Folding a fitted sheet with your hands in mittens

This week feels tough....

Trying to put into words what I’m thinking about this week is like trying to fold a fitted sheet in a small, dark cupboard with your hands in mittens.

Remember a while back when I promised to stop mentioning Trump? I think I managed not to write about him for a good few weeks, but I can’t stop thinking about him, especially now that he has planted himself so deeply into our lives. I know on a practical level he doesn’t affect me, I live a thousand miles away from America and I could almost lock myself in that cupboard with the folded fitted sheet and ignore him. But I’m not scared for me - I am scared for the world and that feels like a lot.

Add to that the attack on a child care centre just down the road from where I live, the images of the devastation in Gaza and Los Angeles (two very different places both looking like the day after the apocalypse), my 56-year old fear of the actual apocalypse, and the fact that I am moving home in two weeks and you will be happy that I’m keeping the thinking/feeling part of this newsletter short.

Just leaving this here because it kind of sums up the way I’m feeling

Delighted to have fiction to take me out of the real world….

Margo’s Got Money Troubles

I had heard about this book from so many sources I am not sure what took me so long to read it. Maybe I thought I was too old to be reading about a young woman who starts an OnlyFans account because she is in financial difficulty. I was wrong.

Margot is the daughter of an ex Hooters Waitress and an ex-pro wrestler. She is only 20, living with friends and going to uni when she has an affair with her English professor and falls pregnant. Alone with a small baby she turns to OnlyFans as a way to make money. But the book is about so much more than that.

It’s about a young woman finding her place in society, it’s about the way we control narrative and storytelling. It’s about family and motherhood and sex work and child care and it even draws a parallel between wrestling, writing and OnlyFans -it’s a stronger connection than you would have guessed..

But it’s not just the story or the messages that makes this book so brilliant, it’s author Rufi Thorpe’s ability to get you to constantly think about the character and point of view. It’s not done in an ‘up-yourself’ snobby literary way, she simply brings up writing techniques and the art of storytelling as part of the story, she occasionally breaks the 4^th wall and talks to the reader - but again, not in a ‘this is a lesson in language’ kind of way - just as way of touching base, of inviting you to think about what is real and what is imagined and who is controlling the narrative.

Margot is fierce and naive, she’s impossible not to like and it’s hard to read this book and not hear what she’s actually saying about motherhood, sex work, child care and a mother’s role in society. I loved her, I loved the way she loved her baby, I loved the way she made me think about OnlyFans.

Eating

I ate the most delicious eggplant parmigiana sandwich at Salumerie in Potts Point. If you want a huge, delicious sandwich I can highly recommend. I will admit to having to use about 8 serviettes.

I baked a cinnamon tea cake which was not only quick and easy to prepare but absolutely delicious to eat, also made this pasta with capsicum and goat’s cheese and ate large spoonfuls of Nutella out of the jar - it’s been that kind of week.

Thanks for reading to the end.

See you next week

Lana