📖
I’d read “Wide Sargasso Sea” many years ago but I wasn’t familiar with Jean Rhys’s other novels until my friend Emily Gould urged me to read them, so I’m passing on this rec to you. “Good Morning, Midnight,” “After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie,” “Quartet,” and “Voyage in the Dark” were all written between the two world wars, and are all slim books about a Rhys-like protagonist: a woman alone who drinks too much and is always in verging-on-desperate straits, between Paris and London. Really amazing if depressing.
May 20, 2021
Related Recs
📚
This time last year I went through a huge “English woman looking back at her mid-20s ” memoir phase. I don’t know how I got there but it definitely helped sooth the soul.
Everything I Know About Love - Dolly Alderton
The Cost of Living - Deborah Levy
Arrangements in Blue - Amy Key
Turning - Jessica J. Lee
Jan 23, 2025
📚
Society’s punitive cruelties are meted out by women in Jacques Doucet gowns and condemnation is served over terrapin with a Roman Punch chaser, but don’t let Edith Wharton’s antique references distract from what is really being offered here: a soul-crushing buffet of confessional gossip more contemporary in texture than one might think. Masterpieces like The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth often get shunted over to the retirement village section of the bookstore (those shitty rotating racks of classics that are tucked discreetly in a corner so they don’t offend culture’s youthful sensibilities), but if you can’t find them there, don’t be afraid to march right up to the counter and ask in your loudest and most self-righteous voice what kind of establishment doesn’t carry Edith Wharton. Read The Custom of The Country for Edith’s eviscerating portrait of Gilded Age venality and follow it up with a couple of her ghost stories.
Feb 28, 2023
📔
Currently working my way through Emily Henry's bibliography and having a blast. If you wanna read sth slightly more highbrow then Id maybe suggest Normal People? Not necessarily a happy book but, to me, itfeels comforting. Also could definitely recommend children's books when you are looking for stories with happy endings
Sep 25, 2024
Top Recs from @naomi-fry
🍍
This is a very basic but very powerful idea that I stole from my husband’s brain. If you get a pineapple at the store and cut it into not-very-big chunks, and then you put them in a bowl covered in saran wrap in the fridge, every time you open the fridge to get something you can stick your fingers in there and grab a perfectly cold, delicious, and sweet chunk of pineapple to shove in your mouth. It’s very refreshing! And I imagine will seem even more so as spring ends and the heat of summer begins!
May 20, 2021
🍔
Hannah is a good friend of mine and also my colleague at the New Yorker: she writes the Tables for Two column in the magazine every week. She has such a knack for describing food that everything of hers that I read, I immediately want to start eating!!! Highly recommended.
May 20, 2021
🎶
Somehow still the best writing music when I’m on a deadline (which is almost constantly).
May 20, 2021