In May, my friend C sent me a voice note asking whether she should go to a sauna with a man she’d matched with on a dating app as a first date. I listened as she laid out her reservations. It wasn’t so much about body insecurity, she explained, but the fact that she gets severely flushed and can’t really wear makeup—you’re completely exposed, with no real defence. Still, she could see the appeal: being in a bikini in a sauna felt cute and flirty in its own way. Should she suggest getting a drink first? Or just say fuck it and go to the sauna?

My mind buzzed with opposing takes. The fact that they’d be scantily clad in a hot room might, in fact, lend itself to a hot date—but on the other hand, perhaps it was prematurely intimate. Was the man making a sincere attempt to change up the formulaic nature of early dating, or was it something more calculated—a way of fast-tracking nakedness? She said she was quite certain it was the former. In the end, they opted for a drink anyway. (The sauna ended up being date two.)

I told her about my own related fantasy of meeting a man at the beach. It wasn’t that I was especially keen to bare it all in a bikini from the get-go, but rather that I was drawn to the way the context eclipses the usual performance of early dating. There’s no requisite first-date primping—instead a casualness in which inhibitions dissolve before you can get in your head. Physical vulnerability is already baked into the beginning—and it’s still cute and flirty! But there is an important distinction: part of what makes the beach scenario appealing is that it’s incidental.

Both scenarios, nonetheless, raise the question: what contexts are likely to spark chemistry? We so often equate desire with spontaneity and assume that falling in love, too, should feel accidental. And yet, there is something curious about the fact that in a culture obsessed with efficiency and optimization, with knowing precisely what you want, declaring it unapologetically, and seeking it out directly, we still long for the wisdom of embodiment over the logic of the algorithm; for accident over design.

Or maybe this is a distinctly millennial affliction. Has Gen Z already moved on from this kind of magical thinking? Instead of mastering the art of flirting—finding the courage to approach strangers, embracing uncertainty, and accepting the possibility of rejection—they are choosing to optimize desire itself. They are using the tools and technologies available to them, from AI-powered dating apps to algorithmic matchmaking, rather than surrendering to chance and waiting for some sentimental fantasy to materialize. But talking to strangers in third spaces feels to me like an essential part of being alive. And for all the talk about “vibes,” you can’t catch one from the couch.

There is, indeed, something wonderful about having a stranger enter your life serendipitously, without precedent or intervention—it feels predestined, attributable to some unknowable, almost divine force. And yet, these kinds of chance encounters often emerge from pre-existing networks and shared structures. Context is more conducive to chemistry than we tend to admit. It filters for mutual sensibilities or orientations toward the world—even something as simple as the bar someone chooses to spend a Friday night in, which reveals something about their relationship to place, taste, money, and even alcohol. Even so, there is a growing sense that the architecture of modern life does not produce enough contexts in which desire can be realized.

I suppose this is why, for all our collective ennui, we return to dating apps despite the feeling that we are forcing fate’s hand. They offer a way to effortlessly transcend our immediate context: they expand the dating pool, but also decontextualize it, stripping it of the usual scaffolding of pubs and parties, universities and workplaces, and mutual friends. Sometimes this feels further atomizing. Other times, the kind of singular romantic possibility they enable, in which you meet an attractive stranger and spend a possibly lovely evening together asking the kinds of intimacy-inviting questions usually only permissible within the frame of dating, feels expansive. An overlap in the stories of your otherwise untethered lives. More than likely, they’ll go on to live a life you won’t know a thing about. Nevertheless, you play the odds.

I’ve dated across cultures and continents. I have been, admittedly, drawn to the novelty of no shared context at all, and later struggled to bridge those differences and the ways they lend themselves to conflicting ideas on the good life. At times, I’ve thought the men I’ve met on dating apps have enriched my life somehow, if only through exposure to people whose worlds are so different from mine—men from different places, with different perspectives, whom I would likely never have met organically. They’ve prompted me to ask myself hard questions about what I want, what I value—about the mysteries of desire itself. Other times, I wonder if I’ve taken a host of wrong turns by interfering with the natural order of things. What if the men I’ve met on dating apps were never meant to enter my life at all?

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Yesterday, I spent the afternoon perusing book tables at the Summer Book Fair at Ladbroke Hall. The event was beautiful and low-key. Stylish girls milled around the tables, browsing curated new releases and special-edition paperbacks from independent publishers. Later, they retreated to the back garden, where they sipped margaritas while reading their newly acquired titles or chatting with friends and strangers. The weather was immaculate: warm but softened by a gentle breeze. I left feeling so very zen.

Afterwards, I headed straight to Chelsea to meet a friend for dinner at La Famiglia. Everyone there seemed to be either on a date or having a wholesome family dinner. If you go, ask to sit in the back patio. After dinner, we walked to The Cadogan Arms, where we met a middle-aged man who was flying solo and had taken it upon himself to introduce pub-goers to one another as a kind of self-appointed matchmaker. Honestly, pubs should consider putting him on retainer.

In other news, I took myself to see The Invite, which I really enjoyed. (Take it from me, a solo Sunday movie is an elite ritual.) The Oscar Wilde quote at the beginning, “One should always be in love,” followed a few beats later by “That is the reason one should never marry,” felt like a clever encapsulation of the tension between desire and possession, freedom and security, and all the contradictions that make love so complicated. Fittingly, Esther Perel was a consultant on the film. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say I had a very different read from Piña on the future of Joe and Angela’s marriage. If you’ve seen it, let me know what you thought.

I also watched Noah Kahan: Out of Body on Netflix, which was obviously very different but which I’d also recommend. I appreciated how openly he spoke about body image (we need more men talking about this!) and found the candid glimpse into his family life really fascinating, given how much I love his songwriting.

See you next Sunday for Desire: Part VI. Here are all the previous essays in the series so far:

• Desire: Prelude — A Series

• Desire: Part I — Imagination | On fantasy, fiction, and “the good life”

• Desire: Part II — Dissonance | On cheeky cigs and self-delusion

• Desire: Part III — Escape | On avoidance and attraction

• Desire: Part IV — Coincidence | On doorknobs, detours, and the afterlife of attachment

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If a coincidence is defined by its lack of premeditation, it reminds us that we cannot fully orchestrate what or who enters our lives, or when—that desire often reveals itself through what we could not have recognized or anticipated.

We often cast desire as a force that derails a life, jolting it off course, but the truth is that it offers both escape routes and doorknobs. These so-called detours might be the point.

A few months ago, I went to a party at a friend’s house in London. Because most of us were transplants and the group skewed artsy, academic, and existentially curious, a simple question—what brought you to London?—often answered with a boyfriend, fiancé, husband, or ex, quickly deepened into a conversation about desire, relationships, culture, and place. Men may have prompted the plot twist (dating as armchair travel, then actual travel), but what unfolded from there was sprawling and surprising.

As we stood in the galley kitchen, drinking wine and picking at a charcuterie board, I thought about how it is not possible to disentangle the story of our lives, from other people and the paths they’ve led us down. People move for love; they move in the wake of its ruins. Desire determines direction. It forces questions of change and chance. Desire disrupts the narrative. It can reorganize a whole life.

Perhaps what we think of as a series of accumulating coincidences is really attachment and its afterlife: the meet-cute with your college boyfriend because the elevator in your apartment building broke down; going to a party on a crisp September night in Toronto and meeting the stranger who would become your best friend (she was in her post-breakup yes-woman era); gearing up to move to New York City and imagining yourself single and dating around, only for your resolve to disintegrate when an old flame reaches out. It is developing a mounting love affair with London when the plan was supposed to be to fall in love in New York—with New York. (For the record, I do love New York, but I love London more, so I took up with the mistress.)

It is the way a breakup sparks a desire for reinvention like moving country or chopping off your hair (I am, admittedly, more attached to my hair than my sense of place), and the flat next door to your best friend becoming available. It is taking it as a sign that the universe has conspired to will you in a particular direction, even though you do not believe everything happens for a reason, nor do you identify as a spiritual person on principle (if we’re talking astrology-as-truth or spirit guides; although by now you can probably tell I am perpetually and compulsively searching for meaning), and having the good sense to act on the coincidence.

In graduate school, I learned that great fiction should end in a way that is both surprising yet inevitable. In conversations with friends, I learned that people often think desire—and love—should feel the same: surprising in the moment, yet inevitable in hindsight. But perhaps it is not any particular love that comes to define us so much as the accumulation of intimacies through which we come to understand the story of our lives.

We cannot accurately foresee what will come of our romantic entanglements—whether they will endure or fall apart, or where they will lead us. Perhaps to a new city, some new insight, or a new version of the self. But time has a way of zooming us out from events, allowing us to trace the connections between them. Only in retrospect do we become skilled at arranging coincidence into narrative.

I thought about my Tube ride earlier that Saturday evening: people sipping from canned cocktails, clutching bottles of wine, or already tearing open boxes of beer to crack a bottle en route to their destinations. I thought about how the pursuit of alcohol is often intertwined with the pursuit of desire, how it makes us more open, more willing to act on a feeling, and therefore more likely to stumble into coincidence. (Open alcohol is prohibited in Toronto and New York City, so there is something gloriously illicit about it to me, even still.) Maybe they were heading to parties where they would meet a beautiful stranger? Maybe the girl they’d start talking to in the restaurant bathroom would become their best friend? I imagined the desires that shaped their lives so far and the coincidences that awaited them: how they might change the course of an evening—or the course of a life.

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I’ve been going to Wilton’s Way Deli & Wines a lot lately, which makes you feel like you’re hanging on someone’s patio. They also do a really good Aperol spritz. This song came on when I was last there and I immediately Shazamed it so I could add it to my July playlist. The same evening, I went to the new spot East2West on Broadway Market for dinner which was delicious and provides ample people watching opportunities.

I had a haircut in Chelsea the day the new Gracie Abrams album came out, which is impeccably titled Daughter From Hell, so I listened to it on the Tube ride over. I have thoughts…but I haven’t listened enough yet to say anything definitive. An aside, but as you will have learned above, I am, indeed, attached to my hair, and Oli from The Hair Bros kills it every time. If you’re an air-dry girlie who also dreads the overheating and arm exhaustion that comes with blow-drying, I think you’d like their approach. Plus, the salon backs onto The Chelsea Gardener, so you feel more like a bonsai tree being pruned than a human in a chaotic salon.

If you haven’t read it already, I’d recommend reading Jia Tolentino’s new essay, “Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare” and then following it up with “The New Female Contempt” by my friend Alistair Kitchen. As always, if you have thoughts, send them my way.

See you next Sunday for Desire: Part V. Here’s everything I’ve published in the series so far:

• Desire: Prelude — A Series

• Desire: Part I — Imagination | On fantasy, fiction, and “the good life”

• Desire: Part II — Dissonance | On cheeky cigs and self-delusion

• Desire: Part III — Escape | On avoidance and attraction

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If you’ve ever been in a relationship that is dying a slow death, you will know there is nothing more romantic than an alternative.

Desire is notoriously unfaithful, a merciless companion to waking life. It is often inconvenient, constantly testing us: our willpower, our morals, our commitments. What we repress tends to metastasize. The unconscious builds elaborate escape fantasies that disrupt the even surface of daily life.

Desire can make escape feel like revelation, yet it rarely arrives with clarity as its companion. The pull of immediate desires can obscure deeper ones—the trouble lies in knowing whether our desires are born of avoidance or attraction. Are we moving toward something or merely running away?

In Leslie Jamison’s essay “Daydreamers in Broad Daylight: Ten Conversations” daydreams are framed as portals to desire. She turns to the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips:

“Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken,” Phillips writes. “We can’t imagine our lives without the unlived lives they contain.” But I don’t agree with Phillips when he says that “the right choice is the one that makes us lose interest in the alternatives,” and I suspect he doesn’t even agree fully with himself. It’s a delusion—a fantasy of certainty—to think there’s a path that could make anyone stop wondering about the other paths.

It is easy to pathologize this as chronic dissatisfaction, a state antithetical to happiness in which one is perennially disenchanted with reality and lured by escape. But it is also, paradoxically, a way of staying alive to oneself and the world: remaining open to possibility, contradiction, and transformation.

This curiosity—the desire to be consumed and alchemized by experience—has been an animating force of my life. It is not simply a longing to experience more, but an impulse to transcend my own limits: to cultivate experiences like collected stories, to narrativize, understand, and preserve them. It is a kind of pre-emptive nostalgia that compels me to mine life for meaning and beauty—an attempt to reckon with the fragility of time, to stay alive to the fact that every moment is fleeting, and therefore worthy of gratitude, attention, and surrender.

This is what continually draws me to fiction and also makes it impossible to walk past a buzzing pub on a Friday night without wanting to go inside: the warm light gleaming on the cobblestone, the smell of cigarette smoke, the clink of pints of Guinness. It always reminds me of the electric possibility we associate with youth—all the abstract and incarnate longing—for love, belonging, connection, a good time. There is something life-affirming about it. I see strangers overflowing onto the streets talking and laughing, full of unbridled desire, and think: I want to talk to every single one of them.

I wonder if I will ever outgrow this impulse, if it will lose its hold—how I never want to leave the party, but I don’t want to be the last one standing either. I think about how, after dinner at her flat one evening, S told me her theory that people fall into one of two categories: those who arrive at parties with a clear sense of when they will leave, and those who have a hard time knowing when to call it a night. Perhaps this is a kind of litmus test for your relationship to desire—how susceptible you are to its charms. I think part of the reason I love London so much is because people here love to linger. Then, I wonder if lingering is itself a form of presence or escape.

At a launch event for her second novel, I heard say that regret is the absence of experience, not the presence of unhappiness. I thought of my friends and me: thirty-somethings pursuing impractical passions while doing odd jobs or working freelance, moving through cities like New York and London. Cities where thirties are the new twenties, where the usual markers of adulthood, like settling down, getting married, or buying a home, are delayed or eschewed entirely, whether by choice or circumstance.

I consider whether our tendency to treat life as a series of experiments and experiences is a form of liberation from a prescriptive path—one that bestows insight and a fuller engagement with life. Perhaps there is a kind of humility in recognizing that the self is not something we fully possess or understand, but something we continually encounter and become. Or whether it is something closer to greed: a kind of falling through a trapdoor, overwhelmed by our own openness, seduced by a spectre of alternatives, unable to identify what we actually, truly desire, and choose it above all else. Perhaps this is, in its own way, a fear of commitment. Every choice is, after all, an abandonment of alternatives—a refusal of all the rest.

A line from the short story “Wants” by Grace Paley plays on my mind: “Now, it’s true, I’m short of requests and absolute requirements. But I do want something. I want, for instance, to be a different person.” I think about the impossibility of wanting so much—the blessing and curse of it.

It’s late, but I tug on L’s arm and gesture toward the pub. I think of how our only chance of escaping our own limits, of transcending the self, is in the pages of fiction, in music, in bars, in conversation.

People are clustered together on the curb, their faces luminous against the navy sky, talking and laughing and flirting. Cyclists swarm by. I still find the cacophony of accents in London irresistible. I look at the stylish, eclectically dressed young women: their Y2K Vinted finds, their hoop earrings and air-dried hair, and the men with rolled-up shirtsleeves and singular ear piercings. Each of them with their own stories and desires.

I tell her I want to be where the people are, that the night is still young, that we should go inside. She says she doesn’t know where I get all this energy. I think of another line from a short story, Marina Keegan’s “Cold Pastoral”: “I have this pathetic fantasy that I’d be more productive if I was less attractive,” and I think I have a similarly pathetic fantasy—that I’d be more productive if I were less attracted. Less enthralled by people and pubs and parties, less in pursuit of some elusive thrill. But then I privately counter: there would be no fun in that.

I think about the desire for escape, embodiment, totality. Overwhelming. Wonderful. They want it all—so do I.

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My weekend plans involve Saturday night dinner at Dara Klein’s gorgeous, neighbourhood Italian restaurant, Tiella (I went once after mentioned it in her Substack and have been dying to go back!), followed by watching the World Cup at a pub. While I am entirely ignorant when it comes to matters of sport, as you will have learned from the essay above, people, parties, and pubs are my weakness, so far be it from me to say no to an opportunity for camaraderie. On Sunday, my cousin and I are heading to Bath for a spa weekend escape of sorts—fittingly on theme.

I read a lot of essays this week that happened to be about drinking. My favourite was “Is This the End of Booze?” by Derek Thompson. I also liked “A Diehard Drinker Accidentally Quits” by Sarah Miller.

See you next Sunday for Desire: Part IV. You can find the full series here. Until next time, go linger at a pub.

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On a rainy Tuesday evening in February, I found myself talking about smoking. We were inside a pub that resembled a shabby living room, chatting with the easy intensity that comes after the first drink.

L and I reasoned that if you only indulged a cheeky cigarette occasionally (socially or on holiday somewhere) then you weren’t really a smoker, and were therefore justified in selecting no beside the cigarette icon on your Hinge profile. To declare yourself a smoker, then, seemed to imply a host of inaccurate connotations: a lack of self-control, a compulsive desire, rather than the reality—that you might buy a pack once or twice a year, perhaps on a patio, perhaps in Paris, perhaps on one of those endless, dreamy summer nights. Besides, cigarettes in Europe don’t count.

S found our take amusing but categorically wrong. Obviously, I understood the logic was flimsy, but it made sense. She explained that, for her, if a man had sometimes or yes on his dating profile, it would be an immediate dealbreaker; she hated smoking for precisely the same associations we had just articulated. Crucially, she also hated the smell. “Before M, though,” said S, clocking the irony, “I dated loads of guys who smoked.” She had been speaking theoretically but her dating history told a different story.

What we want in theory rarely holds in practice. My mother has always said my father wasn’t her type, and yet she married him. Then they divorced. I’m not sure what to make of this sequence of events—what truths, if any, it reveals about desire. Stop at the wedding and she didn’t know what she wanted. Stop at the divorce and perhaps this is a cautionary tale—proof that desire is a fragile directive. Stop at the time of this writing and a verdict still eludes me.

There are many things about my father that my mother finds aggravating—baffling, even: his fashion sense; his incessant snacking (the evidence of which is always scattered as crumbs on the floor); the way he reflexively reaches for his e-cigarette several times an hour and, when he misplaces it, looks briefly panicked, patting down every pocket like someone who’s lost their wallet (she’s not a smoker, though you could have guessed that); his life choices. Yet she also finds him endearing, even charming on occasion—not in spite of those qualities, but because of them, and how completely they challenge her way of seeing the world. And although there have been periods when their dynamic was especially fraught, it has settled into a strange, definitive, enduring kind of love.

But back to S: Did she like these men in spite of their smoking, or was it that, in smoking, they embodied impulses she felt well-advised to suppress and was therefore subconsciously drawn to? Are we privately drawn to the things we publicly resist? Are attraction and aversion two sides of the same coin? Maybe her exes’ disregard, their tendency to indulge—to choose life-maximizing pleasures at the expense of longevity—was, on some level, strangely seductive.

We are not nearly as consistent as we delude ourselves into thinking. In the months I’ve spent working on this series—the more I think about desire and its complications—the more I see proof of dissonance everywhere.

A friend of a friend told me she had always envisioned herself marrying rich but was in a relationship with a fisherman (maybe lobsters are lucrative?). I don’t eat meat, but I find the smell of leather delicious. After a string of partners publicly deemed creative, introspective, emotionally complex types, Taylor Swift just married Travis Kelce. For years, Gwyneth Paltrow, a poster woman of modern wellness, famously allowed herself one cigarette a week.

Desire lays bare our dissonances and delusions. Even the most self-possessed among us are not entirely immune. “Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn’t imagined we would ever go, or toward someone we never thought we would lust after or love,” says philosopher Amia Srinivasan. You can hate things about a man and still want him. I want so many things I am not supposed to want.

I told S and L about an essay on smoking I’d read and adored by John Phipps called “Quitting”:

“Schopenhauer says that money is prized above other goods because rather than satisfying a concrete need it represents in abstract the satisfaction of all human needs. Cigarettes were an almost inverse case, providing concrete satisfaction to an abstract need. They felt like they were satisfaction, satisfaction incarnate. . . I smoked because I thought it was cool, funny and doomed, and would therefore suit the cool funny doomed life I wanted.”

Romantic desire, then, is both money and cigarettes. Like money, it compresses abstract longings into a single object of attachment—the possibility of satisfying multiple desires for a life at once. But like cigarettes, it is also desire in its most incarnate form: emotional high, intensity, relief, thrill, distraction. Maybe the folks at Hinge should consider adding these as options under Dating Intentions.

A person can become a future, but more often they become a fix. Toxic substances, toxic relationships, nicotine, sex, love: desire is an intoxicating force—both physical and existential, essential to feeling alive. No wonder we are often powerless against it. No wonder it’s so hard to quit.

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Looking back at everything I did this past week, time feels stretched. I had my cousin’s graduation, a trip to the Algarve where I spent my birthday, and after flying back yesterday, a quick turnaround to Leif Vollebekk’s BBC Orchestra show at the Barbican. The weather everywhere was so perfect—warm and breezy with minimal humidity—that it almost felt artificial. I take it as reparations for last week’s heatwave.

An art-schooler myself, people-watching at a business school graduation was a fun anthropological opportunity. The reception was basically a garden party where we ate canapés in the sunshine. There was even a magician who went around blowing everyone’s minds.

The next day, we flew to the Algarve where we indulged in all the holiday pleasures: an extra glass of Vinho Verde, open-air dining, poolside french fries. I remain convinced that the first head-to-toe dip in the water is one of life’s most revitalizing pleasures. I can’t stop thinking about the beach and its perfect colour palette: immaculate blue water bordered by sandstone in shades of terracotta, which glowed in the light of the setting sun.

Per sacred holiday rituals, after our swim-and-sunbathing circuit, we’d shower and lounge around before getting ready for dinner. Each night ended with us chatting and giggling, oscillating between silly topics and deeper ones. Votives flickered around us, and a full moon hung luminous in the vast navy sky. My cousin recruited us all to make this lip dub, which was honestly really fun.

We were cutting it close on time after getting back from the airport but managed to make it to the concert just as “Rock and Roll” was starting, which felt like divine timing since it’s my favourite and a regular opener. The song always makes me feel life’s grandeur—aliveness, vastness, fragility, beauty, and the orchestra amplified that feeling. I’m used to seeing him in grittier rock-and-roll venues, so this felt uniquely spectacular. I saw him for the first time years ago in Toronto and earlier this year in Paris, and we happened to run into him and his band at a bar afterward both times (weirdly, David Suzuki was also at the Toronto bar), which was a pretty funny coincidence. Last night, there were several standing ovations. I could hear people behind me crying. It was really magnificent.

After the show, people milled around the Barbican grounds. My cousin had an early morning flight, but I convinced her to walk home and get a quick nightcap because it was such a gorgeous night. I write this now feeling full (and a little tired) and wildly grateful to have experienced so much of summer’s best this week and to have spent it with people I love. Wishing you a July filled with all the same!

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See you next Sunday for Desire: Part III.

I have imagined my life a hundred different ways, which is to say I am constantly traveling to alternative futures—alternative selves.

Dating is a form of armchair travel. All projection and possibility, until it isn’t. Relationships conjure realities; strangers conjure speculations. You get to imagine alternatives without fully committing to any of them. Who might you be with this person? What kind of life could you live and where?

I can trace this tendency back to high school, but it has persisted through college dormitories, house parties, as an adult over drinks on first, second, third, even thirtieth dates. I have dated across continents and cultures, but my imagination has taken me further still.

In one imagined life, we retire to an unassuming town in Spain, running a quaint little restaurant with eight or ten tables. He cooks; I chat with patrons (an indispensable part of the experience, trust me). In another, we live in a clapboard house on a vineyard surrounded by an expanse of lush, rolling land. A truck is parked out front. Grown children gather around a dinner table while a large dog with dense, matted fur sleeps at our feet. In yet another, we are childless academics summering in a remote town in Greece or Italy, sipping white wine while exchanging theories on the mysteries of modern love at a dinner party, like a scene from Before Midnight.

It does not take much to summon a fantasy, and not because I have a Pinterest board full of wedding dresses or tiered cakes (I don’t), or a secret, urgent longing for love (the longing is neither secret nor urgent).

You see, it is not really about the object of desire. Our ideas about partnership are inextricable from our ideas about the good life. They are containers of possibility, holding both the generosity and the impossibility of imagination.

A handsome stranger, and suddenly I’m reconsidering everything: my ambivalence about children (who am I, really, to think myself above this blueprint for fulfillment?), my commitment to bustling, cosmopolitan cities (never mind that urban-rural preferences had become shorthand for deeper incompatibilities in a previous relationship), my values (we evolve, don’t we?). I have entertained it all—open-mindedly, begrudgingly, embarrassingly, regrettably.

The problem is this: if desire is a negotiation between fantasy and reality, then getting what we want changes the terms of that negotiation. The very containers of possibility end up containing it in the end. You are no longer outside the building, peering through the windows of imagined lives, but inside one fishbowl—living its specific joys, quarrels, and compromises.

But in the beginning, we are free to imagine. How, then, can love possibly be as romantic as desire? How can it hold up against a world that once glimmered with boundless, unclaimed possibility, where a stolen glance at an attractive man on holiday could turn into a conversation that becomes a whole life? Sometimes I am not sure if falling in love estranges you from the world or makes you more alive to it.

After all, I am a lover of great fiction, and it is hard to resist that which offers all thrill and no consequence.

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The Existentialist is a newsletter about the pleasures, plights, and perplexities of modern life and culture. More here.

I write to you in the midst of the London heatwave. Earlier this week I saw a group of schoolgirls playing 007 (the hand game, you know the one!) on the Tube, which feels like proof that, no matter the season or decade, we’ll always have girlhood. <3

I had plans to go to Paris this weekend, but the trains were canceled due to “an exceptional spell of extreme heat.” There’s even an alcohol ban happening over there. As for London, I keep hearing people say temperatures this high are rare, but this is my fourth summer here in a row, and I beg to differ—it’s about time they got on board with central air con!

Last night, after wandering through a pleasingly air-conditioned but crowded Selfridges in search of a pair of shoes, I went for pizza with my family in Marylebone. By evening, the air had cooled, and the pubs were full of men in crisp linen shirts and women in white. Afterward, we went for ice cream and spotted a rainbow. By 10:30, I was back home with a box of leftover pizza (but no shoes).

A few recs from the week, still in the spirit of girlhood:

• In lieu of Paris, on Friday night I stayed in and watched Voicemails for Isabelle. I agree with the consensus—it hits like a good old-fashioned rom-com and, indeed, made me sob.

• I’m more than halfway through my friend Sophia Montrone’s debut novel, Nymph. A blurb on the back says it’s a mix of Call Me by Your Name and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, which I’d say is a pretty solid comp. If you’re craving a slow burn, full of gorgeous prose and longing, pick it up.

  

• One of my favourite short stories of all time is called “Guests” by Mary Terrier, about an eleven-year-old girl whose mother dies and the various women her father brings around afterward. I recently re-listened to Molly Ringwald read it on The Paris Review podcast and was throughly taken by it, even still. I loved it so much that when I first read it years ago, I reached out to Mary, and she was kind enough to talk to me about it. So many images and lines from the story still play on my mind. (You’ll never look at a discarded tampon the same way again, for one.)

See you next Sunday for Desire: Part II. Bop to my summer-coded, desire-inspired playlist while you wait.

Today is the first day of summer. It is a season of sun-stretched days and longing, alfresco dinners and going out for ice cream afterward, music festivals backdropped by a setting sun, where young women link arms in the way of girlhood, skipping and dancing in the grass while their male counterparts look on, amused. It is for eating stone fruits and strawberries and cubes of melon, for reading in the park, and later, in bed, lying outstretched on top of the sheets as fresh air drifts in through open windows. Summer evokes bare, salty skin and the smell of sunscreen, a crisp glass of Sauvignon Blanc, conversations with strangers, sunlight shimmering on the undulating surface of a swimming pool or body of water.

Looking back, so many of my most vivid encounters with desire seem to have unfolded in the summertime. I moved into my college dorm in the summer, as one does, and, since dorms are pressure cookers of desire, felt it so vividly in those early weeks: the excitement of budding crushes, newfound freedom, the strange electricity of college parties, and being suddenly surrounded by other bodies in close proximity. I fell in love for the first time in the summer. I moved to New York City, and years later to London, in the summer. The latter move kicked off my favourite summer yet, and I came around to the season in ways I hadn’t before. So much living, it seems to me, takes place in the summertime.

Summer is a time for giving in—fully and completely—to the thrill of experience: loosened inhibitions, togetherness, embodiment. If winter is a time for being with oneself (retreating, thinking), then summer demands the opposite: flirting with the world, living, desiring.

Desire is, of course, an expansive and endlessly fascinating subject—fertile ground for novels and films, songs and conversations, fantasies and regrets. As the psychoanalyst Stephen Grosz puts it, happiness is “the sweetness of desiring what you have, fully aware of its fragility, its brevity and its limits.” Desire, I have found, makes it easier to bear the passage of time itself.

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself thinking about desire constantly—its exquisite beauty and its complications—and drawing on my own experiences while looking to art, culture, and the people around me for clarity. This has resulted in an eight-part essay series that will arrive in your inbox every Sunday starting next week.

I hope you’ll read them amid your own summer escapades, that they lend richness to languid afternoons, and spark curiosity about your relationship to desire and all that it illuminates. That they prompt you to look more closely at your attractions—what pulls and moves you—to ask yourself what you really want and why, and to sit with the tensions that follow, or simply see something familiar anew.

Most of all, I hope they bring pleasure and insight, awaken memories of past desires and ignite present ones, and offer something like desire itself: the simple, precious gift of presence that makes this summer feel more alive.

Next up | Desire: Part I — Imagination

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My social life lately has mostly consisted of book events. Here’s the debrief:

• Last week, I attended a talk at the V&A for Jenny Walton’s new book Jenny Sais Quoi. I actually hadn’t heard of her before, but found her immensely likeable and charming. She spoke about navigating life in Milan as an American, breakups, serendipitous meet-cutes, the kooky characters in the world of vintage, and the life-changing magic of JW Anderson’s pigeon purse. (A lover of ridiculous handbags myself, I’m a firm believer that an element of intrigue in an outfit is the secret to bringing more whimsy—and more conversations with strangers—into your life.) If you fancy a listen, you can watch a recording here.

• I also attended an event at Liberty hosted by Phoebe Lovatt in partnership with Byredo on the subject of summer reading lists—a high-stakes category! It reminded me of the time I saw someone reading A Little Life on the beach, and it took everything in me to not go over and offer an unsolicited warning. Anyway, Phoebe was lovely (not to mention stunning!) in person. I recommend giving her podcast a listen.

• The last stop on my book bender was celebrating my friend Carlos Barragán’s debut, The Yahoo Boys, at Burley Fisher Books, which I’m looking forward to reading. The book follows Carlos’s journey to Nigeria in an attempt to find his mother’s romance scammer, but based on the conversation that evening, I suspect it’s also a book about empathy, loneliness, and desperation.

See you next Sunday for the first essay in my Desire Series. In the meantime, here’s some mood music to soundtrack your summering.

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For starters, I found the film wildly entertaining, and the fact that these questions kept bouncing around my brain made the experience even more dynamic. I was imagining how The Ethicist might reckon with the film’s moral dramas. What, I wondered, would my guy Kwame Anthony Appiah have to say about all this? (If you’re not familiar, the column gives ethical advice on real-life moral quandaries submitted by readers. Unsurprisingly, I find it thoroughly compelling.)

In a similar vein, I’ve always found art to be an invaluable springboard for interrogating ethical frameworks. Not because its role is to offer moral doctrine in any didactic sense, but because, through the complexity of well-drawn characters, we can examine desire and morality more honestly. I’ve long felt that critical inquiry is vital to moving beyond our own self-delusion and psychological bias, expanding our capacity for empathy and developing a more resilient ethical framework—one that can actually be applied to the nuances of real life, even if that leaves us in uncertainty rather than clinging to easily warped dogma. I suppose this is why I’ve always found religion wholly insufficient on matters of morality. The prophets were never multifaceted enough for me!

With that, here are some aspects of the film I found especially rich, the thought-chains they led me down, and some general takes and criticisms:

• It was funny! I loved the meet-cute at Tatte (a Boston café I was pleased I clocked). Everyone beside me at the cinema was laughing out loud at the awkwardness. I also thought the photographer scene was hilarious.

• How were Emma’s parents so oblivious? I gathered they were busy and not the most present when she was a child, but especially after she lost her hearing in one ear?! Come on.

• I found Emma’s use of the word “aesthetic” to describe getting caught up in planning a school shooting especially troubling. The flattening of something so horrifying into the language of trends and subcultures was chilling because it illuminates its initial pull—the way identity, belonging, and aesthetics can be seductive forces. To be clear, I don’t mean to collapse ordinary aesthetic identity formation into violent ideation, just that the initial mechanism of attraction is recognizable.

• The snapshot storytelling style was effective. The pacing was strong throughout. A lot of contemporary storytelling leans on needless provocation or big psychological twists that ultimately underdeliver, whereas this avoided cheap tricks.

• The wedding speech was a clever device to explore Charlie’s reckoning. It drops us into vignettes of their relationship in a compressed, efficient way, and when Charlie revisits it after new information comes to light, trying to rewrite it, it becomes even funnier. In a way, it reflects his drive toward integrity—his desire to say something that felt honest rather than rely on cliché, even if it leads him to erase everything. I read Charlie’s questioning as an attempt to make sense of what he’s learned. Maybe it veers into deluded intellectualization, but the way new information can retroactively reshape a shared history felt universal, like the recontextualizing of Emma’s anger when she’s nearly hit by a car crossing the street.

• I found Charlie sympathetic. I know a lot of people found him passive or frustrating, but I found Rachel much less likeable. Charlie is reckoning with something difficult, caught between love and a destabilized understanding of Emma. To me, his relentless desire to understand, even if he didn’t arrive at a verdict fast enough, felt like a kind of action. Then again, maybe he’s merely the most ethically preoccupied. And what good is awareness without action? Rachel, by contrast, comes off sanctimonious, and possibly also jealous. What’s at stake for Charlie is much larger than what’s at stake for Rachel. She also doesn’t fully acknowledge her own wrongdoing, and instead of simply declining the wedding, turns her speech into a passive-aggressive character assassination.

• The Freudian thread worked for me. The Misha storyline reads as Charlie’s internal split externalized. He feels disloyal to himself, unable to reconcile Emma’s past with the version of her he holds. Misha becomes a projection of that dissonance—an attempt to level the internal imbalance. By acting against his own self-concept, he mirrors the same moral rupture, making it psychologically easier to hold. Am I reading too deep into it? Possibly, yes. Did I warn you at the beginning? Also yes.

• Would we even have a movie if Charlie had been the one who planned a school shooting? I kept thinking of Margaret Atwood:

  Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.

  If the roles were reversed, there’d be far less ambiguity. You’d likely just hear, “girl, leave him,” and arguably, for good reason. Present-day Emma does not seem like the usual suspect; she does not read as a threat in the way we might expect. I’m not sure we would have read Charlie as forgivable in the inverse scenario.

So, to return to the animating questions: the film unsettles moral binaries by pressing on the unstable relationship between intention, action, and consequence. Are we judged by what we meant to do, what we did, or only by what resulted? And if fate interrupts a potential wrongdoing before it materializes, does that lessen culpability, or merely conceal it?

It also raises a deeper utilitarian question: what do we do with harmful intentions that never become harm? When, if ever, does thought itself become morally significant? Does past trauma make wrongdoing more intelligible, or risk making it more excusable? The film doesn’t resolve these tensions, which is precisely its strength.

I think often of an essay in The New Yorker by Joshua Rothman which asks: Are you the same person you were when you were a child?

If we could see our childish selves more clearly, we might have a better sense of the course and the character of our lives. Are we the same people at four that we will be at twenty-four, forty-four, or seventy-four? Or will we change substantially through time?. . . Try to remember life as you lived it years ago, on a typical day in the fall. Back then, you cared deeply about certain things (a girlfriend? Depeche Mode?) but were oblivious of others (your political commitments? your children?). Certain key events—college? war? marriage? Alcoholics Anonymous?—hadn’t yet occurred. Does the self you remember feel like you, or like a stranger? Do you seem to be remembering yesterday, or reading a novel about a fictional character? If you have the former feelings, you’re probably a continuer; if the latter, you’re probably a divider.

I suspect Zendaya’s character would see herself as a divider, while Charlie reads as a continuer—searching for narrative coherence across time. Are you a continuer or a divider? Let me know.

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Our moral frameworks are often formed in hypotheticals, not actuals, and reality has a way of testing them. A perfect example came up when I discussed the film with my cousin and uncle. When asked whether he could look past Emma’s confession if he were Charlie, my uncle said, “yes, people change.” But when asked whether he’d feel the same if I brought home a man who had planned a school shooting that never materialized, he paused and said, “that’s different…why do you guys have to go so deep into everything?” And then, he promptly scurried off.

I have spent the last few weeks in pursuit of settling in, which is to say, I moved! Most of my waking hours were consumed by episodes of manic cleaning, organizing, and general domestic recalibration. When my body gave up, I took to collapsing onto my bed and working through my ever-growing to-read pile of open tabs until my mind gave out too, and then, bedtime! I bring you a report on the most pleasurable reads.

• The most satisfying JFK Jr. lore: Last week, I wrote about the JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette obsession—and the allure of a life frozen in time. Since then, I read a gorgeous essay by Jeffrey Eugenides in The New Yorker. Eugenides went to Brown with JFK Jr. and knew him only peripherally, but not especially well. The curiosity and longing that come from proximity make the storytelling so compelling. It lands not because of any salacious revelation, but because we understand the fascination through Eugenides’ own attempt to reckon with it, and with his desire for validation by association. Years ago, I read Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot. If you didn’t know, rumour has it the Leonard character is based on David Foster Wallace, which makes me hope Eugenides will one day apply similar imaginative force to a fictional JFK Jr.–inspired figure. I’m a sucker for a campus novel. The people want more!

• On the surprising revelations of psychoanalysis: A delightful essay on an endlessly fascinating subject by my friend and author of Lonely Crowds, Stephanie Wambugu.

• The Harvard Crimson on Substack writing: “What does the popularity of Substack as a less established, institutional space for writing, even at so established an institution as Harvard, mean?” I’ve said before that so much of the disparagement of Substack writing claims to be about the writing itself, when it’s actually about resources, which feels like displaced elitism. Not everyone can work at a prestigious magazine or afford to hire an editor. Just because an idea or piece of writing doesn’t fit the form of a conventional publication doesn’t mean it should be discarded. There’s room for work that exists outside those constraints. Substack writers are notoriously held to a higher standard than creators on other platforms, which also makes me think of Eric Newcomer’s quote: “Love the principles of journalism but would rather be an influencer who exceeds expectations than a journalist held to an impossible standard.” It’s like hyper-policing vegans for any dietary missteps, as if the mere label invites disproportionate scrutiny, putting perfection before impact.

  Every space we create for writing necessarily involves compromises between accessibility, longevity, authenticity, excellence, and every other quality that reading and writing encompass. No space will be perfect, and each will have its flaws. Yet, as we continually strive toward better means of reading and writing, it is worth considering exactly what we are striving toward. We must be conscious of what we give up and why—the values we assign weight to, and those we take for granted.

• Patrick Radden Keefe on morally useful forms of ambition: I remember in grad school, PRK (an alumnus) came to give a talk. Afterwards, students milled around drinking wine and eating cubes of cheese on paper plates, marvelling at his celebrity. I have to say, I wasn’t especially familiar with him or his work at the time, so I didn’t quite get it. Since then, he’s made cameo television appearances as himself in Industry and starred in a J.Crew ad. I get it now.

  We started having a conversation that journalists have all the time, in these days of artificial intelligence and political turbulence and nonstop distraction: Does what we do matter? I said something self-deprecating. But then Keefe surprised me. He said something positive. . . “I don’t want to sound self-righteous at all,” he said. “But I feel like I’m living a righteous life.” He said that everywhere he looked, there were people, including a number of other Yale Law graduates, who were doing morally grotesque things. “Listen, I may not be part of the solution here in any fundamental way,” he said. “But I’m not part of the problem. And that’s something.”

• Relatedly, this piece on being a “high agency” person by Sophie Haigney: Being raised by immigrant parents and living in NYC and London has made me think a lot about how America celebrates ambition regardless of its aim, whereas the European mindset often feels less self-centric and more discerning. Individualised ambition isn’t inherently bad, but we should be more critical about the kinds we elevate as a culture. Agency, Haigney explains, is about action—but action toward what end? In service of what?

  You can just do things, sure, but what will you do? In the 21st century in America, we’ve collectively lost a sense of moral guidance and don’t even know exactly where to look for it. But it’s still worth looking. To valorize agency without also emphasizing its purpose allows us to ignore harder questions like: How do I live a good life? And what about the collective good? The smash-and-grab mentality elides these questions. Have we forgotten that life might be better lived in concert with others?

• On restaurant gap relationships: I know this might sound like a frivolous compatibility metric, but I believe the rituals of dinnertime should be taken seriously. Plus, I brought it up recently with some new people I met and I fear it may have surfaced underlying tensions. Forget asking about values on your next date; you’ll get a polished answer. Just watch them eat! You can learn a lot about someone’s relationship to desire and pleasure from how they approach a meal. Is it merely a matter of utility and macros? Are they standing at the kitchen counter, hurriedly shovelling spoonfuls down their gullet? Is cooking a sensual affair, complete with music and wine? Do they call themselves a foodie while chopping vegetables haphazardly improperly? (I said dice not mince!!!) Are dinner reservations an afterthought, or the fixed axis upon which the rest of the day orients? I, for one, love long, languorous restaurant meals accompanied by long, languorous conversation. Looking back on previous relationships, this litmus test holds. And to be clear, I will go on the record and say that eating meat is not a personality trait.

Speaking of hedonism, in case you missed the memo, The Existentialist is a newsletter about living fully, thinking critically, and the intersection between them. More here.

They were undeniably an aesthetically compelling pair. He was handsome in a classically masculine, all-American way: chest hair, lean and athletic—the kind of build that suggests casual football in the park rather than gym-sculpted. His style subverted his pedigree: slouchy clothes, quirky toques, backward baseball caps, and a habit of rollerblading or biking lent him the approachable air of a prep-schooler running late to class. He seemed affable and charismatic, like he moved through the world easily. In the interview clips I’ve seen, he answers questions with a mischievous half-smirk, as if holding back a private joke.

Carolyn embodied a perfect, complementary opposite: self-assured, deliberate, effortlessly elegant, enigmatic, charming in a subtle, magnetic way. Paparazzi photos captured her je ne sais quoi—hair coolly disheveled, mouth slightly agape, dressed with her signature minimalist restraint—walking, carrying bags, going about her daily business. The public interest in her is inevitably tied to her proximity to power. (It is worth considering how as a culture, we are often drawn to men who inhabit power and women who are chosen by it.) Still, together, they possess an enduring, ineffable allure—a springboard for unanswerable questions about love, fame, and grief.

Like everyone on the planet, I watched Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette. I confess that, despite all the ethical controversies surrounding Ryan Murphy’s adaptation and the show’s shortcomings, I was thoroughly entertained and deeply affected. Since the show is heavily fictionalized, I went down various internet rabbit holes trying to discern what was actually true. There is both very much and very little to find. The white space invites speculation, projection, and unverifiable accounts. Die young, in a largely analog era, and there’s a lot of it.

Some have joked that the show is a lifestyle ad for the 90s—a pre-wellness New York City: late nights out, being part of a scene, smoking indoors. A time when courtship demanded effort and intensity, explicit declarations of interest, and leaving voicemails. The appeal isn’t surprising. Everywhere you look, people are lamenting their screen time or the state of modern romance.

On the whole, I found both JFK Jr. (Paul Anthony Kelly) and Carolyn (Sarah Pidgeon) sympathetically portrayed, though as the series progressed I empathized more with him. (I really felt for Lauren in the end!) It made me think about the nature of compatibility and whether the very differences that drew them together also doomed them.

In the series, John seems to want a partner who would enthusiastically participate in his life, rather than reluctantly acquiesce to it but Carolyn is depicted as almost entirely uninterested in living a Kennedy life. I suspect the reality was more nuanced, and it would have been satisfying to see her wrestle with aspects of that life she found appealing amid its challenges. (From the few real-life clips of her speaking, she comes across as warmer and more ebullient than the show portrays.) The fight in the penultimate episode was gutting. Legacy loomed large: their respective familial histories, their mothers’ anticipated or explicit disapproval, the weight of expectations. The dialogue—especially in moments of conflict—felt both generously imagined and precise. My loyalties kept oscillating, which is always a good sign.

The series complicates the idea that wealth and fame are unequivocally life-expanding. Carolyn has a big life, but as she and John get serious, her world shrinks. Her life becomes shinier, yet she loses her anonymity and freedom. Equally, for John, his relationship with Carolyn makes him minimize his own life. Even before her struggles with mental health emerge, she craves a more insular existence, while John, born of and for the spotlight, thrives in it. I understood Carolyn’s claustrophobia whenever she was swarmed by paparazzi, especially during her argument with John in the loft when the buzzer sounds in the heat of their conflict, as if they cannot steal a moment away. Yet I also felt claustrophobic on his behalf, like when they lie in bed and she says she wants to stay in that moment forever—which while romantic felt almost like a foreshadowing—or when he suggests catching the end of a party and she insists she’s already wiped, even though it’s only 11 p.m.

I thought the decision to bookend the series was strong. It underscores John’s tragic flaw: an Icarusian quality that courts its own undoing. The scene itself is quietly horrifying. I’ve often wondered what those final moments before the plane crash were like, how long they were aware of the impending end. There were scenes where I chalked up his sunny disposition to good fortune, but more often it felt radical—a testament to his resilience in the face of so much personal tragedy. There is also the art-imitating-life quality. In the final episode, I thought of the recent, real-life death of Tatiana Schlossberg, which made the scene between Caroline Kennedy (Grace Gummer) and Ann Freeman (Constance Zimmer) even more devastating.

Such is the so-called Kennedy curse: alongside extraordinary wealth, power, and glamour comes unfathomable misfortune. It’s the stuff of movies and literature—a stylized, mythologized American Dream. Mark Fisher’s writing on hauntology comes to mind: JFK Jr. and Carolyn Bessette’s beautiful, ill-fated love story embodies our collective mourning not just for the past, but for the lost futures it contained. When they died, they were frozen in time, relegated to myth, all that potential and possibility suspended, leaving us perpetually wondering what might have become of them.

Although March has taken me from Dublin (because Normal People) to London (because I had to get my life in order before taking off again) to Houston (for the rodeo—who am I?!) to Toronto (to see family), it’s involved a slower pace of life than my usual. This has meant lots of home-cooked meals and content consumption (the good kind). I bring you the best of the latter.

• Strangers by Belle Burden: By now, you’ve probably read a lot of the discourse about this memoir. In short: a woman with a picture-perfect life finds out her husband is cheating on her. The next day, he leaves her and their family without explanation. It’s an incredibly propulsive memoir that explores an unnerving reality I often think and write about: that we can never really know another person. Rumour has it that Gwyneth Paltrow is playing Belle in the film adaptation. A phenomenal casting choice, if you ask me.

  

• Bonjour Tristesse: I finally watched Durga Chew-Bose’s directorial debut which I had been saving for far too long. I adored it and think it’s worth watching for the cinematography and soundtrack alone, or if you just want to sink into a summering in the French Riviera and smoking cigarettes kind of vibe.

Report back if you read or watch, or if you have any recommendations for me. If you are new around here, you can find more about me and this newsletter here.

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Flesh follows István, a self-conscious, monosyllabic fifteen-year-old living in an apartment complex in Hungary with his mother. There’s an ambient bleakness to his childhood, which crystallizes when he is groomed and sexually assaulted by his forty-two-year-old neighbour. This event is obviously formative, but as István is gradually carried upward into the world of London’s ultra-rich, its reverberations remain palpable without, mercifully, ever feeling reductionist. (BTW, no real plot spoilers beyond what’s on the book jacket, but if you’re particular about that sort of thing, best to come back another time.)

Each chapter leaps through time, beginning in medias res. The first few pages evoke a blissful disorientation, like a blurred camera lens slowly sharpening into focus, as you gradually grasp the setting, the passage of time, and the events that transpired between chapters. In the hands of a stylist as masterful as Szalay, this kind of imaginative exercise feels like play.

The book is a masterclass in pacing. Flesh is sweeping but not sprawling, propulsive and precise, spare and deeply affecting. Whether in the space of a sentence or a chapter, Szalay renders a kind of spaciousness that is nothing short of exhilarating.

Roddy Doyle, author and Chair of Booker Prizes judges put it well:

”I don’t think I’ve read a novel that uses the white space on the page so well. It’s as if the author, David Szalay, is inviting the reader to fill the space, to observe—almost to create—the character with him. The writing is spare and that is its great strength. Every word matters; the spaces between the words matter.”

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At its most fundamental, Flesh is about the pleasures and pursuits that make a life: sex, food, desire, status, power, love, and the strangeness of inhabiting a body that is never entirely knowable to the mind. This makes Szalay’s stylistic choices all the more fascinating, if only because one might assume that a book called Flesh would contain, well, more of it.

But there is no fat to cut. Every word feels essential. It is in what is left unsaid—whether by István or Szalay—that we can glean the vast expanse between the life of the mind and the life of the body, and the ways in which we remain unknowable to ourselves and to those around us.

There’s a scene where István has a disagreement with his partner, prompting a thought-chain in which he reflects on the shame and isolation of puberty, on pleasure, the impossibility of fully grasping experience, and the fact that the body is not a loyal servant to the mind.

”Perhaps it’s at that age, he thinks, that you first have the sense that you and your body are not entirely identical, that you occupy the same space without being quite the same thing…” (301)

Shortly thereafter, his partner asks him what he’s thinking about. He simply replies: “Nothing."

In truth, of course, he is thinking of everything. He is thinking of the various inarticulable truths that make up a life: that which can never be fully grasped by language. Still, I think it is vital that we try. In doing so, as Szalay has managed, we can eclipse, however briefly, our aloneness.

As much as these tensions are universal, the loneliness they engender is perhaps felt most acutely by men. Like much of Szalay’s oeuvre, the book is in part an exploration of masculinity. István’s laconic manner of speaking, for instance, struck me as distinctly male, almost laughably so. The choice is obviously intentional, but if you’ve ever tried to converse with an adolescent boy or endured the soul-crushing boredom of sitting opposite a man on a date where conversation feels like extracting blood from stone, you will probably feel viscerally annoyed.

István is often called passive, but Szalay disagrees. I think the label reflects a broader trope: women driving the narrative while men ride shotgun. It is true that István does carry a certain ambivalence in his relationships with women, shaped at least in part by the lasting impacts of his childhood. For him, women are the pursuers, the decision-makers, the hinges on which the foundation of his life rests. Yet to call him wholly passive is to misunderstand agency. Consider, for instance, that István does push his life forward—it’s just that many of the ways this happens (moving to London, for example) unfold off the page.

I think often of the ways people retrofit their lives with a sense of authorship, as if they were always pulling the strings when, in fact, they were just responding to the cards they were dealt at the time. The friend who could never do dating apps would survive; the tech founder who credits only their own genius is delusional twice over. Chance and fate shape the course of our lives far more than many of us admit.

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I heard Szalay reference Orson Wells’ idea that happy endings depend on where you stop the story. Life is, at once, brutal and beautiful. Play the tape all the way through and none of us emerge unscathed. István experiences unfathomable devastation even at the upper echelons of wealth and power. Live long enough, and life comes for us all. The magnitude of the human experience hardens us, only to soften us again.

And therein lies the power of this novel: its ability to depict the pleasures and the plights of life, the banal and the extraordinary. The aimlessness of adolescence. The smoke-veined white marble in a hotel bathroom. Reckless, unbridled desire. Falling rain in the headlights of a car. The flower of a chestnut tree. The green gardens of the English countryside. Sunbathing poolside at a vast estate. Tom Ford suits and Cartier perfume. The drag of a cigarette. A pour of whiskey. The shock of grief. The fragility of life and the force of it. And the will to survive, in spite of everything.

One might wonder whether István has changed or remained the same. I would wager it’s impossible to live a life and remain entirely unchanged by it. And therein lies the problem—the paradox of experience: wisdom arrives too late, if it arrives at all. In the end, István, it seems to me, is humbled by life and made more gracious because of it.

P.S. If you’ve read Flesh, I’d love to hear what you thought. There’s a lot I am keen to discuss but didn’t want to give away here. And if you’ve read any of the other Booker finalists, drop your recs.

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The trend typically begins with a time management contrast, sometimes juxtaposing the tardiness of a previous self with the punctuality of the current one. Then comes the drink order. In one video: “she ordered a black coffee and I ordered the iced vanilla latte I knew we both wanted” (@earthtoapryl). In another, “we both hate coffee, she got a Frappuccino, I got an iced matcha latte” (@ari.giselle333). These details tell a story while inviting speculation.

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From there, the videos flow into deeper territory—longings and anxieties held by a younger self, and the assurances provided by an older, wiser adult who knows how the story unfolds. On the whole, they are optimistic, but the ones I appreciated most felt realistic: balancing life’s victories with its inevitable tragedies, highlighting all the ways things change, and the ways they stay the same.

On the phone, my friend joked that her younger self would be half an hour late; her present self, only five. (If you’re reading this I’d put my money on both versions of you ordering a chocolate chip cookie.) We both laughed at the honesty inherent in her self-awareness. We confessed the videos had prompted us to remember our former selves with startling specificity, and that doing so made us tear up. It was painful to recall the people we once were: the insecurity, the sadness, the fear.

How easy it is to conjure a previous self, and yet how easily I have forgotten her. On the surface, she’d think me unrecognizable, but she remains embedded within my bones. What I mean is: the inner child lingers close beneath the surface like a shadow self, quick to rise with every trigger.

I’m reminded of a quote from Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion:

“It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be…”

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Specificity in a sea of generality

In graduate school, I took a class with Leslie Jamison, who urged us towards specificity in our writing. She said this creates emotional impact and paradoxically, it makes a story feel more universal. She also spoke often about the multiplicity and simultaneity of self which has helped me reframe internal contradictions as an indicator of my preference for disruptive truths over comfortable illusions of congruence. This brings me to Tavi Gevinson’s idea that contradiction is a form of alignment. Rather than rejecting or avoiding the parts of ourselves that evoke shame or fear, we ought to acknowledge and integrate them—there lies the path to real alignment and healing.

This, I think, captures the resonance of this trend. Whereas most TikTok trends thrive on generality—lip syncing, silly dances, shared cultural shorthand—this one is anchored in specificity. Of course, the degree of depth varies, but many of the attempts feel earnest enough to prompt reflection nonetheless.

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The wounded inner child

The emotional response to this TikTok trend can perhaps be attributed to its parallels wth inner child work—a therapeutic concept present in modalities like Internal Family Systems (IFS) and Gestalt therapy.

Popularized by John Bradshaw’s 1990 book Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, this framework suggests that acknowledging and nurturing our inner child allows us to process unresolved emotions and break unhealthy patterns—many of which manifest in relationships. To do this, therapists often use dialogue and visualization exercises to guide clients through “reparenting” offering their younger selves the reassurance, validation, or care they may not have received.

If your past self could see you now, what would they think? Would they recognize the same unrelenting desires or wonder how they’ve evolved? Would they be proud, relieved, disappointed? These questions are not trivial; they point to our desire for coherence across time and our need to draw meaning from the choices that brought us here.

Admittedly, I used to cringe at the idea of talking to my inner child, ever partial to a more analytical approach. But, if you’re ever angry at a loved one, try looking at a photo of them as a child—it’s disarming. The same applies to yourself. If you want to practice self-compassion, remember you’re speaking to your younger self, too. Honestly, I find this harder to apply when I am the subject—but maybe that’s the point. And perhaps that’s what this TikTok trend is unknowingly enacting: a bridging of past and present that captures the dissonance between who we were and who we have become, and the strange ongoing effort to make peace with both.

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For Valentine’s Day, I thought it’d be fun to share an excerpt from my officiant speech. Getting ordained was comically easy but writing a speech that felt specific and, ideally, moving was hard. There were plenty of tears—and some full-on sobs (you know who you are)—so I think it landed. Hopefully, these lessons on love resonate with you, too.

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If you’re curious, here’s a recap of the wedding in Vogue.

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Love is a hugely powerful and transformative force. It fills you with butterflies and makes the world seem like a bright, dazzling place. Colors appear more vibrant. Food and drink tastes more delicious. A mundane Tuesday evening home-cooked meal suddenly feels like the most spectacular thing in the world. Music takes on a sharper meaning—as though the lyrics articulate your deepest feelings. Love forces you to reconcile reason and emotion. It challenges your mind and moves your heart. It conjures a feeling of homesickness when you are apart from your beloved. On good days it feels as easy, natural, as unmistakable as a sunrise. On difficult ones, it can feel like being caught in the downpour of a rainstorm with no hope of brighter days. It demands a consistent act of will and a renewal of hope. Even so, I believe it is as essential as the air we breathe, otherwise we would not spend all of our time searching for it.   

To that end, relationships have always struck me as the singular most worthwhile pursuit, and the people here today are a testament to the abundance of loving relationships you both have. But today is, above all, about you formally declaring your love for one another—your commitment to nurture your relationship above all else—and this is an infinitely beautiful and profoundly difficult endeavour. So remember to never lose faith in the commitment you will make today. 

With that, I offer you three lessons on love I have gathered over the years that I hope you will carry with you as you embark on the next step in your journey of life together.

First, remember that you’re both absolutely nuts. Seriously, neither of you are sane, especially not when it comes to love. But that’s what romantic relationships do. They unveil our deepest vulnerabilities and offer us tremendous insight into our flaws—the parts of ourselves that bring up feelings of shame, that make us feel like we’re crazy. They give us the gift of self-knowledge laid bare before us. Don’t lose sight of the humility inherent in this awareness. Frame each other’s shortcomings generously. Trust that your partner is highly attuned to your every shift in mood, and remain attuned to theirs. Instead of being angry at the fully-formed adult standing before you in an argument, picture the fragile, wounded child in the old family photo album. Understand that your partner will project their formative experiences of love onto your marriage and it is your responsibility to meet them with patience and to help them heal. See the fear behind the sulk, the unmet need behind the criticism, the longing for connection in their incessant desire to talk after you’ve already had a long day. Offer empathy, patience, and kindness even when it feels impossible to do so. In choosing to marry today, you are choosing to spend your life getting to know the person standing in front of you, and allowing them to get to know you. You’re promising each other the greatest luxury of them all: time—time to commit to the greatest self-growth exercise you will ever face, together. Remember that love is a cycle of harmony, disharmony, and repair. And you’re choosing, most of all, to stay at the table with this absolutely bonkers human being so you can repair and heal and return to creating a synchronized harmony together. 

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Second, stay curious and communicate proactively, not reactively. It is easy to think that after years of knowing one another and living together, you know all there is to know about your partner. The fact is, you cannot and you never will, but try anyway. You will both become many different people over the course of your lives together and it is your responsibility to meet every iteration with curiosity and excitement. Don’t scrutinize, criticize, or be judgemental. Your partner cannot read your mind. Be clear and specific about your needs or rest assured they will surely go unmet. Recognize and actively rewrite inherited paradigms. Seek to understand each other more than you seek to defend yourself. Bring up the things that bother you freely and readily. Sweeping things under the rug is a fragile strategy that shatters under pressure. Instead, face conflict head on and with compassion. Incompatibilities will seem abundant if you search for them. Focus instead on the traits that make you feel as though you were carved from the same stone. Be honest with yourselves and each other. Lean into your feelings instead of spiralling into your own unfavourable narrative, then figure out a solution together. Never go to bed angry. Compliment one another and be specific about the things you notice and appreciate, for you are the witnesses to one another’s lives, and the only respite from loneliness is feeling seen. Look closely at your partner. Take note of the beauties of coexistence—the fact that interdependence fosters growth greater than that which you could pursue alone. Make sure you talk to each other, every side, every version, every day. 

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The third and final lesson is maintain a sense of play. Understand that the throes of passion will wax and wane. To sustain love requires a kind of will. Romanticize each other’s quirky behaviours and find them alluring still. See the charm in their peculiarities. Your fantasy of the other person and marriage will fade if you let it, but fight everyday to keep it alive. Life, too, will bring its own difficulties. There will be innocuous disagreements about how to properly rinse a plate before putting it in the dishwasher or what to watch on Netflix. But time will inevitably bring more burdensome challenges like pain and loss. With age, the taut, limber, hot bods you currently reside in will grow slack and plagued by ailments. Still, find reasons to laugh. Don’t take yourselves too seriously. Say I love you often. Flirt shamelessly, even in front of others. Be the kinds of parents that readily participate in public displays of affection sure to embarrass your kids. Take every opportunity to hug. Write love notes and hide them around the house. Kiss like teenagers, even when you’ve kissed thousands of times before. Go big on the little things. Find the novelty in each discovery. The beauty in the mundane. At its best, love should contain both security and adventure. Let your marriage be not the end of romance, but the beginning. 

So, remember you’re both crazy, stay curious and communicate proactively, and maintain a sense of play. I wish you both a wonderful life together full of love, health, happiness, fulfillment, prosperity, growth, and ever-evolving connection. 

Oh, and to everyone else, having heard me monologue about love, if you want to inquire about my rates for couple’s counselling, feel free to come find me at cocktail hour.

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“People are really interesting when they have well developed senses of interiority, and you get that developed by following your compulsions—specifically your creative compulsions.”

While winter has its downsides, (commuting in the snow, seasonal blues, the inability to go on long, aimless strolls without contracting frostbite, etc.) I love it. Whenever I mention this to someone older, I’m told I’ll hate it when I’m their age. While it’s possible that my affection for the winter will wane with the onset of arthritis, and though it’s true that my current circumstances allow me to curb many of the season’s inconveniences, I think winter (post-holidays, at least) gets a bad rep. I’m also happy to report that is a recent convert, so it’s a matter of time before the PR problem gets fixed.

My theory: people feel prohibited by the limitations of winter when they ought to lean into them. Summer is a time for being in the world; winter is a time for being with yourself.

This isn’t a case for avoiding people. I recently read Derek Thompson’s "The Anti-Social Century” in The Atlantic and share his concerns about the detriments of an increasingly atomized society. We are, of course, in desperate need for more third spaces, more opportunities to form meaningful relationships and to build community. Less time in front of a screen, more time in the world.

That said, there's a difference between aimlessly scrolling social media and following creative compulsions, even if they involve a screen. The former is a passive, mind-numbing surrender to an algorithm; the latter is a conscious cultivation of curiosity. One dulls the mind, the other sharpens it.

When you do emerge into the world, you'll forge more enriching connections, fueled by a trove of material and insight. I often think of Adam Mastroianni's idea that “good conversations have lots of doorknobs,” rejecting the giver-taker binary in favour of conversational affordances—things like digressions, confessions, or bold claims, that invite response. Cultivating a vibrant and dynamic interiority by following creative compulsions is the key to having the sorts of conversations that feel like a seamlessly improvised dance.

To return to the original point: interesting people have interests—and what better time to invest in them than against a backdrop of falling snow, nestled in crisp sheets, with a steaming cup of tea or, better yet, a Negroni by your side? (I'm all for combining hedonic pleasures with eudaemonic ones.)

Few things are more peaceful than embarking on a creative quest of your own choosing. It might sound pretentious, but I’d argue that following your creative compulsions is a sincere pursuit in a world where art and culture are often reduced to aesthetics or worse, class performance. There’s beauty in being taken by something, just for the sake of it.

Living in the digital age lets us indulge every whim, but this ease also flattens and fragments our relationship to what we consume, rather than fostering depth. Oddly, I’m reminded of the scene in And Just Like That, where Carrie and Big go through their alphabetized record collection to pick an album for the evening. There’s something charming and intentional about this ritual, like revisiting the archives of a collection, and by extension, a life (those who’ve seen the episode will catch the irony!).

So, maybe you’ve been wanting to dabble in French cinema: make the plan to start with Rohmer’s Tales of the Four Seasons. Curious about psychoanalysis? Create a reading list of your own design, shifting course as your interest evolves. Maybe you want to reread Sally Rooney’s oeuvre to see whether the present version of you relates to her books in new ways. It might reveal how you’ve changed or stayed the same. I’m reminded of “Becoming You” by Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker which categorizes people into “continuers” and “dividers” to answer the question: are you the same person you used to be?

Self-knowledge requires openness, but it’s not about endless permeability. Honing our creative compulsions and sense of self is as much about discernment as it is discovery. Take wine, for example. After years of choosing bottles based on labels (still fun, I admit), I’ve decided it’s worth refining my preferences. When it comes to red, I *think* I enjoy medium to full-bodied wines with smooth tannins and balanced acidity, but without heavy oak. If that sounds like you, give this one a try.

When it comes to personal style, being thoughtful and specific about your likes and dislikes is key to developing a refined sensibility. It ensures you circumvent the boundarylessness that leads to overconsumption and overwhelm. On that note, I’m obsessed with the closet cataloging app Indyx. It may require some upfront time investment (even as someone who is delighted by organization, it seemed like a lot at first) but trust me, it’s so worth it! I give the app credit for how good I’ve gotten at packing. Spend your next snowy Sunday setting it up, reap the benefits forever.

All of this is to say that in our precarious world, burrowing away into a quiet and focused place, into the practice of cultivating something, or simply into a good story, can be both grounding and utterly mind expanding. I truly believe it is one of life’s greatest pleasures to transcend yourself whether in relation, in conversation, or through art.

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Here are some things I’ve consumed this week that are fittingly on-brand:

“The Illusion of Him” by Lee Tilghman

Lee captures the anxiety of early dating so well: the longing, the projection, the unease that comes from budding connections. I needed to know what happened so badly that as soon as I hit the paywall I absolutely had to upgrade to a paid subscription. I devoured the entire piece in one sitting, before even making coffee—and that’s saying something! Lee articulates the frenzy of being consumed by a love interest with such precision. She’s very sensible, so she didn’t go nearly as far as the women in these books, but I was reminded nonetheless of Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux and Willful Disregard by Lena Andersson.

While I relate to the impulse to pathologize—be it limerence, overcorrection, or some other psychoanalytic concept—I wonder if, at times, for those of us with a reflexive and rigorous tendency toward self-analysis like Lee, there’s value in resisting?

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“Against Self-Actualization” by Adelle Waldman & The Metropolitan Review

I loved this meandering book review meets philosophical exploration. I’m fascinated by self-actualization as a concept, but simultaneously skeptical of schools of thought that overemphasize self-sufficiency. The idea of independence has always struck me as dubious, and I believe the greatest growth happens when we’re in relation to others.
These days, it feels like self-actualization is being commodified by every guru and celebrity but I like that this piece offers a simpler, less rarefied alternative: relational joy. Also, it made me want to read Susan Minot.

But learning to be more careful about not falling for jerks is not the same as learning—or trying to teach oneself—not to need anyone, not to need romantic love at all. And yet wide swaths of our culture have, it seems, embraced the idea that the desire for love and romance is something we should strive to overcome, or master, in the name of something like self-actualization. In fact—if we’re being real—we ought to acknowledge that self-actualization is a concept as little grounded in evidence as the belief in religious miracles, in that I’m pretty sure no one has ever witnessed self-actualization or knows what it looks like in practice. Rather, it always seems to be just around the corner, slightly out of reach, something this or that influencer or celebrity is about to attain now that he or she has finally realized this one new “truth” and has only to apply it, for all the pieces of their life to click into place. At least happiness in love—if rarer than we might like—is something we’ve all seen with our own eyes, if we haven't experienced it ourselves.

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”Tell Me Why It Hurts” by Danielle Carr

I’ve been curious about The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk for some time, so I read the text preview to see if I should add it to my list. The first few pages disturbed and intrigued me. To say the least, the statistics on abuse, assault, and violence are staggering. This led me to a profile, which was quite a trip. It made me think about how naming something can offer both liberation and damnation; does it provide a framework to make sense of your suffering, or doom you to be defined by your diagnosis? Of course, as always, it can do both.

What about when the term is as broad and amorphous as trauma? Does it provide a kind of relief for individuals who could not, in their conscious memory, ascertain the particulars of what happened to them, even if there was a subconscious, embodied knowing? Or, has this categorization been pushed beyond its intended purpose, a kind of catch-all explanation that, because of its pervasiveness, has come to say nothing at all? All of this made me think of empathy as a concept, and the question of whether understanding is a prerequisite for empathy. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I’d recommend Leslie Jamison’s essay collection The Empathy Exams.

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“Is This Worth a Second Chance?” from Where Should We Begin? with Esther Perel

This new episode was one of my favorites. I listened with my eyes closed right before falling asleep, and I was so taken by the intimacy, it felt like I was eavesdropping.

On the surface, the couple is exploring whether or not they should give their eight-year relationship a second chance, a year after it ended. But on a deeper level, they’re negotiating big, universal questions about love and connection. In my opinion, this is Esther at her best. She navigates their dynamic with particular deftness, knowing precisely which strings to pull, when to offer an insight, and when to sit back. There’s a moment when she asks him to respond in Dutch and have her translate it into English as a way of encouraging more active listening. I was struck by how she leveraged literal language to navigate the complex metaphorical language of connection. Though I couldn’t understand a word, I surprised myself by how tender I felt towards both of them in that moment.

Related to the idea of self-analysis, I also wondered about its limitations here. In facilitating greater self-awareness, would Esther actually catalyze a change in their dynamic? To what degree will they overcome entrenched childhood wounds? And if they do, will their desires actually shift as a result of that self-understanding, enabling greater harmony between them?

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An essay collaboration/conversation between David Roberts & Laura Kennedy

This was such a wonderful and necessary conversation (and not just because of Laura’s delightful accent and manner of speaking). So often, these discussions remain confined within silos of social and financial class, generations, cultures, etc., so their collaboration intrigued me. David was born into generational wealth, while Laura comes from a working-class background. They talk about how the legacies they each inherited produced distinct obligations and opportunities and how their notions of success and identity have shifted with age and experience. Despite their differences, they share a similar—perhaps universal—struggle: to self-actualize amidst the various systems and structures that have shaped them in the first place.

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For the record, I don’t think this is the kind of film that’s ruined by spoilers and I haven’t given away the ending here, but if you’re hard edged about that sort of thing, you might prefer to return once you’ve watched.

On the surface, Anatomy of a Fall is a legal drama about a couple Sandra (Sandra Hüller) and Samuel (Samuel Theis) who live with their eleven-year-old son Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) in an isolated mountain chalet near Grenoble. Picture impassioned monologues over cigarettes and wine. You know, the stuff of French cinema. It’s a slow burn, but totally immersive as it builds.

Shortly after the film begins, Samuel dies from an apparent fall which Sandra insists is accidental. Naturally, there’s an investigation—the titular anatomy of the fall—which yields conflicting accounts of what could have happened. In one of these accounts, Sandra is suspected of murdering Samuel, and so begins the trial. The rest of the film unfolds largely through flashbacks. This provides the scaffolding for yet another, even more compelling anatomy of a fall—the fall of their marriage.

So, while the question of whether or not Sandra killed her husband is certainly compelling (FWIW, I don’t think she did, but please comment your opinion), it’s the richly explored tensions at the heart of the film that I found most captivating. As the trial continues (especially when Daniel takes the stand), the tension between reality versus perception grows increasingly complicated. What better place to explore this dissonance than marriage: how do two people with different perceptions come to understand a shared reality? Or, does marriage make liars of us all?

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The film asks us to decide: Did Sandra really know her husband or is the portrait of the marriage that the prosecution compiled from audio clips (Samuel secretly recorded the couple’s arguments for his novel-in-progress) and Samuel’s psychiatrist’s testimony more whole or true than the side of Samuel that Sandra had access to? Does knowing someone intimately mean knowing them comprehensively or does it narrow the aperture and distort the lens, your understanding of them too steeped in your own narrative?

Since there isn’t sufficient evidence as to what exactly happened (whether Samuel jumped, slipped, or if he was pushed by Sandra), a known concrete reality becomes evasive, too. Just as we cannot objectively understand their marriage, we cannot know with certitude if Sandra is innocent or guilty. Watching this, you must choose what to believe about her (and by extension what to believe about Samuel), as her son ultimately does.

There’s a scene that illustrates this back and forth like a high-stakes tennis match: Sandra and Samuel’s heated kitchen argument. One minute, you’re understanding their marriage one way, only to find yourself confronted with a starkly different possibility the next. Children of divorce, you can probably relate, lol.

Samuel’s grievances certainly had some validity, though I’m unsure to what extent. It seemed to me that Samuel both wanted acknowledgement and appreciation for his sacrifices but was also trying to retrospectively understand his passivity as sacrifice. I wondered, too, how heteronormative conditioning impacted Samuel and Sandra’s respective expectations and disappointments for their marriage. If their roles were reversed and it had been Sandra in Samuel’s position (he was a less successful writer and Daniel’s primary carer), how might their marriage be different?

It is impossible to fully disentangle Samuel’s perception that his sacrifices surpassed Sandra’s from traditional gender roles that undergird the institution of marriage in the first place. Equally, it is impossible for him to disentangle his identity, his understanding of himself, from the forces under which he lives. More specifically, the societal presumption that the man must be the dominant partner in a relationship means that Samuel is not just haunted by the reality of his circumstances, he’s also haunted by the archetype of the dominant man which he does not embody. Equally, if Sandra feels contempt towards her husband, this is perhaps amplified by her own conditioned expectations as to what a man should be. Arguably it is also, in part, more simply, just a matter of personality differences; the course of their respective lives further cementing his belief that he is a victim and her belief that he will not take responsibility.

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I’m reminded of Joan Didion’s 1992 Vogue essay “Emotional Blackmail: An Affair of Every Heart” with particular regard to the kitchen argument:

“We can do the favors we do not care about doing until our every moment is made dull and aching with resentment we are afraid to admit; we can commit ourselves to interests which are not our own until we no longer remember, really, who or what we wanted to be. We can ignore our own needs in order to meet the needs of others, and then blackmail back with the knowledge that we have done exactly that; we can give over our lives to impossible people, live with alcoholism, chronic infidelity, emotional criminals of the most blatant variety—and in so doing we can gain the right, and rather inexpensively, to place the blame for our thinness, our pallor, our crippling shortcomings, upon those for whom we have given up so much. All the world need do is look at the record: are we not loving, are we not good.”

There can be an ease in relinquishing our choices to someone else so as to avoid taking responsibility for the course of our own lives and in doing so, telling ourselves that we are the more selfless partner. And yet, this will surely render us powerless and resentful. Still, sacrifice and compromise are indisputable tenets of every good marriage; criticism and resentment are well-known killers. But accepting a life is different than choosing one. If all partnerships require a constant negotiation of agency, can a few happy sacrifices in the beginning eventually build up to a life you are dissatisfied by and a self you no longer recognize? In the end, I’m left with a new question: how can we tell which compromises won’t compromise who we are at our core?

If you’ve seen the film, let made you spiral in an entirely different direction, and if not, you now have an activity for a rainy Sunday.

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A couple of weeks ago I attended an event at Southbank Centre in London for the launch of Sally Rooney’s fourth novel, Intermezzo. Before her conversation with literary critic Merve Emre, she delivered a statement condemning the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the deaths of civilians in Israel, in Lebanon, and in Palestine. As Emre notes in her preface of the transcript of their conversation in The Paris Review, Rooney’s words served as a reminder of the importance of not isolating discussions of the novel from broader contexts.

Over 900 people gathered for the event: a stylish and refreshingly effervescent sort, evidently not above material pleasures, unlike the literati I’d grown accustomed to on any given night in New York. There were bespectacled men carrying tote bags, women with Marianne-style bangs, and even a newborn, clearly destined for a future of very fine literary tastes. The event was so popular that there were streaming events for people who couldn’t snag a ticket where I pictured more of these stylish, literary types. There were also billboards (billboards!!!) for the novel and midnight release parties. It’s hard to make a tit for tat comparison to the release of Rooney’s last novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, since I was living in Toronto at the time, but London is historically a top tier literary city and closer to Castlebar, Ireland, where Rooney is from. Even so, the frenzy for Intermezzo felt unprecedented—for Rooney, and for literary fiction in general. 

All of this fandom produced its own lane of criticism. Many writers and critics have shared their derision surrounding the craze, specifically how advanced copies have become a sort of commodity meant to signify status, a coolness. Rooney herself has spoken about her discomfort with the fame her books have afforded her and even writes about the commodification of the contemporary novel in Normal People. When Connell attends a reading from a visiting writer at his university, “[h]e knows that a lot of the literary people in college see books primarily as a way of appearing cultured” and that the event “was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys. . .”

I understand this frustration. As someone with tremendous respect for Sally Rooney as a writer and for the novel as a form, someone who has made sacrifices to pursue art-making, the idea of Intermezzo as a contemporary status symbol à la The Row’s Margaux bag feels personally insulting. But then: doesn’t a person’s favorite book tell you more about them than their favorite handbag? A book can suggest a rich interior life, but attempting to externalize that interiority can feel performative and disingenuous. 

In her delightful essay “why everyone wants to be the internet’s librarian,” dubbed this phenomenon “aesthetic intellectualism.” She supposes that in a world where physical beauty has become much more attainable thanks to “looksmaxing,” society’s hottest new commodity is intellectualism. My cousin and I have a phrase we like to toss around *sarcastically* to determine if something difficult is worth doing: if it doesn’t make you hotter, don’t bother. Reading, it seems, has become the ultimate hot girl activity. 

Books, therefore, are being pulled into a superficial tradition of perception building. Of course, you can be hot and smart, so the idea that a public person known for their face or body can’t also be literary, is dubious, often sexist logic. 

Even still, the idea that books are used as props, in order to further the agendas of people who actually have no regard for them annoys me. Paparazzi photos of celebrities with niche, acclaimed paperbacks are everywhere, sometimes allegedly being selected by book stylists to shape their public image. It seems, too, that more and more celebrities and influencers are starting book clubs. Whether this love for literature is genuine or part of a publicity exercise is irrelevant if you focus on the outcomes: many authors have said this kind of press has had a life-changing impact on their previously precarious book sales. So, if the death of the author has turned into the rise of the celebrity or influencer, then in an industry as financially fragile as publishing, perhaps all press is good press.

Yet, unlike being hot or stylish, which has a clearer path to attainment, being intellectual is more amorphous, more elusive. And despite the relative affordability of books and the existence of libraries, there’s an elitism inherent in the book industry and in literary circles in general. Books are cheaper than Botox, but you can have all the money in the world, and you still can’t buy intellect. This exclusionary aspect of literature is what keeps it so mysterious and coveted. Of course, gatekeeping has its place: it upholds a kind of intellectual rigor, it shows us how time, effort, and dedication can beget insight, but in many ways, being intellectual (whatever that even means) is the most inaccessible cultural capital of them all. 

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Is it possible to democratize literature without commodifying it?

In an article on the art of decision-making for The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman argues that our life choices aren’t just about what you want to do; they’re about who you want to be. If celebrities are making reading seem glamorous, does it matter if it results in more readers? I’m disgusted by the idea that the novel is becoming a signifier of social class and simultaneously grateful that literary novels are gaining traction. Maybe you can come to reading for superficial reasons, but surely this can be a gateway drug to genuine enjoyment. 

Admittedly, I shamelessly love and take aestheticized shelfies, but this does not compromise my sincere love for books. Surely, these aspects of my personality can co-exist. You can have reverence for something whilst still using it to tell a story about yourself.

The life of an author is notoriously difficult and unsustainable, but perhaps the desire to push back on the commodification of books, to protect them rather than squeeze them for profit, is paradoxically contributing to the precarity of the industry rather than preserving the integrity of the novel. We don’t bat an eye when musicians drop merch and yet the Intermezzo tote bags and other palpable marketing efforts have been the subject of so much scrutiny. I wonder: why do we hold books to an impossible, puristic standard compared with say, music?

To engage with a novel already demands more: the burden is higher on the reader than the listener. Reading invariably requires more focus and sometimes pre-existing knowledge, too. If the barrier to entry is already higher, could there be a benefit to strategically lowering the bar?

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The duality of the Rooney-verse 

In a recent essay for Vulture, Andrea Long Chu writes that when critics say that Rooney merely writes romance novels, they are not just accusing Rooney of unseriousness; they are also accusing her books of being commodities. For Chu, “the novel form and the commodity form are dialectically entwined, to the point that a given novel’s literary qualities may be impossible to distinguish from its economic ones.”

Rooney herself speaks to the complications of this duality in a 2019 interview with Hazlitt. She says: “If the book is turning a profit for shareholders, then the book cannot meaningfully be critiquing the system by which that profit is turned.” Still, Rooney acknowledges that there’s the possibility that there’s something in the novel that, despite being steeped in a broader political system, “transcends the transaction of simply paying for a book and owning it as a commodity” and which can “bring us a joy or a pleasure that we can salvage.” I appreciate this hopefulness, this optimism which, in my view, permeates all of Rooney’s work. Besides, without radical changes to our current system in which everything is bought and sold for capital, how else are we to disseminate literature to the broader public and compensate writers for their work?

I agree with Chu and Rooney, but the criticisms calling Rooney’s work “unserious" as well as the collective interest in her personhood, is obviously augmented by the fact that her work is both critically and commercially successful. That is to say, her work is, on the whole, thought of as a meaningful dialectic whilst being a widespread bestseller—a rare feat for literary fiction. This is worth analyzing. Yet, many assertions that her novels are “unserious” or lacking in literary merit undoubtedly has to do with the fact that she is a young woman, and one whose primary subject is love. (I’d argue that when it comes down to it, this what everything is about.) 

Relatedly, a sizable portion of the disdain surrounding Rooney’s work has to do with the approachability and resonance of her prose. In this regard, the accessibility of her novels take something as insular and elitist as literature and magically, wondrously democratizes it. This is because Rooney’s novels offer so many openings, so many ways in, without compromising the intelligence and nuance of the ideas. In a 2017 conversation with Michael Nolan in Tangerine Magazine, she addresses the ways in which Conversations With Friends maintains its readability despite being about theory and politics, hypothesizing that the novel is in an “awkward position between being quite an accessible read, and also having a heritage of influence that’s not necessarily so accessible.”

Take, for instance, Beautiful World, Where Are You: you might relate to the spare depictions of technology or the ritualistic descriptions of modern courtship while feeling dizzied by the digressive, existential email exchanges between the two protagonists. Or, Conversations With Friends: come for the steamy affair, stay for the exploration of power dynamics and love in a time of capitalism. Or, with Normal People, you can be taken by the exploration of vulnerability and class and Paul Mescal in the TV adaption. It feels relevant to mention that I saw him in East London (he was running, in his short shorts, obviously) but that’s a story for another time.

Rooney’s work contains gorgeous descriptions of intimacy, capitalism, musing on the limitations of language, lavish holidays, Marxism, sex. To return to the music analogy: I think music is a superior medium because of its ability to transcend language and class—for its community-creating powers. Sure, you can revel in the poetic genius of a particular line, or you can disregard the lyrics entirely and still partake in the visceral, embodied experience of dancing with friends at a concert…or you can comb Taylor Swift’s discography for easter eggs about her romantic history.

Like music, Rooney’s work can be enjoyed in a multitude of ways by a multitude of people. Get swept up in the will they, won’t they? or savor the deft turns of phrase, the brilliance of her metaphors, the sharpness of her interpersonal observations. Better yet, do it all. 

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Books as portals for community 

At the beginning of the event in London, Rooney and Emre talked about the contemporary novel as extending beyond its emergence as a bourgeois form. Part of fostering this inclusivity, I think, has to do with changing the ways we talk about literary fiction rather than changing the content of the novels themselves, which rely on their specificity and depth of thought as a differentiator from other, more platitudinous forms. I believe much of why people don’t read has to do with a discovery and discussion problem. A vague endorsement from a celebrity can open up the gates and welcome newer, more populist readers. Equally, there are a plethora of BookTokers speaking about fiction in an array of registers, often in a way that feels more personalized than literary criticism. Unless you come from a kind of literary lineage like the aforementioned baby at the event, a lot of book talk can feel disorienting. For the rest of us: we have to learn to swim in shallower waters before we can dive into the deep. After all, sometimes you just want to know what’s the best tonic for heartbreak. Caring what critics have to say comes later. 

This is the sort of framework for positioning literature I endeavour to employ when I teach or recommend a novel—that is, contextualizing novels in broader discourse, offering up fiction as a way of helping you court your own relational anxieties, to confront your own psychology, and to grapple with the philosophical questions that keep you up at night. Not only does this make literature more accessible, it leverages its powers as a tool for connection and community, too. 

While I relish the solitary pleasures of reading, it was nice to see a book serving as a portal for community, not just among writers and people with graduate degrees in literature (guilty!) but for anyone who is simply taken by a good story. As much as conversations about craft fascinate me, there’s something scintillating about discussing the joys, insights, and comforts of literature with someone who shares your enthusiasm for the same book. BTW, this is actually something I hope to eventually create with The Existentialist, so if it sounds appealing to you, please let me know! You can learn more about me and this newsletter here.

P.S. In the name of “aesthetic intellectualism,” I’m curious, which cover did you prefer?

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