Dear Noters,
August was supposed to be a cinematic montage of white wine and sunsets. Of pizzas on the beach, sand sifting through bare toes, the landscape melting like wet paint over a glittering sea. But it didn’t quite end up like that.
As with most things in life, this August contained multitudes. Listening to breaking news updates and reading first person pieces as my feeds were flooded with violence: racist rioting, fires on streets, terrorists infiltrating a security system designed to protect women.
And yet, only a few days later, I was standing amidst a crowd of girls and women, screaming ‘f*ck the patriarchy’ at the top of our lungs, adorned in glitter and beads, a kind of defiant fearlessness streaking our cheeks, leaving trails of confetti in our wake. These were the stand-out moments: the lows; the highs.
But the in-between? Ever-present clouds; lukewarm days. Getting up early to go to the gym before work. Watching Love Is Blind. Voice noting friends. Conversations about nail colours, and Molly-Mae, and orange wine. Another month spent finding the glimmer amidst the everyday, trying to find the montage in my reality. Lots of greyish days, splattered with specks of gold. Kind of like a painting, I like to think.
For the newcomers: welcome. This newsletter is intended to be read in a very specific way: with your Sunday morning coffee. It’s a snapshot from my Notes App (thoughts on pop culture and society and romanticising and everything in-between) structured in an anagram of ‘Notes’: N is for Noteworthy, O is for obsessing, T for texts, E for educated by and S for saved. I hope you love it.
Noteworthy
Sweeter Than Fiction: Why You Don’t Need To Break Up With Your Boyfriend!!!
In news that shocked the entire world and evaded no-one (except, perhaps, anyone who isn’t chronically online), Molly-Mae and Tommy of Love Island fame (aka The Kardashians of the UK) announced their break-up via Instagram, this month.
It’s been wildly speculated that Tommy Fury cheated on Molly-Mae, but I’m not here to talk about rumours. What I am here to talk about, though, is why everyone cares so much.
I guarantee you that you’ll have either been part of – or privy to – the following conversation, at some point in the last few years:
Friend 1: Omg, have you seen?
Friend 2: What?
Friend 1: [insert celebrity couple here] just broke up.
Friend 2: WHAT??? How do you know?
Friend 1: She just posted on ig.
Friend 2: [sends piece/shows the post]
Friend 1: Oh my god.
Friend 2: I know.
Friend 1: I didn’t think they’d ever break up?
Friend 2: I know, I literally can’t believe it.
And then, the sentence that reverberates in every single one of these conversations: I genuinely don’t think I’ll ever believe in love again??
A celebrity breakup unleashes a phenomenon I’m going to call: Parasocial Relationships On Crack. Why? Partly because it involves two people (double the parasocial); and partly because it’s about a relationship.
Max Balegde made a hilarious (and probably accurate) prediction after Molly-Mae and Tommy Fury announced their break-up: “I don’t think people understand the severity of how this is going to impact society. Think about it: Molly-Mae has created a generation of girlies who like a slicked-back bun, a fiat 500, they’ve got a nude lip on and the most Flawless fake-tan that you’ve ever seen in your life, and every single one of them right there is sitting there thinking: Molly and Tommy have broke up, maybe Tom, or Liam, who I’m with, right now, who works in recruitment, maybe there’s flaws in our relationship. If it could happen to them, it could happen to me! […] 90% of those are likely to break up over winter.”
He’s being funny; it’s not a serious video. And yet. He’s not wrong. This is what happens when celebrities break up: it sends the rest of us spiralling.
After JLo and Ben Affleck announced their divorce last week, a slew of tweets clogged our feeds about what this ultimately means about whether or not you should ‘get back together with an ex’:
We put so much belief in these relationships: it’s as though we store all our hopes, our dreams, in the arms of those we idolise, partly because we know that fairy tales aren’t real.
We no longer watch – or believe in – the rom-coms we grew up with. Edward Cullen was actually quite abusive; Blair and Chuck weren’t romantic, they were toxic, and don’t get me started on Romeo and Juliet (teenagers killing themselves over a fleeting crush? Come on!).
Even if you’re surrounded by the kind of romantic love that seems to have been ‘written by a woman’ (your sister and her husband; your parents, or grandparents, even your own relationship), you will also most-likely be privy to the realities of romantic love. Miscommunication. Boredom. The ‘seven-year itch.’ When romance slips from flitting butterflies to bickering over the ‘correct’ way to cut the butter.
For me – and for lots of people, I think – these things, the quotidian, are a part of the romance; they exemplify true comfort, which is synonymous with true love. They don’t dazzle on screens. They are not the stuff of (most) poetry. They’re for the muted emotions; the buttered-toast mornings.
But it’s easy to be dazzled by the dazzling; by A Listers performing love with red-carpet interactions. It’s so alluring partly because it leaves so much to the imagination: we are forced to fill in the gaps. It’s even better than fiction; a true-life fairy-tale love.
And there’s often an element of art wrapped in reality, too, which only deepens parasocial obsessions.
Taylor Swift wrote some of the most romantic lyrics of all time about her ex, Joe Alwyn: ‘you are the one I have been waiting for / king of my heart,’ and ‘I would give you my wild, give you a child’ and ‘all’s well that ends well to end up with you.’ Stormzy wrote of Maya: ‘My miracle / my happy place / my heart and soul / forever yours.’ JLo released a whole film about the depth – and truth – of her relationship with Ben Affleck (“actually, true love does exist, and some things are forever […] Don’t give up”).
When art is tied to (romanticised) reality, and that reality changes, the audience is left with shock, followed by that terrifying, unanswered question: Is love real?
But one thing we often forget about celebrity break-ups? There are more than two people in them.
Because there, too, is the public: the watchful eye, the third-wheel.
And that’s why – according to O’Callaghan, quoted in Cosmopolitan UK – celebrity relationships are statistically more likely to fail: “Hollywood stars have higher break-up and divorce rates than the rest of us because of the pressure of being in the public eye.”*
All of which to say: no, you don’t need to break up with your boyfriend because Molly-Mae did, or Jennifer Lopez did, or Maya Jama did. Love is still real. (I promise).
Everyone Just Needs To Leave Chappell Roan The f*ck Alone, Please
This month, Chappell Roan spoke directly to her camera – and her fans – in a plea for privacy.*
In the video, she said: “I don’t care that [stalking/harassment of celebrities] is normal … that doesn’t make it okay.”
She goes on: “It’s weird that you think you know a person just cause you see them online and you listen to the art they make. That’s f*cking weird.’
It’s such a refreshing phrase: that just because something’s ‘normal’ doesn’t mean it should be.
How is that we condone stalking/harassment as harmless ‘fan’ behaviour, when what it really is a gross invasion of privacy? The answer to this would require days of research and an in-depth understanding of how fan culture developed, in tandem with the paparazzi and the expansion of the internet over the past decade. But what I will say, is this: we are living in unprecedented times. Never before have celebrities been so easily contacted; never before have we expected so much of them.
They appear on our screens, in real-time: on glitchy live-streams or TikTok videos. They have never been closer. We can almost touch them. Almost.
If you’ve read any of my work, you probably know that I’m all for the pop-culture-political-crossover (because I think it’s generally a positive thing), but it’s also a clear exemplification of just how much we expect from our favourite celebrities: there is no domain in which they are not held to (incredibly high) standards.
They need to be online, all the time. They need to produce more work; they need to support the causes we support, and not the ones we don’t. We made you famous, we remind them, if they do something we don’t like. We pay your bills. You wouldn’t be anywhere if it weren’t for us.
Let us be very clear: we love you, until we hate you. And there’s a very, very thin line between the two.
In the latest episode of Everything is Content, Oenone, Ruchira, and Beth talk about this phenomenon: how celebrity culture oscillates, in 2024, between two extremes: we idolise and despise our celebrities, at the same time.
Of gossip columns, they make another excellent point: all those who criticise are so much more ‘clued up’ about what the influencer/celeb is doing than the average ‘fan’ is. They are fan-turned-hater.
Taylor Swift sings about this phenomenon in her song ‘But Daddy I Love Him’: speaking of her ‘fans’, she says “I just learned these people try and save you, cause they hate you.” The song is widely speculated to have been written about Taylor’s brief relationship with Matty Healy, when her so-called fans wrote an ‘open letter’* to the singer, demanding she stop dating him. They love her so much, it turns to a kind of overprotected, internalised hatred. She can only be theirs; and when she acts in a way that is obviously not condoned by them, they turn against her. It’s all so f*cking dystopian.
I’ve read some really incredible writing on this subject, from artists who have experienced their own moments of fame, and the descriptions are terrifying. I implore you to read them: Chappell Roan doesn’t owe you sh*t (by Lauren Hough), and The Eeriness of Fame by Eliza McLamb.
Lest us forget: Our favourite artists are individuals with beautiful, messy, complex lives. Yes, they may create brilliant art, but we are not entitled to a single scrap of their attention. And that is how it should be.
Share
‘Ugh, Everything Is The Same’: Okay, but is that a bad thing?
For The Guardian, Rebecca Nicholson wrote a piece titled: ‘The big idea: are we all beginning to have the same taste?’
Focussing on uniformity in the music industry, Nicholson writes about her experience of seeing The Sugababes and the history-making phenomenon of The Eras Tour. Let me add one more to her roster: Oasis. The band hadn’t announced its comeback when she wrote the piece, but this weekend it’s all anyone’s talking about.
She writes: “We’re seeing an increasingly samey musical landscape, in which taste has become trapped in a feedback loop of the algorithm’s making.”
Of writing on Substack, Emily Sundberg’s piece recently argued the same thing:
“I realized that if you blacked out the names of many of the writers I come across on Substack today, I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart […] Substack is making everyone into writers the same way Instagram made everyone into photographers.”
And you could say the same thing about fashion. An ongoing romanticisation of the 90s and 00s (baggy jeans, oversized sweatshirts, Rachel from Friends or Meg Ryan in Nora Ephron Films as style inspiration) leads to a flattening of sartorial expression: everyone looks the same.
In Dazed, Kleigh Balugo links the relative stasis of fashion over the past 20 years to that of culture, citing a viral TikTok video, which itself cites academics Mark Fisher and Marc Augé:
“Fashion and art haven’t changed in almost 30 years because since… the early 90s we’ve basically been trapped in the same exact neoliberal, late capitalist system the whole time […] The same financial institutions, studios, heads of fashion and even musicians have basically been popular and on top of the industries they’ve been in since the 90s.”
At the same time, we all want to escape. To get offline. To return to print magazines and flip phones: the golden era of – oh, right, yes, - the 90s or early 00s. When the internet was a way to explore the world as opposed to hide from it.
Earlier this week, The New Yorker published a piece about the ‘Global Oat Milk Elite’, in which they interview – and analyse – some of the most popular ‘alternative’ Instagram meme-accounts across the world.
It focusses on one of the curators – Jonas Kooyman – of havermelkelite (Dutch for ‘Oat Milk Elite’) who started the account after noticing a trend:
‘Within a couple of months, maybe seventy or eighty per cent of the people before me in line—they would start ordering oat milk instead of regular milk” – a way to “project a certain image to the outside world”—a conscientious consumerism and a cosmopolitan good taste.’
So: everyone is the same. Everyone listens to the same music (Taylor Swift, Chappell Roan, Oasis), everyone wears the same clothes (white blouses with bows on them, Adidas Sambas, huge scrunchies, bright red accessories, oversized jumpers with bold lettering), everyone watches the same TikTok videos and complains about not being able to kick their TikTok addiction. Everyone watches Baby Reindeer – and then the Piers Morgan interview about Baby Reindeer – and comes to the same conclusion (it was unethical; it was good TV). Everyone watches The Olympics whilst eating crisps on their sofa. Even the counterculture is hom*ogenous: oat milk lattes, micro fringes, vintage shops, thrifted mirrors with gilt frames, Birkenstock clogs, reading Joan Didion with old-school-wired-headphones on public transport.
Last week, I wrote a piece about how it feels to squash oneself, as a writer, into an algorithmic ‘niche’ in order to find an audience in 2024. Because everything’s the same, right?
Who is the real villain here? Oh, I know! – social media. It’s always social media, isn’t it? That flattening, hungry thing that envelops you and spits you out feeling terrible about yourself.
Or could that be too simplistic?
Is it that we all love the same things because those things are… well, really good? Is it that there have always been super-hyper popular things, at every point in history, and we’re just feeling it particularly keenly right now, post-pandemic, when everyone is trying to grab onto life and squeeze it with all their might?
Maybe. It’s hard to tell.
But what I will say, is this. Firstly: I love how much people love the same things. It adds a layer of excitement, of easy conversation, dropping ‘very demure, very mindful’ into a conversation and watching eyes light up. Secondly: I actually don’t think everything’s the same. Each year, I find new music that sounds totally different (to me, anyway). Each year, I find new ways to express myself through fashion; and see people online, and in real life, expressing their individuality in completely different ways. Each week, I have conversations with people I love – and people I barely know – that make me see the world in a different way. Each day, I read something new: a piece online, or in print, or a book, that makes me think: no, things aren’t hom*ogenous. Yes, there are trends, but there’s so much variability within those trends. So much creativity, so much originality.
Okay, so we’re going through a phase of ‘female protagonists can be angry too’, right now, but does that explain – or predict – the ferocity of Eliza Clark’s writing in Boy Parts? The implicit anger of it, the rage that claws at the page? No. It is unique; wondrously so. It is refreshing. And it is a demonstration of a culture that is seeking new voices; those that aren’t always easy to listen to.
Is there really an argument that Charli XCX’s ‘brat’ is hom*ogenous? Only in that it has dominated cultural (and sort of political) discourse recently. It exists within a tradition, yes, but does it sound the same? No, it doesn’t. It reverberates with its own quality; self-loathing, self-love, the urge to party and pass out and do it all over again. The urge to build a beautiful life. The urge to self-destruct. Billie Eilish’s sexy monotone, talking of Charli’s underwear: pull it to the side and get all up in it. The complex ‘working out’ of a female friendship on ‘Girl, So Confusing.’
Which is all to say: perhaps we do have the same taste. But that taste is really quite good. Or, in the words of Charli:
Uhhh, the response to the demure trend isn’t very demure…
It’s meant to be a joke. If I see one more piece from about how to ‘channel demure’ (be earnest, quiet, shy, mindful as a way to embrace your femininity) – I will SCREAM.
Obsessing
Chrome nails (especially with a pink-green tint).
The album ‘Short n’ Sweet’ by Sabrina Carpenter.
(Especially how she makes the whole thing about a situationship, just like Taylor Swift did with making TTPD all about a brief relationship break-up as opposed to her break-up of 6 years. Like mother like daughter, eh?).
Toast. Every once in a while, I rediscover toast. Today is one of those days; I will be having it with all of my meals, thank you very much.
Broadchurch. I know, late to the party; again. But still. Olivia Coleman, you are breathtaking.
Love Is Blind. (So many thoughts; let me know if you want to hear them).
Eliza Clark (I devoured both of her books, over the past week. I know I’m late to the party, but I’m never going to leave it now).
Finding artists on Instagram. It’s my new favourite thing. My feed is like a gallery, curated just for me. It’s wonderful.
Actually using the body wash I save, because life is too short to save it.
Aperol Spritzes (because summer is almost over).
Pesto and cheese sandwiches (if you know, you know).
Green tea.
TEXTS
As ever, I’ll only recommend pieces/books I really love – not just everything I’ve read. Here goes.
Penance by Eliza Clark is a masterpiece, and I don’t say that lightly. It’s for anyone who loves true crime, gritty gen-z voices and/or Atonement by Ian McEwan (I love all three).
The Guest by Emma Cline is slow-paced and magical. Her writing is so evocative, so surprising, so entrancing. I devoured it.
This piece in The New Yorker about friendships will make you feel held, and seen, and normal (in the best way).
Anne Enright: I love you. Here’s a piece I adore, about her experience being on tour as a writer.
And this short story will draw you in and pull you out, tide-like. It’ll make you wish it were longer.
This poem, Dear Reader, by Kim Addonizio is everything I wish I could write.
On writing and reading: this piece on Literary Fiction and Plot by Heather Parry is wonderful, as is this piece by Elif Batuman, in which one of my favourite writers in the WORLD writes about Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney, after listening to it (yes, listening!) for the first time. It’s meta, it’s sharp, it’s brilliant.
Educated By
This piece about Swifties for Kamala shows the power of pop-cultural-political-crossover (inspiring, tbh).
If you’re not sure what’s going on with Blake Lively and It Ends With Us, right now (you’re not the only one), this podcast episode is a great explainer.
This marriage therapist talks about the most frequent conflicts in a relationship – and how to cope with them.
And, finally, this piece about Why AI Isn’t Going To Make Art. Thank goodness.
Saved:
And so August slips away like a bottle of wine as the world slowly tips us into autumn. There’s something so fresh about September: it feels more like the new year than the new year does. An opportunity to re-invent. To line fresh notebooks with fresh ideas. To reclaim this year, that might feel as though it’s been running from you. To remind yourself that this is your life; that you can do whatever you want with it. (Yes: you).
And because of all these things (and also because it’s fun), I’m re-naming the season. Welcome to Lit Girl Fall.*
Lit girl fall is for those who find great joy in simple things (cinnamon-spiced lattes, finding an antique copy of your favourite novel); for the grown-up Tumblr ‘thought daughters’ who read The Bell Jar once and never looked back, because it made them feel seen, and inspired, and also slightly self-indulgent. It’s for those for whom the album ‘RED’ is almost a religion (it is – quite literally – holy ground). It’s for reading bell hooks as the rain patters and the candles flicker and articulating the thought – even if it’s just in your own notes app – that you are the adult your teenage self aspired to be. Here’s a playlist just for you, a Pinterest Board to feed your inspiration, and a complete ‘How to Romanticise September’ guide.
I hope, this month, you read a really good book and make yourself a really great coffee and sit with your bent feet under you, watching the rain outside your window. I hope you treat yourself with kindness, with compassion, and with the strength to hold fast to your dreams.
Paid subs – I’ll see you next week (and let me know what you’d like me to write about in the chat!). Also, I’m gifting a few paid subs this month, to say thank you to this gorgeous community. If you - or someone you know - would love a subscription but isn’t in the right financial position right now, message me and I’ll gift you one.
Until next month,
Hannah xxx
*Footnote 1: From Cosmopolitan UK: “A study by the Marriage Foundation found that 40% of celebrities divorced within a 10-year period, yet the UK national average for divorce in the first decade is 20%.Throw in long-distance travel, conflicting schedules, and differing career priorities, and it’s far from a fairy tale.”
*Footnote 2: I’m sure you probably already know who she is, but for those of you who haven’t heard of her, she’s a singer-songwriter who has shot to meteoric fame in the past six months or so.
*Footnote 3: They wrote: “your voice holds tremendous power and right now your silence is palpable,” adding, “we urge you to reflect on the impact of your own and your associates’ behaviour.”
*Footnote 4: I just wrote an entire essay about how these aesthetics aren’t real; they’re curated, two-dimensional, and unrealistic. But they’re also beautiful, and they’re kind of crucial when it comes to romanticising the mundane. So take Lit Girl Fall with a pinch of salt. Right now, I’m writing this on my sofa, hair scraped back in a greasy bun, second coffee perched beside me because I’m on a deadline, and also at the tale-end of a migraine, so writing looks less like Carrie Bradshaw, today, and more like rat-girl-frenzied-writing-fuelled-by-toast-and-coffee. Such is life.
