if she doesn’t already have a fave), wool house socks, a nice throw and a good hot water bottle. I like the hot chocolate mixes by Koko Black and Adora. Don’t forget the marshmallows.

11. A voucher for a portrait or photography session that captures her beauty in the here and now.

12. A signet ring. Lots of gorgeous ones in all different metals or styles. I wear mine every single day and adore it.

    

13. Beautiful, useful things: Good quality gardening gloves (I have these on my list), a quality umbrella (this brand is excellent), wellington boots. Or: an exquisite handcream, a bundle of cookbooks (Alison Roman, Karima Hazim Chatila and Sivine Tabbouch, Emily English, Elizabeth Hewson), a subscription to her favourite aspirational substack that she does not pay for herself.

14. A picnic rug (I love these) and basket. Pack it with some lunch, a thermos of hot tea/coffee/chocolate, a treat and her favourite book, and send her to a nice park for an hour. Clean the house while she’s out.

15. A three pack of skin needling sessions at The Skin Bar, and make sure you add the red light session for after so her downtime is reduced. Investment in her skin is important especially as she ages, and it’s less of a gamble than botox.

16. Or a giftpack of her favourite skincare. I love skincare by Go-To and Emma Lewisham.

17. A Mecca Makeup lesson where someone with legitimate skills will teach her to do her own makeup, and she walks away with products from the store to the value of the class.

18. A designer shoe. I know they’re more expensive, but they’re usually so well-made and if you do your research, you can find a pair that is classic and that will last. I have classic shoes (think loafers + ballet flats) that I have owned for twenty-odd years by the likes of Gucci and Salvatore Ferragamo that are still fab.

19. A class. A pickling class, a gardening class, a crochet class, a boxing class. I can vouch for classes! I can especially vouch for a class with the ladies at . If she’s keen to learn something new, get her a voucher for a class.

20. A dwarf lemon tree that can be grown in a pot, or a small herb garden. It’s a great way to start with some basic gardening, which will help with her soft fascination and draw her out of the mental load. Just a few minutes a day outside in the sunshine, tending to something natural, is good for her mental health. (I asked for a lemon tree for Mother’s Day.)

21. A tea selection from T2 with some teaware.

22. Art, if she’s inclined towards such things. I love the pieces at Castle and things.

23. A custom lyric or recipe platter to preserve a favourite song, poem or recipe and create an heirloom piece in the process. I love a platter and a platter with a personal touch is a chef’s kiss.

24. DIY your own vouchers for chores / date nights. Put them in a jar or make a book out of them, and she can pluck one out once a month for the next 12 months, and you have to honour it. You can include things like Breakfast in Bed, an outdoor cinema night, a bushwalk or hike, and a trip to the art gallery, among other things, in the collection.

    

25. Tickets! To a theatre show, art space, an overnighter interstate, or whatever. Don’t make organising the babysitting her problem.

26. A last-forever belt. Polene has some very tasteful ones.

Hello, and welcome to subscribers new and old. I had a few new sign-ups last week, so I am going to start with a wee little intro: My name is Sarah Ayoub and I am a writer living in Gadigal/Sydney. I started out as a features writer for glossy magazines like Girlfriend, Cosmopolitan, Cleo, Madison, Marie-Claire and ELLE, but you’ll now find me writing for newspapers like The Guardian and The Sydney Morning Herald, and digital outlets like SBS. I have a PhD that looked at the narratives of migrant girls in Australian Young Adult literature and I teach/have taught creative writing and journalism as a sessional academic at the University of Sydney, University of NSW, Western Sydney University and more. I have only recently started publishing some research, but that’s mostly because I spend a lot more time on my books: to date, I have written three young adult novels, and five children’s picture books. Some of those books have been longlisted/shortlisted for awards, some have been best-sellers, some have been studied in schools or are found on the NSW Premiers Reading Challenge, and my favourite one did not do so well, so I firmly believe that there is no magic formula to a good book and I get by writing whatever tickles my fancy and pays my bills. I am Lebanese by heritage and my Levantine culture is infused in every part of who I am, including my work. I am very much interested in migrant-settler stories all round, and love having a yarn with older and/or fascinating people. I am always chasing a great meal, a good book, a chic outfit and a softer, slower life and this newsletter is a mix of all the above: reflections and advice from my life as a writer, thoughts about the things I have bought, read, ate and loved, and ruminations on my dreams and ambitions to live well. Think about it as a digital journal on the things in our physical and mental space that can inspire + enable creative work, and a lot like catching up with a friend over coffee, and not skipping the cake. Thank you for being here!

Now on to this week’s topic…

I love making a new year’s resolutions, but I don’t think I’ve ever been good at keeping them. I self-evaluated that behaviour and in the past couple of years, I started making word boards instead: selecting words that stood out to me from my magazines, and pasting them in my notebook for the year. I liked feeling somewhat accountable to my choice buzz words everytime I opened it, and the positioning of the words, as snappy little bits all over the page, felt a little more fun than a bunch of rules I set for myself.

In 2026, I went one further and made a visual mood board on Pinterest as well as my word board, and that’s what I wrote about here.

Both my visual mood board and the word board in my notebook point to a desire for softer life: more time reading and creating (as opposed to scrolling), more movement, a spiritual practice, a form of self-acceptance (honouring the season I am in etc. etc.), community-centred work and time away from a screen.

The word board was a little more specific (only because, unlike the infinite supply of content on algorithm-centred platform, a magazine only has whatever it has in that issue to choose from). Some of its choice words were ‘pull-up’, ‘light-filled’, ‘exploration’, ‘adventure’, ‘turning a page’, ‘archiving’, ‘faith’, ‘pottering’, ‘movement’, ‘digital detox’ and ‘making space’.

Now, just over three months into the ‘new year’, I’ve decided to do somehting I have never done before and actually evaluate how I am tracking, and honestly, I am probably at a 50% pass rate.

The good:

• Movement: I have been moving, more than I probably ever have in my life. There’s no clear exercise program or routine so it’s all very intuitive, but I am pleased to see I have sustained three months balancing walks with 3-4 days per week of resistance work and, on occasion, some pilates. Now that the temps have started dipping, I hope I can keep it up.

• Light-filled: I don’t do this everyday, or even every week, but I am making an effort to step outside to see the sun as soon as I wake up. Sometimes I go downstairs and make a hot beverage first, which might defeat the purpose, but I think I should still get a win for the effort. I hope I can keep it up in the winter.

• Digital Detox: The year started out better, with a more concerted attempt at unsubscribing and deleting on a regular basis, though that effort fell by the wayside as the year got busier. But this is an easy fix and I reckon I can schedule an hour of my time one day soon to delete accumulated screen shots, photos and downloads I no longer need. I am back on Instagram, and trying not to use it as much.

• Pottering: My favourite thing. I didn’t get to do this as much earlier on in the year, but I think it was because of the heat. Since the temps started dropping I have been able to do more of the kind of pottering I like: playing around in the kitchen.

• Archiving: I know I’ve missed a few Tuesdays, but I am pretty impressed with my efforts at checking in here (mostly) once a week. The posts aren’t always quality but I use this newsletter to force myself to write something in the absence of something more substantial (like the novels in my head) and a way of archiving my thoughts, since I have always deleted or destroyed my journals and now I regret it. I’m also writing more in my notebooks with the resolve of actually keeping them. None of them are diaries in the manner of writers of by-gone times, but I don’t think they had a million alerts from the school app to compete with their journalling time.

• Making space: I am getting better at saying no. I am so impressed with myself. I think that on its own deserves a pat on the back.

The not-so-good:

• Exploration and/or Adventure: I am yet to go to the beach. I am yet to read by the beach. I am yet to go for a hike or long walk in exotic location, am yet to have an adventure or exploration of any kind. The inclination is there, but trying to pin down my husband/my friends/childcare/the right weather conditions is proving to be difficult. And I’ve read too many stories to go into a national park I am unfamiliar with on my own. And, as of the last month I also don’t want to drive anywhere far in case the petrol runs out, so there’s something to be said for the accessibility of natural spaces and public transport in the city in which I live.

• Aesthetic: Nothing is aesthetic right now. Not my outfits, not my living room, not my bedside table, not my face. I wish I could commit to looking chic all the time, but alas, my real life does not allow it. And I wish I didn’t have to remind my kids to put their plate in the sink/take their clothes off the floor/tuck their chairs in, but I do, and all of that gets in the way of the vibes.

• Pull-up: I still can’t do a single pull-up. I have tried once since January.

• Reading count: Started off a lot stronger than where I am currently sitting in my book count for the year (I don’t have a set number, I just aim to read) but this one is an easy fix so I am not going to be too hard on myself about it.

• Writing: Don’t. Even. Ask. I’ve actually overcommitted to writing projects this year so my solution has been to avoid almost all of them, which only contributes to more panic when I remember. I do feel like I have less time and I am playing catch-up on a lot, so I am hopeful I will have a super-productive June/July (when uni is quieter) and then feel a bit better.

Where to from here

So do I like, make resolutions for my resolutions? I don’t think so. Even though I should be writing more and reading more, and even though I want to do a pull-up, and have more adventures, for now I am going to stick with where I am yet because some progress is still progress, and I am too afraid of letting the gains I have made (esp with the exercise) fall by the wayside. The point here is to make habits, but I have to create pockets of time for those habits to form, and I want to be kinder to myself. I can’t write if I am burnt out by trying to do a bunch of different things, can I? So on I go, and maybe I will make it to the beach eventually. There are still seven and a half months in the year.

What would you like to see here?

This is a question for the regulars who always leave comments in this corner of the internet. Thank you! I heart you! I have a few posts in the works (like how I make my money + how I manage my life + some ruminations on friendship in the age of the internet) but I would like to know if there’s something you’d like to see me write about. Let me know!

Happy Eastertide, friends, I hope you’ve had a lovely long weekend. I am writing this on Monday night after a couple of days of intense crankiness. I don’t have a specific reason for it, I just know that I am doing whatever I can to shake it off.

It started at some point on Easter Sunday: I’d had a good and sombre Holy Week, partaking in the rituals of my faith and culture (which are inextricably linked), and felt the genuine sense of hope and the spirit of renewal that the resurrection story promises when I’d attended Mass. But by Sunday afternoon I’d felt frustrated, and even though I’d taken myself over to a friend’s house for a long, deep chat on her terrace as the sun sank into the horizon, I still had an emotional hangover on Monday.

I did everything I was supposed to do to make it better. I moved my body first thing, I had a nourishing breakfast of oats with fruit (my first bowl of oats this year, in honour of the changing seasons) and played outside with my kids. Eventually I got to my duties of the day, which included taking my eldest to the local shopping centre for Chatime (bubble tea/boba). She’d given it up for Lent, and well, when you’ve waited almost seven weeks for something, and you’re 11 years old, you really don’t want to wait another day for it.

The shops were crowded and I didn’t get to do a proper grocery shop the way I normally do on a Monday, so I came home a little bit frustrated. I’d spent $90 on things in the supermarket that weren’t even part of our weekly shop, and there was a moment where another mother and I commiserated at the checkout at how little $100 will buy you these days. When I drove out of the shopping centre parking lot, I discovered that it had started raining on the clothes I’d hung out to dry that morning, and although my husband had the instinct to get them off the line as soon as it started sprinkling, they were all mushed together in the basket when I got home, so I rushed to hang them up indoors because I suck at ironing (and refuse to do it).

At some point while I was wading through the washing, I realised I forgot to buy something I needed for dinner — an essential that could not be subsituted — so I got even crankier, and then that crankiness went up a thousand notches when my kids started arguing over the Nintendo Switch. They had been fine all morning and their cattiness only came out when the device did, but I also felt too tired to do anything about it and then I felt more tired thinking about how I was already tired, and how we were only half a day into two weeks of school holidays. My plans to write 1000 words on my new WIP had not materialised at all for the last three days, I felt like I was behind on a deadline I had imposed on myself without taking stock of where I was. I was emotionally and creatively stifled.

Paying sensorial attention

I decided to get off the couch and do something productive but basic. I pulled out the kitchen scales and weighed out some eggs, then started making pasta dough on my benchtop. I paid attention to the way it came together using all of my senses: the clinking of the fork against the stone as I whisked the egg into the flour, the cutting motion of the scraper as I combined it together, the changing texture of the dough as it became smoother and rounder and more elastic. The act of kneading the dough — pressing my heel into it, pulling it back towards me, repeating the process — felt calming and grounding.

In her book, A brain that Breathes, Jodi Wilson says that repetitive movements “nurture a feeling of calm and contentment”, activating the reward centre of our brain and inspiring us to form new ways of doing things. “As we work,” she writes, “we solve problems”. Making my pasta dough brought me back to my centre. Drowning out the proverbial noise — the chaos of the house, the information overload of my phone — helped me address where it had all gone wrong.

I paused and thought about it: what had been different about the past two days? What hope had I put into them that wasn’t materialising? And most importantly, how could I fix it?

I noticed first and foremost that I’d spent a lot of time on Sunday on a certain social media app; the kind with ads and noise and short-form videos that send your brain into overdrive. Second, I had eaten a lot of Easter Eggs and was probably on some sort of sugar-crash. I’d given up chocolate and sweets for Lent and getting back on all that processed food had clearly done something to my brain. My kids were also experiencing a sugar-rush themselves, even though their Easter baskets had felt incredibly tame. They seemed louder, messier, and more argumentative than usual. Finally, I had realised that there was some part of me that felt letdown by the long weekend. I had planned it out perfectly: I would make maamoul after church on Good Friday, clean my house on Easter Saturday, spend the day at home doing nothing (enjoying the clean house) on Sunday and Monday. Daylight savings would give me an extra hour of sleep; my kids would get to sleep in which they don’t do in the school term.

None of it had gone to plan: I forgot I needed to give the maamoul dough four hours to rest, so I baked it too late and that meant insufficient cooling time (it still tasted amazing though). The house did not stay clean. The kids did not sleep in. Daylight Savings sent the sun streaming into my room way earlier than the days prior, when I was waking up and watching the sun rise. My plans of lying down on my couch reading Tayari Jones’ Kin did not materialise, I couldn’t focus on a movie I was watching, the news was dire. Things kept coming up.

Solving creative problems

By the time I’d finished making the pasta dough, I’d realised that the bad mood I’d found myself in required the same plan of action I would advise to my writing students in the wake of a creative roadblock. Often the things we need to do to reset and repair after a mental hurdle are pretty basic: drink water, make a cup of tea, use a hot water bottle, go for a walk, get some vitamin D, eat a nourishing meal. (Wilson suggests some other things - all fantastic and doable - in her book.)

All of the above things can also be applied when you’re stuck creatively too. You can step away from your WIP for an hour or a day or a week. You can go for a short walk or abandon it for a longer time, move on to something else. You can drink some water, make tea, turn your face to the sun for a bit. See how time outside, time pottering, time returning to your basic needs, can invigorate you again.

They all work, but sometimes our creative problems are bigger than a walk or some vitamin D. Sometimes they’re representative of your season in life, or a shift in the industry, or the precariousness of the economy. Sometimes our roadblocks need bigger courses of action.

I pivoted from novels to picture books because the care-giving duties I had weren’t leaving me in the headspace I needed to be in to write longer, more intellectual, works. A friend was recently told they needed to build a bigger author profile, even though the book they were pitching was excellent, so they’ve funelled their energy into a stronger social media presence. A colleague’s second installment in a series was not acquired by their mainstream publisher, so they decided to self-publish.

All three of these examples point to a need for the same kind of self-reflection I did when I was asking myself why I was so moody on the weekend. They all require us to ask very similar questions of our creative selves: What is happening differently in this project/task/experience? What is not materialising? And how can I fix it?

And at the heart of them is creative thinking: all three solutions to the problems came from thinking about the problems in a more creative way, tweaking their traditional approach: Can’t write something big? Do something smaller. Don’t have the audience? Build it. Can’t sell the book you’ve already written? Self-publish it, you already have the audience.

Sometimes all it takes is stepping back, changing your point of view, and not giving up.

Here are some places to start:

1. If you’re struggling to write, change your brain’s diet: You’re going to keep getting the same output if you keep giving yourself the same content, the same day-to-day experiences. If you’re stuck, do something different. Go see a show, visit a museum, walk around a bookstore and pick up something you ordinarily would not pick up.

2. Shift your perspective: Reframe the work you’re doing so it’s no longer a source of financial pressure/a reflection of you as an artist and more of an experiment. It’s about trying different things to see if and where it changes. The ‘challenge’ or ‘experiment’ factor can unlock a drive or passion because the outcome becomes a source of curiosity and wonder which is an essential part of creative work (rather than a tangible product with high-stakes for your career/finances). Being more strategic about the pros and cons of a shift can unlock some potential too: shifting to picture books wasn’t a goal of mine after years of writing novels, but the shift has allowed me to set up a productive passive income stream that keeps me in the industry I have worked hard to get into, until I feel capable of taking on bigger projects.

3. Use your body: Give your brain a rest and do something tactile with your hands. The action might stimulate your problem-solving capacities. My tactile thing was a pile of flour and some egg, and I made a lovely meal out of it. It created a big enough gap between my WIP and my brain to enable me to come back to it when I was more prepared to handle it.

   Have you had to re-think your approach in the face of a creative roadblock? How did it pan out for you?

   

Other good things:

• My review of Tyree Barnette’s debut book, Stolen Man on Stolen Land, is available to read at The Sydney Morning Herald.

• Gabrielle Tozer’s brand new picture book, Tiny Good Things, is a delightful romp through the adventures we can find in our day-to-day with the right outlook.

• Kay Kerr’s new book, Might Cry Later, is a read for our times.

• I love watching this woman prepare the most elaborate meals in her tiny Paris kitchen.

• This made me laugh.

• I made Elizabeth Hewson’s spaghetti vongole last week and it was so simple and so delicious.

• So many great writers attending the Sydney Muslim Writers Festival.

• Wearing these jeans so much they’re down to like $5 cost-per-wear.

• New favourite platter that cost me $12.50. I love it for its vintage vibes and a picture that nods to my family nickname on it (lemon).

There is so much going on in my headspace at the moment. A war, the decimation of my motherland and its increasingly (and frequently) displaced peoples, the rising cost of living and the fact that our wages never seem to catch up with it. I have many writing projects in the works and it’s hard to keep focus on them. I worry about the AI invasion and the work drying up. In the spirit of that headspace, the one that really needs to pare back, I sat down last night and wrote a bullet-point list of little things that can be joyful and grounding and good, to remind me of the small ways I can retreat, to build up little pockets of resilience and joy in the midst of such pervasive turmoil. If you’re inclined to, please leave a comment, because I’d love to know: What would you add to the list?

• A really well-brewed cup of tea, at the perfect temperature.

• Watching the sun rise.

• Also: A lovely moon. Stars you can see.

• Gelato.

• A big, colourful salad on a beautiful ceramic plate.

• Pretty tea cups and mugs.

• A perfectly-jammy egg, with crispy soldiers dripping in real butter.

• Cake offcuts. Mascarpone cream. Fresh berries.

• A really good, can-tear-you-away-from-your-phone book. A short book that packs a punch (Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These and Natasha Brown’s Assembly come to mind).

• A nice patio/balcony, no matter how small the space is.

• A fabulous goat’s cheese.

• Girlfriends you have deep, contradictory and and tentacl-y conversations with. Girlfriends you can say ‘Don’t marry him’ to.

• A crisp white tee.

• A good Pinterest scroll.

• A nice purse.

• Going to the movies. Cinema popcorn, a choc top, the quiet.

• Lie-downs in city parks.

• Clearing out your closet.

• Bare feet on grass.

• Saltwater. Inlet beaches + lagoons.

• The first days of Autumn, the first days of Spring.

• House socks.

• Large trees.

• Flowers. In fields, in markets, in vases.

• Fruit that tastes the way it’s supposed to. I feel like supply of that kind of fruit is dwindling.

• Wicker baskets.

• Visits to public libraries and free art exhibitions.

• A simple, saucy pasta. A crisp salad with a tart dressing. A hearty soup.

• Sunday roasts. Homemade gravy.

• Christmas decorations.

• Wreaths on front doors. Nice front doors in general.

• Coffee table books.

• Religious iconography. Processions. Prayer rituals.

• Pancakes, any time of day.

• When you and your bestie are thinking the exact same thing, and you catch eyes.

• Comfortable shoes that are nice.

• Sunday papers. Glossy magazines.

• Really good olives.

• Bees wax candles in vintage-style candle holders.

• Sparkles.

• A good scarf.

• Picnics.

• Fish and chips in butcher’s paper. Potato scallops with tomato sauce.

• Hot water bottles.

• Fairy lights.

• Watching the rain from inside. The way the air smells after.

• Lovely paper. Good pens. Hand-written notes.

• Farmer’s markets.

• A bowl of lemons on the benchtop.

• Photos and artworks in frames, all around the house.

• Second-hand bookshops.

• Small towns with good bakeries.

• A clutter-free house.

• A sobhiyeh (basically a Levantine/Arab morning catch-up).

• Lamp lights > overhead lights.

• Dancing. In the living room.

• Crossword puzzles.

• When all your pens match in the pencil mug/tin.

• Long lunches. Early dinners.

• A well-made hot chocolate. With a marshmallow inside.

I am writing this from my bed on a Monday night, where I am, for the umpteenth time, trying to avoid social media. It beckons me like a toxic lover, taunting me with information it has on Lebanon even though it no longer brings anything good. For days it has announced the names of the dead and the decimated: human beings of all ages — in villages that have survived ages — gone in an instant, wiped out by the drone attacks that are coming hard and fast, by an attacker furious in its insistence for possession, invasion, havoc and destruction.

It is in these moments that my mood absolutely plummets. The days are full enough to distract me: there is writing work and emails to check and bedsheets to hang on the line. There is homework to supervise and dinner to ready and bedtime stories to read. The youngest will ask me about the chocolate I have stashed in the bookshelves (“for when you do good homework”, I reiterate) or the toy wand she wants at the newsagency (“we’ll go and see it soon”, I over-promise). The oldest will tell me stories about high school that remind me of my age and the middle child will beg and beg for a device. I never thought those zaps of my attention would be so welcome, but they are.

And then they’re asleep and the house is quiet and there’s not a single activity or book or television program that’s enough of a distraction. I turn off the overhead lights and put a lamp on, listening to Fairouz’s song Watany on repeat. The word watan means motherland/homeland, and the y at the end of it adds ownership, so she’s singing about her homeland. According to the Collins dictionary, the word represents a deep emotional connection to one’s place of birth, roots, or home, embodying feelings of patriotism and loyalty. There are different Fairouz songs for different moods and different moments of patriotism, but this is the one that feels pertinent right now.

In the song, the celebrated Lebanese icon sings about how even the carvings of the stones bear the faces of her ancestors who used them to build their homes/villages, about how her watan been there for 100 years, 1000 years, from the beginning of time. She grows older and it grows larger in her heart in tandem, she sings, and how in the days that might come, the sun might hide but her nation will remain, strong, abundant, the entire world.

The lyrics, like a lot of beautiful Lebanese words, don’t translate perfectly. As a speaker of both languages, I’d argue that English can’t fit the expanse of the Arabic language, particularly in its lyricism. It’s for this reason that I withdraw to patriotic songs when my homeland is under attack. The song lyrics inspire a level of hope I can’t find elsewhere, apart from prayer. The Lebanese are people who pray, who bear their sufferings for the sake of love for their homeland and love for their Creator, and the language of prayer is so deeply embedded in everyday language, so it feels fitting.

I withdraw into these songs because there are many of them, and they are a small comfort for those of us in the diaspora, who watch on helplessly from afar while our motherland suffers. The most we can do is offer money and advocacy, neither of which can get people who are displaced and dying far, especially if the advocacy is falling on ears of leaders unwilling to take action (or sanction). The songs offer a semblance of connection to the struggle and reiterate the bonds we feel in our bones, even as life in the diaspora creates distance. The Lebanese have often taken to al fann or the arts (music, dance, poetry, art, craft), using it for celebration, commentary, creative expression, survival and so much more. It is through this culture of preservation that Lebanon’s unique identity — and its intersection at east and west — continues to flourish.

For as long as I can remember, Lebanon has been a place of strife, more often than not as a result of the meddling of foreign actors, but in the context of this bigger, more global, conflict, the stakes seem much higher. It’s why I have not been able to write, or think, or work. I have been absent from here for two weeks, and even this piece feels so terribly put together, because my brain is all over the place.

But the songs inspire me to keep going, so I do, because when I withdraw into song, I am not giving up on my watan, but remembering that it has fallen and risen again. The songs are the fuel for my own work of celebration and commemoration, work that begun when I myself was quite young, and work that, by the grace of God, I, like many other Levantine artists, will continue to resist and persist with.

Three good books

Just over a week ago, the University of Sydney’s creative writing students launched their anthology A little better elsewhere, which I have written the foreword to. The anthology “grapples with the complexities of nostalgia” with intimate reflections on childhood, love, change, diaspora, culture and more. Available here.

I didn’t do much of International Women’s Day but I did attend a talk by some of the contributors to Don’t ask the trees for their names at All About Women. It was one of the best things I could have done to celebrate the day, and the women and their stories did not disappoint. Stories of migration, otherness, hope, yearning and struggle come together to paint a vivid picture of the multiplicity of an Arab woman’s experience, with the expected resilience and courage coming through with much admiration. Available at all good bookstores.

I am a pretty good homecook and often cook by feel, but once in a while I will feel the need to push my cooking in new directions or towards flavours I have not combined before. This is what Elizabeth Hewson’s Home Food has done for me. Last night I made the anchovy, chilli and olive butter chicken thighs; next up is the zozzona pasta.

A giveway!

I’ve recently reviewed Alex Sarkis’ Something New in The Age here and I have one copy to give away to a subscriber (Australia only). Simply leave a comment on this post to go into the draw.

In 1881, just after publishing Portrait of a Lady, Henry James mused that he had “lost too much by losing, or rather by not having acquired, the note-taking habit”. He spent the next 30 years rectifying it: using a notebook to write down ideas, sketch character, develop plots, and recording anything he felt worth noticing. According to scholar Philip Horne, James saw the notebook as an indispensible tool to his work and practice: “the only balm and the only refuge, the real solution of the pressing question of life”. Though James burned many of his notebooks, some remained, and in 2018 Horne used some of those ideas that never eventuated into works by James to edit a collection aptly titled Tales from a Master’s Notebook, in which contemporary writers take one of James’ ideas and turn it into a story.

Despite my best efforts, I’ve never been good at keeping notebooks. I lugged a leather-bound journal around Europe the first time I went travelling without my parents. Almost ten years later, I decided I was going to journal through my 30s, and some time after that, I decided to pursue the practice of Morning Pages (from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way). None of those attempts were particularly fruitful or enduring, and save for a few enthusiastic entries early on, my journalling never took off in the way I wanted it to. But it never felt problematic, not even when I went to my first-ever academic conference and sat down next to a researcher who recorded the presentation in front of us in the most meticulous bullet-journalling fashion that I am sure was conducive to producing excellent work.

And yet, I still start each year with a new notebook, its pages crisp, its purpose clear, my intentions noble. I split that notebook in two — a half for each semester — and go about recording my to-dos and my deadlines and my meal plans and my reading records in it, and only occasionally using it to handwrite speeches or lectures and tutorials I have to give, or to write down the questions I was using when I was interviewing another author on stage. The book is messy and there’s no method to its madness, but it meets its immediate purpose, and at the end of each year, I toss that book away and begin a new one.

In the last few months however, I’ve begun thinking more about the value of a notebook as an essential tool for creative practice, one that ought to be kept rather than tossed. As I purposely sit on the ideas I have for novels, perhaps out of fear or writers block or something else entirely, I am aware that the archives of my mind, so frequently relied on in the past, no longer seem like enough to sustain a productive writing career. I lament deleting all the dramatic and emotional emails and texts sent between my husband and I in the early days of our dramatic Romeo-and-Juliet-style courtship (they held a lot of pain) and other emails and text chains between friends, and sometimes, even all my old tweets and blog posts. Apart from some of the drafts I have digitally kept, I feel I am lacking the archive that I think demonstrates a career built, progress made, creativity fostered.

This ‘lack’ is something I felt more keenly when I started teaching writing in academic contexts. I came across so many writers for whom a notebook was part of the work. I also became aware of handwriting (and the fact that it doesn’t afford us the backspace key) as essential to seeing progress, and therefore fostering development and understanding. In Kate Grenville and Sue Woolfe’s collection Making Stories, Peter Carey discusses his method of ‘cantilevering’, which involves writing and rewriting sentences/paragraphs — often on the same day — to develop the work in a more aesthetic and conceptual way. In drafts he shares in the book, we see a couple of sentences turn into a couple of paragraphs, but we also get a lot of wisdom in a simple statement he makes when ‘showing’ his working out: “Now we have computers you lose this…” he tells them, thus sparking something in my own brain.

I often tell my students that I begin all my novels by handwriting, and this is true. I draw mindmaps and do bullet points and sketch out the key players and themes and events underpinning what would become the plot and write central, core conversations that reflect those characters. But I’ve never taken that process seriously enough as part of the work and these notes have always been on random pieces of paper that get tossed away when I am more fully into the story and no longer need them.

Now, as I think more seriously and holistically about this work as so much more than a side-hustle or something I fell into by accident (even though that’s indeed how it began), the need to make (and keep) a record of my thinking seems all the more paramount, and it’s not just because I am feeling sorry for the plans of the story I have been pondering seriously for two years, scribbled in a mix of pencil and pen, stapled together haphazardly and shoved in a drawer by my bed like they don’t matter.

It’s because there’s something in the work of notetaking that breathes life into the questions we ask and the things that we ruminate on as writers. A notebook is not just the vestige of source material, but also a form of record keeping and inspiration that could be just as valuable as the work itself, because it delineates the process entirely.

Virginia Woolf’s diaries were so comprehensive that they were edited and published across five volumes. Toni Morrison had diaries for early drafts and plot outlines. Susan Sontag used her diaries to reflect on her creative self, examine the literary landscape and contemplate the form and function of writing. And Hemingway used his diaries to capture scenes he encountered and dialogue he heard and the everyday happenings around him.

I meanwhile, fire off texts and emails and voice notes to friends and colleagues, writing so many of the above things — thoughts on the literary landscape, reflections on particular works, lamentations of my own approaches and aspirations — into inboxes where they’ll probably never be revisited. I don’t even save my chats.

So how will I know if I am growing as an artist?

This lack of an archive coupled with Henry James’ lament and Peter Carey’s words about computers costing us that very obvious sense of progress got me thinking that the way I have kept notes AND notebooks could use a little development if I am going to try to make something worthy of it, even if it’s just a record of how I spent my days. My approach to the notebook doesn’t necessarily have to change: it just needs to exist, a little more comprehensively and concretely (and not to be tossed away), because even a haphazardly-kept notebook can be beneficial if you look at it the right way.

Ofcourse, this was best articulated by Joan Didion in her essay On Keeping a Notebook, published in the collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, when she wrote about her notebooks as a tool for understanding who she was at a given moment/time. I have gone back to this piece often, but I’ve only recently come to better appreciate it. Didion says:

“The point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess. At no point have I ever been able successfully to keep a diary; my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best.”

Didion kept her notebooks not as a catalogue of emotions, events or actvities, and in their not-ness they required a sort of deciphering that I think is very attractive to writers. I love that she kept her notebooks because she believed in remaining “on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not”. I wish I had read this essay when I was so much younger, or that I understood the importance of holding onto material, even the traumatic, for the sake of the work.

But I didn’t. And while I am not going to dwell on deleted correspondence and blog posts, unattended-to diaries, and tossed-away records of to-do lists, thoughts and random notes, I am better placed to see their value now. And of course, there’s my space here too: a weekly attempt at turning up, writing whatever I write for the sake of discipline and regular practice and contemplative thinking, that is a budding archive.

This version of myself might make future me very cross, but at least she won’t be invisible. And perhaps I will be able to see how far — or not — I have come, and make some words of that too.

And good things in my physical and mental space:

• Not sponsored, just cool: The Eve Hotel in Redfern just turned one, and I am currently coveting a weekend away with my bestie just for its rooftop pool. I’d never seen the hotel or even heard of it until the press release landed in my inbox and I saw its gorgeous exterior. I make it my business to staycation in Sydney once or twice per year and this has now joined the Kimpton Margot at the top of my list. They’ve got a ‘Celebrate Eve’ birthday special going which includes champagne on arrival, a room upgrade, an a la carte breakfast for two, and a Henry Wilson aluminium incense holder with handmade Japanese incense sticks.

• Coles has started stocking crumpets by British brand Warburtons and I think they’re the best crumpets I’ve ever had.

• Bought a ticket to see these extraordinary Arab women at All About Women this year. They are all contributors to Don’t Ask the Trees for Their Names, a recently published collection of stories migration, identity, belonging and homesickness.

• Cos always does the best capes. Contemplating adding the brown to my wardrobe.

• The State Library of NSW turns 200 this year and to celebrate they have a year-long program of exhibitions, talks, performances and installations. This is one of my favourite cultural institutions for obvious reasons and it’s a place I love going to with adults and kids alike.

• And three fashion + beauty reads on other people’s substacks:

  JenKnowsBest

  The One about the The 10 Best Styling Tricks I Learned in 15+ Years as a Stylist, Closet Whisperer, & Recovering Fashion Insider (that noone talks about on Instagram)…

  Let me guess: you’ve binged all the think-pieces on French women and their allegedly effortless style, you’ve been caught in a TikTok spiral debating whether to roll or cuff your jeans (as if the fate of fashion depends on it), and you’ve been left wondering if chic is some insider secret only whispered at Parisian café tables over a cigarette and an es…

  Read more

  a year ago · 1736 likes · 59 comments · JenKnowsBest
  The Rich Creme

  15 free habits I picked up at a $15,000 wellness retreat

  If you’re reading this as an email, you may need to click “expand” or open in a new window to view in full…

  Read more

  a year ago · 5348 likes · 157 comments · Emily Morello
  Noted! by Anouk Yve

  Taste Is The New Wealth

  You’re probably wondering where Wednesday’s post went. I’ll tell you: it got swallowed whole by the launch of my tea brand. A project I’ve been nursing in secret for over a year, the way you protect something fragile and true until it’s strong enough to survive contact with the world. Wednesday was the day it all became real…

  Read more

  7 months ago · 341 likes · 30 comments · Noted by Anouk Yve

I wouldn’t call myself a fashion person, but like many people into style icons (and what makes them) I could not wait for the first three episodes of Ryan Murphy’s Love Story to start streaming last week. I ordered pizza and wings for dinner then made a virgin G&T, shut myself in my bedroom with the projector, and watched two out of three episodes before basically falling asleep to a Pinterest scroll ( bad girl).

The show has had its criticisms (The Guardian called it a “punishing slog”, and Naomi Watts’ portrayal of Jackie Kennedy Onassis was panned by viewers), but it’s definitely tapped into so many interest areas, namely the public’s enduring fascination with all things Kennedy and the Camelot myth, conversations around class and celebrity (OMG at the depiction of Daryl Hannah), and the fashion set’s girl-crush on Carolyn Bessette Kennedy (her style perfectly encapsulating 90s minimalism).

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I too watched it for the fascination factor, but I didn’t realise that what I would be particularly fascinated by was not the love story it was (further) mythologising but the life of the older Jackie, and the way she had settled into her self at her age. I had ofcourse known somewhat of the younger Jackie: I had watched documentaries on the JFK assasination and its aftermath; the episodes of The Crown where everyone, minus then Queen Elizabeth II, is wowed by her; and Pablo Larraín’s historical drama film Jackie starring Natalie Portman; and I had read Alice Kaplan’s look at her younger years in Dreaming in French: The Paris years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis.

I’d also seen her style broken down in countless fashion magazines over the years, namely for its clean lines and sort of bohemian sophistication: the oversized sunglasses, capri pants, Hermes scarves and classic flats so effortlessly chic and, on appearance at least, easy to emulate. And then of course, there was the Gucci saddle bag hobo that she carried so many times that the fashion house renamed it for her (the newer iteration, reimagined by former Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele, was best modelled by another woman whose style I also like — Dakota Johnson).

I loved the Jackie O aesthetic

And trust me, I get the appeal. I don’t remember much of what character Jackie said and did in the show (apart from the fact that she was constantly advising her son on his love life, if advising is what we’d call it), but I do remmeber being wowed by her lifestyle. The older Jackie lived in a large Fifth Avenue apartment; took walks in Central Park; wrote handwritten notes to her children, plucked from stationary stacked neatly in a gorgeous desk in an apartment that was the best kind of maximalist. Where the show’s settings reflected 90s minimalism (clean, neutral, bare), Jackie’s apartment was kind of chintzy and classic and charming. Think French Louis armchairs and a lot of equestrian motifs and all sorts of art styles and varying wood tones and candles and lamps. And it all worked together.

The show’s production designer Alex DiGerlando told AD that figuring out Jackie Kennedy’s apartment “was a little bit of a puzzle”, and that the team used a Sotheby’s auction to help guide their styling, because most of her personal items had been auctioned off sometime after her death (apparently people came from as far off as Hong Kong to bid on her stuff!).

So while I know it was inspiration as opposed to a replica of the exact thing, seeing her character in it kind of affirmed for me the creative life and space I want, and I don’t mind all that much that mine is in a duplex in a suburb of western Sydney as opposed to a massive apartment (five bedrooms, apparently) overlooking Central Park. The appeal is in how she lived: there was no definition of a particular type of aesthetic, it was just an amalgamation of treasures and tastes that reflected who she was.

What does this have to do with creative work, for me at least?

I’ve never been one of those people who can write under any condition. I can be compelled to do so by a deadline or a flash of inspiration, but if I am going to work at my craft and my research every day, then I need to be inspired by my surroundings. A few years ago I bought the book by The Minimalists and watched their documentary because I felt overwhelmed by stuff and the solution seemed to get rid of it all. But after some reflection I realised that I wasn’t honouring myself being a minimalist and that I much preferred being a curated maximalist: someone who would mix the clashing prints and styles and objects that I liked because they best reflected the contradictions of my own self.

Personal style matters here too. My best friend and I have a running joke that I am no longer allowed to talk to her about trench coats and blazers. When my sister recruited me for help in looking for a trench coat last year, my husband said ‘Oh no’. Indeed, I am incredibly pedantic about what I see as a wardrobe essential, and I thought so intentionally about the kind of trench coat works best for me that it consumed the head space I otherwise needed for writing. This happens a lot with things I want to add to my wardrobe, but if they’re a classic item that I am going to want to keep for a long time, then I will obssess over making the right decision. It’s weird but true: if my space is in order, and my wardrobe is in order, I feel ready to take on the task of writing. Seeing Jackie walk through the park with her trench on and a scarf wrapped around her head just reaffirmed that the coat was an important buy worth thinking hard about, because it’s something you can wear in your 30s and in your 60s, and wherever you are in the world, and it will work.

And then of course there were the little things that I also feel are conducive to creative practice. I don’t know how much actual correspondence she kept up with (although we do know that as per the series, she started burning her letters before her death), but in the last couple of years, I have taken to writing handwritten thank yous and Christmas cards, and I have found it incredibly rewarding and reflective. I have even written to my children! I have also spent a lot of time thinking about how our digital conversations — over email or What’s App or Instagram DMs — will compromise archives as we know them. I plan on writing about this in more detail soon, namely because we know so much about history’s great figures through their correspondence, and because I sincerely regret deleting many emails and conversations I now wish I had kept (and yet, I am still a little obsessive about digital decluttering, go figure). Letters and memos, I feel, are an essential part of knowing a person, and knowing yourself. I do want to write more of them.

Jackie had also set up a drawing table by the window and would paint watercolours of Central Park; I don’t paint but I love having my desk by a window while I write (James Wood’s paying attention and all that). I love that she took regular walks because I have always believed that walking and flaneuring are a necessary, and fruitful, part of creative practice, and I am just as enamoured by walking big cities like the flaneurs of the 20th century as I am by the soft fascination we get walking in nature. Soft fascination is the way in which we return to our innermost selves, and it’s incredibly generative for creative writing. Seeing all those additional things made me see the legitimacy of her as an ‘icon’, and for so much more than the clothes she chose to wear.

But she was so much more than a style icon

I wonder if it’s because her life as a First Lady overshadowed that, or because much of the fanfare around her in my day seemed to focus on her style or her marriage and not so much on who she was, especially as we are wont to erasing women and older women at that.

When her son, JFK Jnr, came out to announce her death to the press, I got a glimpse of who she really was, and it prompted a bit more reflection and research on my end. “She was surrounded by her friends and her family and her books,” the show’s John Kennedy Junior says, under the awning outside the lobby’s doors. “She did it in her own way, and on her own terms, and we all feel lucky for that.”

It seemed like such a wonderful (and privileged) way to go. It turns out she’d actually worked as a book editor in her later years, and there was a small part of me that felt vindicated for her, because this points to the kind of person she was before she got married, and it was nice to see she got to see some part of her private self through.

In her book, Dreaming in French, Alice Kaplan writes that the young Jacqueline Bouvier idendified with the great salonnières of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. These women hosted salons — intimate social gatherings of intellectuals, artists, and philosophers — and “organised Parisian social life in their parlors and through their literary correspondence”. That students who went to school with Bouvier remember her this way, says Kaplan, “points to a problem for her generation, the lack of role models for women who aspired to beauty and wit at the same time who wanted a life that was both sensual and intellectual”.

Kaplan writes:

“What strikes us today is that Jacqueline Kennedy was focused on a time and a place so far from her own. She was a French time traveller, a voracious reader, and a person who lived in her head, through her dreams and her imagination. In every account of her life from the kiss-and-tell accounts of her husband’s infidelities to glamorized hagiographies, this quality shines through. She had a counter life, and she nurtured her counter life with images and words and histories.”

I mean, is this not most of us as writers? Can we not see the appeal in this too? Being a citizen of the world and a purveyor of great books and bold ideas, while also looking incredibly chic?

Suffice to say, the show generated so much background-level appeal for me, and although the future episodes might not render the same insights, I have enjoyed what I have gleaned from it. If anything, it’s made me surer of the things I find chic, the things I find fruitful and inspirational, and the things I want for myself. And that kind of clarity is not just important to me as a writer, but as a woman moving into a newer stage of her life, where that self-assurance is worth more than any anti-ageing potion or skincare treatment. Provided I am wearing the right trench.

Further Reading

• AD’s exclusive look at the show’s set, including Kennedy compound, Jackie O’s Fifth Avenue apartment, and Calvin Klein HQ, where Bessette worked

• Air Mail’s chat between Carolyn Bessette Kennedy’s biographer and the show’s EP Connor Hines

• What was Kennedy’s Camelot? in History Hit

• Inside Jackie Kennedy’s NYC apartment

• Books: Dreaming in French by Alice Kaplan and Flaneuese by Lauren Elkin

  

And in my physical space this week: A loveseat found by the roadside

I started 2026 determined not to bring anything new into my home unless I really really wanted it, but the other day when I was out walking, on a Sunday before a regular council clean up, I saw this love seat. I have ALWAYS wanted a love seat but never committed and it was in such great condition (the lining at the bottom is starting to droop which is an easy fix), but I kept telling myself I didn’t need it and continued home. Some time later, it started to sprinkle. I couldn’t bear the thought of the love seat getting drenched, so I quickly hopped into my car and drove back to get it, gave it a solid clean, and decked it out with these two cushions that I loved and that never really suited my couch, and voila! My first piece of abandoned-by-the-roadside furniture, and I am thrilled with it. I can’t wait to better style it.

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Late again this week, but that’s because I was working super-hard to finish my manosphere research paper (finally complete, though I have to give it a light edit after a bit of breathing space). So this is a last-minute post sharing a bunch of things I am currently loving or new things I am intrigued/excited by. I hope there’s something in here for you, and that you’re having a fabulous week where ever you are. I want to say I am above St Valentine’s Day but I love a celebration of love and this holiday started out as anti-government anyway!

Once again recommending Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline

I am leading with this one because it’s a great read (have reviewed it here) but also because being the constant opinion pieces and political rhetoric must be exhausting for someone who has spent her entire career advocating against the decades-long occupation of her homeland, which most mainstream media and the political classes have chosen to ignore. The brilliant cover art for Discipline is by my friend and esteemed colleague Amani Haydar. You can contact Amani for artworks (which would make excellent gifts!) through her Instagram DMs. I have a couple of her pieces in my house, and they are very much loved.

The Loco Love heart box is all I wanted for Valentine’s Day

All I wanted for Valentine’s Day was a (heart-shaped) box of chocolates, but that was surprisingly hard to find among my usual suspects. So I asked for this box from Loco Love. I’ve purchased many Loco Love products on and off in the past, but this box has limited-edition flavours like cherry coconut, strawberry and hibiscus, and earl grey tea with bergamot in it. My husband says I am a ‘shapes lady’ and he’s absolutely right: presentation is everything.

The custard tart at Martha’s is worth being dramatic over

Last week I was craving the custard tart at Martha’s and I told my husband that I might not make it through the night if I didn’t have one, and honestly, I don’t think that was a bold claim at all. It just might be the best custard tart I have ever had, and I have tried it more than once to confirm my thoughts. It’s got Portugese tart vibes, but it’s different (creamier, I think). The closest thing in terms of experience (because when it’s warm, it’s an experience) is an egg tart I had in Osaka at a place I will never remember (crying) and the Portugese tarts at Cafe Pastel in Northbridge, WA. Oh and the brownie there is also excellent.

Didn’t need another hat; made an exception for this one

I don’t think I look good in hats, but that has not stopped me acquiring them. I keep thinking each hat will be the one hat I will commit to (I don’t get regular facial treatments so I have to be diligent with my sun protection) but so far, I have been making foolish choices motivated solely by vibes. This goes for the Akubra hanging in my wardrobe that I have only worn once, and which I hold on to in case I ever abandon suburbia for a farm. This hat by Lack of Color is vibey too, but it’s a bit more feminine and has a cute tie to ensure it stays on my head. It also has an exceptionally-wide brim to cover my neck too. I’ll admit it looked better on me in the virtual try-on (upload selfie, try on hat) but I am going to commit to it anyway.

Books! Books! Books!

I am running out of time to read before uni starts and I have multiple books going at once, which must be very bad for my brain. Last week I went to the launch of Bugger, by Michael Mohammed Ahmad, and I have been commissioned to review Alex Sarkis’ new book, Something New. But I am also super excited to get stuck into Work Horse by Caroline Palmer, which is set in New York media at the turn of the millenium. And I just borrowed Wreck by Catherine Newman from the library.

Three excellent substack pieces I read last week

This essay covers the way Instagram is contributing to the AI takeover, the way it’s “mainlining” envy and ego, and the myriad of ways that Instagram is crushing political awareness and social action by de-sensetising us, covertly threatening us and making performative activism feel like actual work.

How to Have Fun in the Apocalypse

It Is Urgent and Imperative That We All Permanently Exit Instagram

Hot girls in cute outfits. Another hot take on Venezuela. A fancy, curated living room. Starving children in Gaza. Someone’s vacation in Italy. The wedding of someone I barely know. ICE kidnapping a mother outside her daughter’s school. A dog doing a silly thing…

Read more

7 months ago · 7714 likes · 544 comments · Zoe Keziah Mendelson

This one, on the death of the career author, is not as doomy as it sounds, though I don’t know if I agree with all of it. Perry uses her own career to evidence the sheer luck that is involved in building a successful career in traditional publishing, and says the new thing to hope for — a portfolio career and multiple income streams — is better for us. I have been a portfolio writer for almost my whole career, and I am not gonna lie, I’m a bit exhausted by it, though the insights in this piece were very valuable.

We Are All Creatives

The end of the 'career author'

Over the past few months, my author group chats have taken on a slightly funereal vibe. Friends are getting dropped by…

Read more

9 months ago · 1867 likes · 236 comments · Tasmina Perry

A long but incredibly-thought-out piece, that posits that “one of the biggest existential threats to modern women is the beauty-industrial complex…the vast network of corporations that manufactures and sells us an endless slew of products, services, images and ideologies intended to destroy our self-worth for the benefit of shareholders”.

father_karine

The Anti-Cosmetic Surgery Essay Every Woman Should Read

Welp, another major female celebrity just copped herself a completely new face. That’s right, thirty-six year old Hollywood crone Emma Stone recently got her face snatched so tight that she’s now twinning with OG Iron Chef chairman Takeshi Kaga. Welcome to Kitchen Stadium: the special mystery ingredient on tonight’s episode is (the divine) feminine ins…

Read more

10 months ago · 22041 likes · 1377 comments · father_karine

The trailer for American Love Story looks so good

And I would not even call myself a Carolyn Bessette Kennedy fan.

Can I be an iced latte person if I am not a coffee person?

I don’t drink coffee, so people who like it can stop reading this section because I am not a purveyor of taste on the topic. Anyway, I have been making ‘iced lattes’ with instant coffee (we have a proper espresso machine; I refuse to use it) and malted milk powder and maple syrup, and I think I really like them, which is fair because they probably don’t taste like coffee. This means that I am willing to give actual iced lattes (with flavours) a chance, so if you have a recipe or place for a good one, please let me know in the comments. Here’s a picture of one I prepared earlier.

This is my outfit of the week, even though it’s only Tuesday

I’m surprised by how little I have worn white jeans until the last two or three years. I feel like they really elevate a look. Bonus points for basket bag. These ones are the Lola Cropped Barrels from Feather & Noise.

Not yet game to embrace the scarf-around-the-waist look

But I do love it!

Remember to romance yourself a little bit this week

It’s the season for it and unfortunately the news is a bit crap no matter where you look. In order to do the essential work of fighting with my kids over homework (and all other care-giving work), I am forgoing looking at the news because it’s simultaneously enraging and depressing. Instead I am using my favourite tea cups, reading the work of values-aligned writers, and spending some time with my favourite females in the spirit of Galentine’s Day. And if you’re a single female, do not be gaslit by the holiday and please remember this.

I’ve always found January to be an excellent month for reading. There are always a couple of books in my Christmas stocking, a lot of reading leftover from the year prior, and plenty of downtime, especially in that first ‘Twixmas’ week where I do nothing. I wrote about Mettle, When Sleeping Women Wake, and The Position of Spoons earlier this month, but I’m back with three highly-recommended reads from January with a brief note in bold on the lessons they offered for my own writing career.

I adored: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

Virginia Evans’ polyphonic epistolary novel is already one of my standout reads of 2026: a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that takes on the perceived ordinariness of an old woman’s last years and dispels with them in a work that is simultaneously warm, funny and tragic.

It’s made up entirely of letters, primarily written by the work’s main character, a retired divorce lawyer who must not ever use her phone, or perhaps even her footpath, because she writes letters to everyone, including her neighbour, who, along with some villain-esque Texan, is vying for her affection; her best friend and ex-sister-in-law (though they were friends first); the man responsible for stalking her; and most interestingly, the 15-year-old son of a former work associate who leans on her in his own times of trouble.

It was not really what I would call a compulsive read, but I found it hard to put down, its simple prose hiding real substance. There was no gripping or obvious three-act-structure, though it was carried by the incredibly strong voice of the main character, because even when others are writing to her, there’s a real solid sense of who she is as a person.

I especially liked that she was at times, quite cantankerous, not even enjoying a close relationship with her children, who are grown-up and married with kids of their own. Her bond with her daughter is especially fractured, but as one might expect of an older character, there are a lot of layers and traumas in the rift that make for especially tender reading.

The Correspondent was released in the middle of 2025 and made very quiet ripples, reprint after reprint, before eventually reaching the New York Times Bestseller List in December. This book is a lesson in keeping at it, even when it’s tough. It is one of the quiet, slow-burn success stories that writers assure one another of in order to continue pursuing the agony of artistic work. Evans had written seven novels over two decades – all of them rejected – before this was acquired. Assurances aside however, it is a pleasurable read for readers and writers alike, not just because of the revelation it makes in the course of story, but because it is an ode to a lost art.

I inhaled: The Heir Apparent by Rebecca Armitage

There’s intrigue and drama at every turn in Rebecca Armitage’s debut novel, The Heir Apparent, which reimagines the British royal family as descendant from the marriage of a real mistress-turned-wife of a 17th century king. In it, we meet Lexi, a doctor completing her residency in Lutruwita/Tasmania who is secretly in love with her best friend, Jack, on whose family’s vineyard she rents a small cottage. Just as they are about to kiss for the first time, Lexi’s past comes calling, and it’s not one easily escaped from. It turns out that Lexi is actually Princess Alexandrina, who becomes the heir to the British throne following the death of her twin brother and father in a freak skiing accident in December, and who must decide her future from two very different life paths.

ABC journalist Rebecca Armitage has obviously drawn from her work reporting on the royal family for her book, and the resultant work pulses with familiarity and fascination (if this reel was her inspiration, then it’s clear she understood her assignment.) It’s clear that the novel’s central characters and their narrative arcs are inspired by the Windsors: There’s the tragic death of Lexi’s lonely, waify mother (herself a figure of public love and allure); the emotionally-distant father and his maligned mistress; the seedy uncle who fancies himself the monarch’s favourite (while leaking unfavourable stories of other royals, including his own two daughters, to the press); and Lexi herself, whose arc is probably as inspired as you can get by Harry Sussex’s own trajectory without a lawsuit.

This book has made a lot of waves since its release and was Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club pick of December. It’s definitely one for fans of royal gossip and will have you reading between the lines, but the lesson for aspiring writers here is two fold: one, that your day job (or the news) can be the best source material, if you learn to play ‘What if?’ well; and two, that sometimes a change of scenery or circumstance is the ticket you need to get yourself unstuck on a plot point. You don’t have to change your whole life around like Armitage did; but it helps to get away from the desk.

I savoured: The Transformations by Andrew Pippos

I quite enjoyed Andrew Pippos’ debut novel, Lucky’s, so when I saw that his second novel was set at a fictional newspaper in 2014, I knew I had to read it. I’ve not lost passion for print media — no matter its various shortfalls — so I relished the novel’s context, and appreciated the tenderness by which the author approached a clearly dying industry. Newspapers and magazines, in their heyday at least, will always hold a bit of magic for me, and this did come through in the scene-setting of the story.

The novel follows 35-year-old George, a sub-editor at a national broadsheet who is going through the motions when his humdrum life is disrupted by two women: the first, his 15-year-old daughter Elektra, who returns to Sydney after living in Melbourne with her mum for years; the second, his married colleague Cassandra, who is exploring polyamory and with whom he begins a relationship. There is a lot to this narrative: familial obligation and duty, the weight of invisible class structures on an individual’s options, the trauma of child sex abuse, and the struggle between doing what one wants, and what one feels they ought. I won’t talk more about the plot itself, and instead direct any interest to this brilliant review of the book by Thuy On.

Instead, I’ll focus on what it taught me as a writer. Pippos’ attention to his craft is evident throughout the novel, and I loved his careful choice of words in every scene. I second-guessed my own ability to write while reading it, because it did the thing I always tell my students to do: it justified the presence of every single word. None of it seemed superfluous, and even the plot, which was laden with a multitude of themes, seemed to me deliberate and well-thought out. I still have not made peace with the ending of my third YA novel, so reading Pippos’ methodological approach was a lesson in thinking intentionally about every single action and choice a character makes in the story from the outset and at the most basic and early draft level. In other words, as I understood it, he wrote action first, then finetuned it later, focusing on sentences and dialogue and other craft choices AFTER his story was, for the most part, set in stone. It’s very easy to get caught up in writing the perfect sentences from the first draft, which is something I always preach but clearly don’t practice. So it was refreshing to see what I have suspected but never actioned in his method.

Good things worth sharing…

• Travelling to Japan and want to bring back a souvenir? Might I recommend a tin of these incredible biscuits, which I was gifted by my husband following his recent return from a trip there? I thought I had covered a lot of my buy-from-Japan bases in this post I wrote in the aftermath of my own travels way back when, but clearly I was missing these. My shelves and spaces are always partial to a tin, which can be reused for just about anything.

• There’s just over a week until Bankstown Poetry Slam’s Grand Slam at the Sydney Opera House. For those unfamiliar, the Grand Slam is a showcase of the best of the 2025 Bankstown Poetry Slam performers, and if that’s not enough to get you moving, this year’s special guests include Kirli Saunders, Omar Musa, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Luka Lesson, Hasib Hourani and more. It’s always a fun, moving night with the best hosts, and the Opera House is such an epic space for it. Tickets and info available here.

• Sara Haddad’s critically-acclaimed book The Sunbird, has been adapted for children, with cute illustrations by Palestinian artist Baraa Awoor. Out now with UQP, it explores the Nakba from the perspective of an innocent, curious child, asking “How could a new country be put inside a country that was already there?”

• Are you an unpublished writer of YA fiction under 25? The Steph Bowe Prize for Young Writers was established in memory of beloved Australian YA author Steph Bowe, honouring her passion for fostering and mentoring emerging writers.

  Entrants must submit a complete YA manuscript, a 1-page synopsis and an author statement about how winning the Prize will further their career.

  The winner will receive $1000 in prize money, a 20-hour mentorship with an award-winning YA author to develop their manuscript, and a professional development package worth $300. This year, there will also be a shortlist who will receive the professional development package, which features a Publishing Masterclass with industry professionals including an editor and an agent.

  The Prize closes on 28 February 2026. For more information visit www.stephboweprize.com

• Sippenham’s beef shin lasagne is quite possibly the BEST lasagne I have ever had. The new-ish pasta and wine bar is small though, so make sure to book your table.

• Want to elevate a standard everyday outfit? This white tee always makes me feel pulled together.

  

• This nutritionist-developed, high-protein, make-ahead breakfast tastes pretty decent and lasts a week in the fridge.

And a brief note on last week’s post…

Thanks to everyone who reached out over message or in the comments about last week’s post, on my article in The Guardian covering the closure of Abdul’s restaurant. My editor told me the article was extremely well-read, and I appreciated the opportunity to report on the history of Lebanese settlement and business in that part of this country at that particular moment in time. There is so much more to that history than can be covered in an online feature article that must stay on topic, and in my role as a reporter. I’ve since been reflecting on how the parameters and conventions of particular genres and media outlets can be limiting and that people can make assumptions as a result of those limitations, so I want to make it clear that anytime I write about migration or migrant experiences, I am always in perpetual acknowledgement that we are settlers on land that was stolen, where sovereignty was never ceded, and where my respects to Elders past and present are always humbly extended.

Last week, one of my editors at The Guardian asked me if I was interested in writing a piece on the closure of Abdul’s, a Lebanese restaurant that had been in Sydney’s Surry Hills since 1968. She wanted to know more about its history, the reasons for its closure, and how so many Lebanese restaurants came to be on the same block. I said yes immediately, and since filing it on Friday (it was published yesterday), I have been feeling the kind of buoyancy writers feel about their best or most impactful writing experiences.

Here’s the thing though: it wasn’t one of my best pieces. It’s not deftly written, or brilliantly researched, or significantly impactful. It wasn’t a breeze to write (though I am blaming trying to write during the school holidays for that one). But publishing it brought with it a tiny vindication for my teenage self, the kind of vindication my writing has been chipping away at for years.

In order for this to make sense, I am going to tell you about my first real love affair, one that began so innocently when I started high school, and spent my Sunday mornings waiting for the paper boy to turn outside my house. My belly would do a little flip everytime I heard his whistle up the street, and I’d run outside eagerly, so keen to lock eyes on him and the little cart he was pushing. I can’t tell you what he looked like or what his name was, because contrary to what it might appear like, this wasn’t a Lizzie McGuire thing and the paper boy himself wasn’t the appeal: it was the Sunday paper, and I would bring it inside, waiting for us to return from Sunday Mass so I could pore over it for hours until my fingertips turned black and my mum hurled harmless Arab-mum insults at me.

But like most first love affairs, this one would eventually break my heart — crushing me with its perceived significance, and if this piece is an indication, I have never really recovered. The rift began when I was 12 and 14-year-old Korean school boy Edward Lee was stabbed to death outside a party in Punchbowl, in Sydney’s South-West. The attackers were described as being of Middle-Eastern appearance, and in the days that followed, NSW Police made use of both mounted police and the dog squad to conduct a Stop-and-Search campaign in the nearby local shopping centre, targetting groups of youths of Middle-Eastern appearance, laying 71 charges and making 24 arrests in one day1. Shortly afterwards, a local police station was targeted in a drive-by shooting in an apparent retaliation for the stop and search campaign, and media reportage in the weeks that followed contextualised the crimes in relation to the ethnicity of the perpetrators, labelling them “un-Australian” and quoting then NSW Premier Bob Carr who said that the culprits were “trying to destroy the Australian way of life”2.

As I wrote in my PhD thesis introduction:

The murder happened just a block away from my high school, where I was in the seventh grade, but its proximity to my sense of identity made it feel even closer. At twelve years old, I was on the cusp of my adolescence, and in the magazines I read and the TV shows I watched, girls my age were worrying about changing bodies, confusing friendships, their burgeoning sexuality and first relationships. By contrast, I worried about how the outside world saw me: as an aspiring journalist, my insatiable appetite for the news exposed me to the moral panics surrounding my community and the accompanying stereotypes and assumptions. In the years that followed, coverage of, and reaction to, the 2000 gang rapes in Sydney, as well as September 11 and the Bali bombings, cemented Lebanese, Arab and Muslim Australians as so-called enemies of Australia. In 2005, months after I started dating a white boy from country Australia, hordes of Anglo-Australians – mostly young, drunk men from the suburbs of Cronulla and surrounds – descended on Cronulla Beach in what would eventually be dubbed the Cronulla Riots, protesting against the presence of ‘Lebs’, ‘wogs’ and ‘Arabs’ in Australia.

It was a period of intense scrutiny, the already fraught experiences of being a…migrant adolescent intensified by the constant media rhetoric, which seemed to filter down into every part of my life…”

From that moment, I read the newspaper or listened to the radio never quite knowing what we would be metaphorically struck with (Alan Jones calling the Lebanese people vermin is a stand-out), but knowing it would feel profoundly unjust. It felt like being broken up with in the most heartless, most public way possible. Like Lainey Boggs discovering she was a “fucking bet” in She’s All That, or the cool kids trying to open a can of dog poo on Aldys while she danced at the prom in Never Been Kissed. It was like this thing that gave me joy could also give me so much pain: it was the source of so much of my anguish, a reason for my lack of belonging, the thing that underpinned so many of the insecurities that saw me justify and explain myself everywhere I went.

But I now realise that it also drove young me in a way that surprises older me today. To say that that pervasive and rage-baity rhetoric of otherness influenced the trajectory of my career is an understatement. I have spent almost two decades penning works — op-eds, reflective essays, novels, academic papers — redeeming, celebrating, championing and justifying our culture. I wrote about the cedar revolution and the role of the youth in Lebanon in agitating for change for a politics essay in my Bachelor degree, did my Masters thesis on the media’s moral panic around Arab-Australians, wrote my first novel about a Lebanese girl who is fed up with the stereotypes around her community, and penned pieces on Lebanese traditions at Christmas and Easter, as well as the impact of the news coverage on the way Muslim women in hijabs were treated in the early 00s. I called on then-NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian to light up the Opera House in the Lebanese flag in the wake of the Beirut Blast, have championed Arab-Australian authors and businesses in reviews and profiles, and I never hid my culture from the powerful. Not everything I have done has been great and hindsight has been a great teacher, but every little piece helped chip away at the deep sense of injustice and hurt I felt as a teen. Those writings, no matter how basic they might have been, all felt like a remedy, an antidote, a balm.

But the best part of all it has been the sense of community I have found in this space, and the sense of community in Lebanese/Arab-Australia more general. That newspaper coverage might have stripped me of my sense of belonging and security, but in answering back to it, my community grew immensely and I found loyal readers and friends and people who shared the same interests.

I saw these bonds in action last week, when I was commissioned to write this story on the closure of a much-loved restaurant, with no contacts, no information, and no idea where to start. With so many Arab-Australian followers on Instagram, I began there, and within a day I had two separate leads that led me to the Abdul’s daughter Dina, and his siter, Hiba. Abdul’s parents had founded the restaurant (and named it after their eldest son) and Hiba was able to speak to me about the early days and how it came to be, while Dina could talk to me about her father and his work ethic. But I also knew I needed someone who could talk to me about Surry Hills and Redfern in the early days, and this is where I did the most Lebanese thing: I contacted an Aunty who was married to a man whose village had boasted the first emigrants here. She asked her husband who asked his Dad who asked a lady who was into history who asked another lady about her Dad, and that’s how I ended up interviewing 91-year-old John Betros. Betros’ own father was born here, his grandfather (on his own arrival to the colony) having set up a wholesale and manufacturing business that supplied goods to the Lebanese hawkers that travelled around NSW selling their wares. He told me that all of Great Buckingham Street in Redfern was occupied by the Lebanese, and that the first restaurants began because Lebanese women realised that all the migrant men who were here alone — the ones who were working incredibly hard to send money to their families overseas — had nobody to cook for them, so the women started making stews and other home-cooked meals and would put on a ‘Dish of the Day’ to feed them.

I had written this piece desperately wanting to remind people that we have always been an industrious, hard-working, loving and solid community that had contributed positively to this place for over a century.

But I now realise that the person I needed to remind was that teenage girl still reeling from the shame that the newspapers thrust upon her at such a critical and daunting time of her life. Of course, anyone who has read Edward Said or Ghassan Hage knows I should never been have surprised by the moral panics and that I never needed to justify or redeem anyone, but I think it’s important to account for the fact that we can rarely ever rationalise or intellectualise our emotions. I simply couldn’t control them, and I knew they held weight.

Writing this piece was what I needed to write to fully arrive at the knowledge that it’s never been on me or anyone else to undo the damage the newspapers did in the nineties and noughties. Like many of my works, it was a tiny measure of vindication for a community that is so much more than a sensationlist newspaper headline, and who counts among it, many celebrated leaders, artists, intellectuals, athlethes, business people and so much more.

If you know your history, you would know that the Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of the modern alphabet, and that the Phoenician people are the ancient people of Lebanon. As I re-read my piece on Abdul’s, commemorating a family, that like many others, represented Lebanese generosity, spirit and work ethic, I realised how far I had come, and how blessed I felt to be able to use the instrument that was once the source of so much hurt (and in many ways, still demonises many marginalised communities of colour) to heal myself, and offer an alternative story.