Hello out there,
October is upon us! So quickly! But I am feeling a surprisingly cool relief that Summer is well and truly OVER. Typically I experience a bit more gloomy dread with this change of season, but am pleased to discover that the chill on the air is energizing me. I am having homey larder-stocking impulses. I stir my pot of damson jam gleefully while Dani lights a fire. I place large meat orders and plan the kind of sausages I’m going to make (a plain and versatile garlic one with a kielbasa-esque base to be added to a variety of dishes). I dream of various dinner party menus featuring long slow-cooked joints of meat and many many bean dishes. Lemons preoccupy me. When will the truly good Sicilian ones arrive? I picture my beautiful guests lit by candle light spooning Sgroppino into their mouths from perfect little hand blown glass dishes.
As is typical of the move to Fall, I spent five days in bed towards the end of September. Like clockwork, the crush of Summer lifts and I get a fever. My body recognizing the change of pace and saying at last. This too, I think, has contributed to my enthusiasm. For every time I get over a bad illness I find myself overjoyed by the return of my health, bounding with the energy of all the ideas I’ve had ample time to contemplate in bed.
In other very exciting news for me! A very sweet reader of this newsletter pledged an annual contribution of $80. I didn’t know pledges were a thing but basically if you don’t have paid subscriptions turned on substack offers a feature where people can say they want to pay you for your work. Getting an email that literally said “so-and-so thinks your writing is worth paying for” was extremely exciting and affirming! As such I’ve decided to turn on paid subscriptions as an option, what this means is that I will continue to send out a free newsletter but if you feel compelled you can opt to pay a monthly or annual contribution (it can match or be less than the $80 a year). I think this option should show up in the newsletter? Otherwise if you click on the part that says you’re already a subscriber it should offer it.
Here’s the thing: I am very willing to admit that I am motivated by money and though I spend much of my life pouring energy into things that do not make me much or any money, I also cannot spend as much time as I would like on these interests because like most people I have to make a living. I am lucky that I enjoy cooking and learning about wine and have been able to transition that into a job (for a long time it was not and I produced at a financial loss). In fact, if you had talked to me when I was 20 I would have sworn off ever owning my own business and promised you I wanted nothing more than a sturdy office job that would ensure my financial security. Born to parents without any financial stability, and seemingly little understanding of how to achieve it, I was determined to do the opposite. I would, unlike them, become formally educated and enshrine myself in the serious white collar realms. I would take myself on yearly vacations around the world, live in a tidy apartment with lovely ceiling moldings in a major metropolitan city, and regularly buy myself J-crew cashmere sweaters without batting an eye. This was the plan!
While I consider myself extremely lucky in many many ways, and by no means truly suffered growing up (we never starved or didn’t have a place to sleep or new shoes for a new school year), we also did not have the buttery ease I aspired towards. My hippy-leaning parents did their best with the mental health impediments their own childhood experiences had lent them and what emerged was a loving but chaotic household prone to substance abuse and overdrawn account balances. I shared a bedroom with my little brother until I was 18 years old and moved away. There was nearly always a tension and stress about everyday spending. These things made me lust after money the way people who don’t understand money at all often do. It was (is) this shimmering mystery, making sense only in the most remedial way (addition/subtraction, hours worked/items bought). Sums which are only big enough to still physically imagine. I do not think this is uncommon.
Anyway, for a long time I refused to entertain my “hobbies” as viable career paths because I knew that generally speaking the things I like to do are not the big money makers in our current scape. I started working when I was 15 and worked a LOT, picking up side jobs in addition to my consistent barista jobs always. I like to spend money and I was very willing to work to be able to do that. In university I studied psychology, ended up doing an expedited masters and worked the whole time, not only as a barista and coffee shop manager but also as a baby sitter, nanny, marketing intern, life-coach-portfolio ghost writer, personal assistant, cleaner, cook, wine importer rep, wine shop clerk, pet-sitter, caterer, and eventually chef.
All this to say, I did eventually wind up doing something that emerged out of my hobbies. I got horribly burnt out, began to resent academia, and had a health scare which shocked me into reevaluating my work and life. Eventually I moved to Wales where Dani and I own a restaurant, and the reason we are able to do this is because Dani inherited some money from his grandfather and was able to buy a house outright. Furthermore, our friends who own the building the restaurant occupies, did the entire build out on their own dime in the hopes that some young people might want to take it over and make something that would contribute to the town and community. If not for both of these enormous gifts of circumstance, running a restaurant would be impossible for us. Especially in such a small town where seasonality affects business enormously, and foot traffic will never be as plentiful as it might be in a larger place. We are however, on the other hand, somewhat insulated from city impediments like soaring rent, over-saturation, and tides of trend that may lack a dedicated community.
I am telling you this because I think it is important to talk about money, and because so often when I was coming of age in New York and dreaming of owning my own restaurant, the invisible financial backing of so many cool places owned by young people baffled me. As did the people who pursued other creative interests without other jobs as their living.
I am not saying it is impossible. Through a conglomerate of hard work, crowd funding, windfalls, and backing I have seen people make unlikely dreams come true. However, as a person who, for a very long time, just couldn’t fathom taking that risk and was perpetually confused by all the secret money that surrounded me in the form of other people’s aspirational lives, I think it is important to talk about it.
Thus, though I love it and do it compulsively I have never pursued writing because it feels like a terrifying black hole. Not only self-indulgent (I don’t mind a little self-indulgence) but also not viable. Not leading remotely to the comfort and safety I so deeply want. I started this newsletter, nearly 3 years ago, as an exercise. As a way to get more comfortable producing and sharing, and as a way to force myself to do some writing in a slightly structured way. I always felt so weird imagining proposing that people pay for my thoughts and occasional recipes. Pay to hear me talk about Evelyn Waugh, and Gucci lipsticks, and chicken soup. Plus, like any skittish “creator” putting things into a transactional realm meant I would feel beholden to them, feel like I had to produce to a certain standard, with regularity and precision. Begin to dislike the thing I loved because it was required.
I hate being told what to do! If nobody pays me I don’t have to. What a deadly mindset. What a classic mistake of people who have never had money and thus do not understand money and thus create a lack of money by fearing and resenting it while also lusting after it. This sexy unavailable paramour just out of reach that plagues me! In Michelle Tea’s excellent memoir How to Grow Up she talks a lotttt about money, a lot about being a person who grew up without money.
She says: When a system is oppressing you it’s easy to take the most glaring physical representation of that system and demonize it. The system itself tends to be invisible, an infinite string of transactions and reactions stretching into antiquity. As a poor person sensitive to the stings of classism, I decided early on that I hated money. Money was evil; money was a problem.
She goes on to talk about how this mindset ultimately became a self-fulfilling prophesy for her. She was distant from money, did not understand it, did not know how to embrace or insist on it even when it was due.
She says: I wanted to have lived. To have taken chances. To not have settled for the poor person’s reduced version of life, shackled to a job, making ends meet, but to have lived as much like a rich person as I could, with their fuller experience of the world, with travel and art and proximity to things beautiful. I wanted to live like I wasn’t afraid, like life was there for my taking.
I first read this when I was 20 and this statement, along with the whole book really hit home for me.
To clarify, the “reduced version of life” is not being attributed as inherent to people with less money, it is instead being explained as what is expected of you when you are poor. To perform moral frugality and show that you are not spendthrift and full of delusions of grandiosity. This is undeniably written into our class system and I became aware of it from the get-go. To be poor and buy yourself something nice or aspire for something big or desire immersion and participation in art and beauty sometimes feels downright subversive. And not only that, but it is treated like an explanation for a poverty that is your fault. You are poor because you aren’t as responsible and practical as the rich people. You didn’t work as hard, aren’t as talented, didn’t play right, didn’t spend right.
What an utter load of horse shit. I knew this was all fucking ridiculous. So, I tried to live outside of these confines, to transcend the script of my existence (which, to be completely transparent was aided by other privileges I did have like whiteness, adherence to certain normative standards of gender and beauty, cultural capital/education, and a keen eye for tastes and customs that would help me to navigate classes above my own). And yet still, in the recesses of my brain, there is a formula that goes: Money = work that you don’t like. Money = losing joy in work you do like. Money = people controlling you. Money = systems of oppression. Money = Mastery. Money = Valid serious forms of labor which are not your own.
I have never known what to expect. It is a mystery. Financial compensation for my…what? I have spent the last five years just beginning to figure out what I should expect for running other people’s businesses, let alone my own (a task that throws everything out the window anyway). And for writing? Forget it. How could I possibly expect anything for that, let alone even begin to comprehend how to quantify an amount for the thoughts inside my head.
I am but a girl with a hobby. And that is a notion that is hard to transcend.
Plus, in lots of ways I am right. I believe deeply in producing art that is not for capital. In continually producing just because. In the clarity and delight that that brings.
But but but, I am also overjoyed when I get the email that someone wants to PAY ME for my writing. I am filled with new stamina and self belief. My ambition fires up, takes on a less abstract form, becomes stylish and distinct.
So, I am offering it as an option. The thought being, that if more people felt compelled to contribute financially I might begin creating more special content for paid subscribers. Speaking of content, because this was more of an update and rant, I intend to send out another more focused newsletter later in the month about a topic very close to my heart—The Dinner Party.
I shall tell you my kind of outline(s) for throwing one, which I think will be fun!
In any case, I hope you are all well and finding ways to actualize and access financial security via things you truly enjoy doing. What an enormous privilege and gift that would be!
Sending love xxx