Coming on fifty, I still feel very grateful to have been reared by Madonna, because she taught me, at eight, nine, ten, that a woman could do whatever they wanted with whomever they wished. As Ariel Levy pointed out in her seminal book ‘Female Chauvinist Pigs’, in the 2000s era of Girls Gone Wild, young women came to believe they had a duty to appear sexually available at all times to everybody. That led to, amongst other things, having no inkling of what actually turned them on. Being able to fine tune my own radio dial, so I can pick up exactly the right pirate station deep in my soul is the biggest gift for a writer or any artist, and I do partly credit Madonna for this.

By my teens I had an understanding that Madonna was not necessarily pledging to take her female fans with her on her upward trajectory - which was fine, because I’d by then switched my allegiance to Neneh Cherry and Lady Miss Kier of Deee-Lite, who in the most deep 90’s moment possible, signed an autograph for teen me in The Body Shop, proclaiming ‘EMMA! You are deee-groovy!’ Her proclamation remains my palate cleanser any time I come across a two star amazon review of one of my books.

A fundamental flaw in our humanity is that none of us understand what our best qualities are - it’s like how you can’t smell your own smell or hear your own accent. So Madonna, who has just released yet another hi-NRG dance track, may not know that it is her whole parallel path in vulnerable ballads that she might be best celebrated for, fifty years from now. For every ‘Erotica’ there was always a ‘Live To Tell’, songs for a housewife trapped in the wrong life to dream into on their way through a soul numbing errand.

Her undisputed masterpiece remains the ‘Like A Prayer’ album. It was the record made in the wake of her divorce from Sean Penn, the love of her life and - given that she still defends him despite the devastating 1988 domestic violence police report she filed at the Malibu Sherriff’s office available to anyone with internet - the scratch in her vinyl. Her personal collapse existed inside the sense of societal apocalypse, as the vinyl (scented with frankincense to invoke the church) came with an insert pamphlet about the AIDS crisis.

Of course I remember the dance routines I made to ‘Express Yourself’, and how the video is arguably one of David Fincher’s masterpieces alongside ‘Zodiac’ and ‘The Social Network’. But it’s only in middle age that I see this was perhaps the one time she could explore with clear eyes what her marriage had been and how it had happened to her. The death of her mother when Madonna was only six, how her father detached from her emotionally, remarried a woman who was violent, the total annihilation of any childhood comfort. The way Catholicism as practiced was wielded against her, as it was against Sinead O’Connor. Recreating all this violence with her marriage (what psychiatrists call ‘Pattern Repetition’, this idea that even if it’s awful, we gravitate towards what we recognise).

I could definitely live without ‘Dear Jessie’, a song so twee I’ve always dreamed of a “director’s cut” version of this album that doesn’t include it. It feels like a failure of nerve on an album that is musically and emotionally courageous. There are days I listen to ‘Til Death Do Us Part’ on repeat, and others when the lyrics are just too much to take:

“You hit so hard with the things you say
I will not stay to watch your hate as it grows
You're not in love with someone else
You don't even love yourself
Still I wish you'd ask me not to go”

When I re-watched the (again, David Fincher directed) video for ‘Oh Father’ I had the same convulsive reaction as when you think E.T has died in the river. She documents the pain he caused. And she comes to understand what was done to him. And she is able to love him whilst still walking away. Detach with Love, they say in 12 Step.

This is followed by ‘Spanish Eyes’, which has become the paean to all the young men Madonna knew who were lost to AIDS. This song still blows my mind because Madonna, whose cellular make-up is built from Catholicism, doubts the existence of G-d:

“And if there is a Christ/he’ll come tonight/and pray for Spanish eyes”

“What kind of life is this? If God exists…”

Living through domestic abuse will take you there. Madonna may not be able to see this herself because, as I say with great empathy, there is a scratch in her vinyl, but…

I occasionally wake up in the morning with this thought: Sean Penn may have three Oscars and be held in such high esteem by the Academy that he doesn’t even have to show up to collect them, but he has never made anything as beautiful and self-aware as ‘Like A Prayer’.

I really wanted the teenage girl on the cover of my coming of age novel to look like she had the power to block out the sun. Especially now it’s going into paperback July 3rd. I wanted that feeling that you’re laying on your back in the grass, hoping they’ll bend down and kiss you like they used to, but in the end they just stand there, stealing your sunshine. And what are you going to do about that? What are you going to do to get your power back when you don’t even have your own credit card? That’s how I felt about best friends at that age, and older male crushes, and the way they crossed over in my mind. I wanted everything they could possibly give me and also to completely destroy them.

You should pre-order it now, if you care about me, even if “caring” means you wake up in the dead of night on holiday with the terrible sensation that you left the oven on until, blinking in the dark, you realise you’ve actually jolted awake because you hate my writing so much. If that’s you, pre-order it and slap yourself in the face with it with one hand whilst pleasuring yourself with the other. Make it a proper a Hate-Read.

Except, if you have taste, like Jonathan Coe and Nussaibah Younis, Lucy Foley, Sara Pascoe and Natalie Portman’s Book Club which picked it as their November choice…you’re going to love it. The best reviewed book of my career has now transitioned, transfigured and maybe even transgressed its way into paperback. With the weight of the hardback off you, you can carry Father Figure in your bag as you gallivant around town, use it as the most elegant lipstick blotter, wield it to kill a wasp. Or use it as they do delicate wood blocks in Korean spas - as a pillow to rest your head on, maybe in grass. Look up from it at the sun, until someone you long for blocks it out and you have to figure out what’s to become of them. And of you.

It was weird then and it’s weird now: the 1990’s film career of the great Janeane Garofalo was predicated on her representing the “unattractive” friend. In ‘Reality Bites’, ‘Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion’ and most egregiously of all, the Cyrano reworking ‘The Truth About Cats And Dogs’, the comedienne would be over looked and rejected by men whilst watching a more “beautiful” friend wallow in the male gaze. And in every one of these films, Janeane was looking, for all the world, like the reincarnation of Natalie Wood. I tried so long to make sense of what was going on in the minds (and eyes?) of those who cast her.

Was it that she was short? (She is, as am I).

Was it because she was ethnic (She is, as am I).

Was it because she was funny (You see where I’m going with this and why her rejection as attractive by those with power became a youthful fixation for me)?

There was such intense cognitive dissonance between what our eyes could see and what we were being told we were looking at. The other criminal offender of this era came just a few years later, when the “classic” ‘Love Actually’ saw Richard Curtis cast Martine McCutcheon in a role where Hugh Grant and every other actor, including her, was called upon to describe her character as “chubby”. As a reminder, she looked like this:

I’ve done a straw poll among women my age and this film genuinely had an impact on female eating disorders of the day extending, it seems, to McCutcheon herself.

It sounds like an over reach, but the one-two punch of Garofalo and McCutcheon, (what we were told these women “were” and the leading lady careers both were denied despite their outrageous talent) caused me to really doubt my own eyes for the rest of my life. Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing? Are my powers of perception accurate?

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There are ways in which being a single mother is, obviously, hard. I decided a few years ago to no longer pursue any kind of romantic relationship - when my kid was younger because I couldn’t spring often enough for the overnight fee of the only babysitter I trusted. I was never going to bring someone back to the flat. So how could I get to know somebody well enough to be able to bring them home if I could only stay out once a fortnight? And now she’s older, it’s a no go because I don’t want a man sharing space - even in passing - with an adolescent girl. As I say, I let go of this in 2023 and moved on, settling quite happily on K-pop boy bands instead - a shot of male beauty once a day that can’t hurt you.

People are writing a lot, lately about body “neutrality” as opposed to body positivity and I realise I got there by accident, by having my body be only for me these last years. I genuinely never think about my body, except when I have a headache or am ill. Otherwise I only need to make sure it can walk to the high street and back carrying bags of groceries and get through exercise classes a few times a week so my brain fires well enough to complete screenplays and novels. I’m not at all sure, as someone with a decade of disordered eating, I’d have gotten to this very happy place if dating were still on the cards.

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“It’s not fair” was my sister’s catch phrase from the age she learned to speak, pretty much until she left home for university. My parents called her ‘The Guardian of Justice’ (when she was six she was photographed spitting on a bicycle that refused to learn how to be ridden). For the longest time, I used to feel that spirit enter my body like a poltergeist whenever award nominations lists came out that did not meet my needs. The full body tremors I felt when ‘Crash’ beat ‘Brokeback Mountain’ at the 2006 Oscars repeated many times across art forms and genres. In middle age I am sangfroid - of course it isn’t fair and what’s for dessert?

My favourite film of the year, Park Chan Wook’s ‘No Other Choice’, the one that really made me laugh (and cry), and which has haunted me the weeks since I saw it, did not receive a single nomination.

I am resigned that Hamnet (a book I love whose film adaptation irked me and so many working mothers I’ve spoken with) is going to beat its closest competition, the exhilarating, thrilling, terrifying, hilarious, furious and ultimately joyful One Battle After Another. It will win Best Picture not because people are weeping in cinemas (which they are) or because the performances are masterful (they are) but because Hamnet is hugely out spending the competition - I get an email many times a week requesting that I attend a “For your consideration” screening (last week I was sent two in one day). As the nominee that gets seen the most, Hamnet has the best shot even if its heroine can be best summarised (to quote The Guardian of Justice) as “This woman loves to lay under a tree”. It is what it is. But that does tie into one unfairness I cannot accept.

The Women’s Prize long list for non-fiction was just announced and their fiction long list will come out on March 6th. I suspected that one of my favourite memoirs of the year, Adelle Stripe’s ‘Base Notes’ might not make the short list but I really hoped it would make the long list. It’s written in an elegant minor key - each chapter explores her northern girlhood via mass market scents like ‘Angel’, culminating in memorialising her complicated mother with an expensive bespoke scent that (spoiler alert) Stripe doesn’t even end up liking. The people who’ve read it find it touching and original, but not everyone has read it. Meanwhile, when the long list for fiction is announced, I know my book isn’t on it because I was told by someone within the Women’s Prize that Father Figure was not submitted for consideration.

Book awards permit each publisher to submit only a set number from their list (it can be as “large” as eight, but for the Women’s Prize, a prize that is so unbelievably helpful to female authors, its a measly two). So this is not the fault of my publishers or any publishers - obviously they have to submit the books that sold very well and got noticed the most, they’d be foolish not to. But that doesn’t mean it’s fair. Really the one way a smaller book can break through onto the list is if they come from an indie imprint where they’re a big fish in a little pond and therefore deemed worthy of submission. The prize committees say it has to be like this because they can’t ask their judges to read an endless number of books. Well…why not? That’s their problem to solve.

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Having been out in adult spaces as a writer from fourteen, it’s always uncomfortable when people ask if my life was like ‘Almost Famous’. I explain how different it went to be a teenage girl around rich celebrities and their acolytes as opposed to a boy. I’ve never written about the adults who pushed me to get involved with middle aged men when I was underage or the women who pretended they couldn’t see - once (and I am not making this up), I was fifteen and it was a Prince. Not Andrew, but, still, a disgusting Prince of an actual country. Left alone in a room with him, I got away unscathed when I spontaneously, childishly laughed at his exposed penis.

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My personal response to living in the era of the Trump administration (beyond leaving the country and voting diligently from abroad) is this: as I go about my days, I think up supervillain origin stories. We know that the “President” was desperate for love from his high functioning sociopath Father, whose face was terribly distorted from plastic surgery and that his brother died of alcoholism. That’s a very bad man with a very good origin story! By “good” I mean convincing. The authenticity of his toxic developmental stew makes it so much more unlikely that he could ever change or even just die (I have noticed that Nazi war criminals and pedophiles, for example, tend to live to an extremely old age). And to distract from that feeling of hopelessness I have developed this habit that some may call bleak humour, others a nervous tic. Here’s the supervillain origin tales I came up with just this week:

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I get unmoored by those moments in pop culture when everyone loves something that I either consider terrible or just genuinely don’t understand. The closest I have found to peace on this issue is focusing on the times I am at one with the rest of society: that Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Rumours’ remains one of the highest selling albums of all time is a great com…

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My elder cat is a gentle rag doll who'd never bitten or scratched me until the day I changed one tiny thing in our home. I am still bearing the wounds he inflicted on my legs within an hour of what I’d genuinely considered a small difference that would benefit us as a family. It was a change I’d made because everyone I know does it. But animals are intuitive, running for the hills before humans realise a tsunami is coming. He knew better…

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Growing up, feeling (despite a loving family) weird and extreme and unanchored, I had rotating attachments to magical items - sartorial or cosmetic - that would help the world understand me and therefore me understand the world. Talismans included a floor length floral skirt I had seen at Camden market age 11 that became a fixation in my mind, the first thing I’d think of on waking each day. I explained it and my Grandma made it for me in her little sewing room. I can’t quite describe the interior collapse I felt when she presented me with a long, floral skirt that was in a heavier, less fluid fabric than I had I imagined. Or the grey sweatshirt with black polka dots I’d requested for my birthday, that my Dad got me - but when I unwrapped it I saw right away the polka dots were a different size from the ones I’d pictured, and my inner world began to crumble.

This constant shock at how things are compared to what I’d thought they were, alongside how disregulated I feel if I get too hot or too cold and the distress I feel at sounds (if a TV is on in the same audio range as a radio, I cannot bear it or if someone is watching their phone without headphones on a bus, or if multiple voices are heard from different directions, which counts out dinner parties for me) makes me think that my long ago diagnosis of bipolar disorder might not be misdiagnosed autism spectrum disorder, which we have in the family. When I get to the top of the list for assessment, we’ll see.

With the way I’ve historically shopped, there’s also an empath component to what I obsessively covet. In advertising (especially with cosmetics or perfumes, say) there is a lifestyle subtext that triggers our wanting, though it’s so deft most people don’t understand that’s what’s happening. I always understand explicitly what I am being asked to buy into. “With these combined fleeting images, you are telling me to picture life as Brigitte Bardot on St Tropez in 1965. I would like that. Thank you, I will buy that scent. Here is my down payment on the moment in time”.

I’ve mentioned clawing my way out of debt this year - so it’s right that today’s substack should offer you an inventory of things I want but am not going to purchase in the Black Friday sales. Unsubscribing from mails outs became practically a part time job this year, yet as many mail outs as I unsubscribe from, I’ve still woken each day to special offers (this experience feels like the cousin of how I have read every issue of The New Yorker cover to cover but any “letter to the editor” references a story I’ve never seen before). If these emailed “one week only special offers” were a person, they’d be speaking too close to your face as they clutch at your lapels - you’d consider them needy and therefore unattractive. Whereas, when it comes to capitalism, the neediness somehow transmutes to need.

And all of it - all of the online shopping, which is different to shopping brick and mortar - at its most basic, simply taps into us feeling somehow bad about ourselves. In 12 Step programmes you learn that it is possible to sit with an unpleasant, difficult, confronting feeling until it passes, rather than trying to numb it with, food, drugs, gambling, sex or compulsive spending.

So I did not buy the Isamaya cleansing cloths in the Black Friday sale, which you see at the top of this post. They contain hylaronic acid and give you glass skin that makes you glow with what looks like luxurious health. They also disintegrate so as not to cause environmental harm. What if they had changed my life. I have to live with that possibility, since once I’ve sat out the urge, it’s gone forever.

I did not buy on sale Givenchy L’interdit, a perfume I was given a sample of when I bought a Givenchy lipstick. I went crazy for this scent, but stayed steady to my not purchasing commitment by remembering how a perfume sample can be more effective than a full size bottle - maybe those floral notes hit deeper when they’re completely mobile, a subliminal sense that you’re a delicious smelling person who can also navigate airports (and maybe lovers?) with ease. It also helps that L’Interdit is French for “forbidden”.

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The photographer, Nick Knight, took this author portrait of me around the publication of my third novel, Cherries In The Snow. We’d become acquainted when he asked me to contribute to his edition of The Pirelli Calendar. Started in 1964 as an annual special edition gift to the tire manufacturer’s most high rolling clients, the calendar generally utilised high fashion photographers to shoot supermodels in states of semi or total undress. A less evolved 1984 shot, for example, has a close up of two rumps pressed together with tire tracks on them. Knight, a brilliant and subversive man revered for his ground breaking work with Bjork and Alexander McQueen, elected to ask 12 women he admired to tell him their sexual fantasy, which he would then interpret with his models.

To my surprise (having read a book of mine that I am too frightened to ever re-read because I wrote the bulk of it in a psych ward) he asked me to be one of them. I’d end up in the thick, shiny pages between the fantasies of Courtney Love and Isabella Rossellini. Mine, which was about a girl who leaves home for the first time and dreams that her boyfriend gets turned into a cat, was “performed” by Maria Carla Boscono.

Who knows what Pirelli or their customers made of it, but I loved it more than I can say. Nick and his wife, Charlotte, were good enough to have a huge print made for me, which I lugged from my Manhattan studio apartment (which really was a lot like the one in the picture) across the country to Los Angeles, where it ended up hanging in my marital home.

Last week two Pirelli related things happened - the new calendar came out (shot by Solve Sundsbo who should have Scandic lines through his ‘O’s but this, like many other things is beyond my skill set). And, in part by selling my treasured print, I paid off long term legal debt I’ve been struggling with since I got divorced. It’s a debt that doubled and tripled in interest and would wake me up in the night with fear. It was definitely a debt that impinged on any semblance of a social life because I had to be so occasional about paying for a babysitter.

I was terribly deeply ashamed when I had to sell this art work I loved so much for money post divorce. I’d been trying to do it for a while, starting by gingerly writing to Nick to let him know I had to do it. It had been such a special gift and represented such a high point in my then young creative life, I didn’t want him to think I’d done it behind his back. I asked if he had a preference in dealer I went through. All the while it churned, not only did I absolutely love falling asleep to this art, I also felt dead certain I was the only one of the 12 women compelled to sell possessions for cash. (That said, Courtney Love has had such a storied life, who knows?)

It’s such a deeply weird thing being an independent, self taught creative for a living. There’s times I’ve been flush. And there’s times, like these last years following the writer’s strike, when I relied on the small drip of substack paid subscriptions to make sure I could buy groceries without them bouncing.

I know multiple creative women who you’d think of as incredibly successful (and they are incredibly successful) who, as single Mothers, go through the same financial rollercoaster - one that, whilst you’re on it, you’re not only trying not to be sick, you’re simultaneously trying to write an essay about it.

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Not long after he settled in at an empty four seater across from us, he began to watch his phone, loudly, strange sounds emerging. A young robotic female voice a similcrum of a child my daughter’s age purred:

“Me and my girlies are having a sleepover in our Barbie PJ’s!”

I looked over and saw he was watching an AI generated Taylor Swift dressed in a shortie nightie. It wasn’t porn exactly, the problem being that so much content is now pornography adjacent it can be hard to escape it or to tell what you are escaping, even just riding an escalator out of a tube station. But there was no forward motion for me - we were encased in a carriage with him and didn’t know where what he was watching so loudly was going to go next. I leapt up. “Hi! You need to put your headphones on”.

He looked bland, like very milky tea that had gone tepid, wearing glasses and receding hairline where life had sipped away at him. I put him in his fifties, just a few years older than me. He looked up slowly.

“Oh do I?”

He came from the Nigel Farage school of diction. That he hadn’t been embarrassed and simply said “Okay” already made me fight to hold my nerve.

“Yes”.

Maybe he was embarrased and maybe that’s why he immediately shot up to 11.

“YOU DO NOT GET TO TELL ME WHAT TO DO! YOU DO NOT GET TO LECTURE ME!”

I felt my daughter grip my arm and (remember, I was once, many decades ago, so fragile I was hospitalized after a breakdown), I found myself answering very calmly:

“Do you want to live as part of a society with your fellow humans or not?”

As soon as it came out of my mouth I knew it was so pure it was funny, like when Romy and Michelle tell their childhood bullies they are bad people with ugly hearts. We fell into this call and repeat for a verse, one that summed up the cultural schism that has torn at the fabric of America and now the U.K:

“YOU DO NOT GET TO TELL ME WHAT TO DO!”

“Do you want to live as part of a society with your fellow humans or not?”

Now he bellowed:

“I AM A LAWYER! WHO TOLD YOU YOU COULD LECTURE ME ON MY RIGHTS?”

I scanned my memory because, though I knew if was absolutely wrong to do what he was doing, in truth I couldn’t remember if it was illegal or fine worthy. I recalled the new signs on the underground that Sadiq Khan had put in place. Threat of a £1000 fine for playing your phone without headphones on public transport. But we were on a train, not the underground, and though we were almost in London, we weren’t there yet. My picker is totally broken, but even I knew this was not a person who would respond positively to the threat of Sadiq Khan’s strong disapproval.

I felt myself begin to crumble.

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A rich, long life inevitably involves some pain. You get a little or a lot - I have written entire memoirs about some of the difficult things. There are other painful things I can only write about through fiction. But I do my best to name the pain as specifically as I can, because it might help someone reading and it definitely helps me. I am Generation X and the split with the generations below mine, with Millennials and Gen Z, is that - with trigger warnings and safe spaces - it can appear an inalienable right to exist without pain. I believe this isn’t possible and that it’s also the enemy of art. Off the top of my head, going by work I love and return to, it would mean you don’t have Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’, you don’t have Patricia Lockwood’s books, and you definitely don’t have the art of Kara Walker.

It is the most powerful kind of alchemy, these pioneering female creatives putting a name to ugly, frightening things and hanging them on walls to be admired. There is a segue I have been nervous to make but have been thinking of for a while. I am quite interested in actresses and their cosmetic surgeries and “tweakments”, curious, like any other cinema go-er, in the ones who “get away with it” and the ones who get caught out, fascinated by the leaps in technique that were made with each war on disfigured soldiers (this is where Korea got so far ahead). But I am most interested in female geniuses and their cosmetic intervention.

I am, in particular, fascinated by the faces of JK Rowling, Isabelle Allende, Miranda July, Mindy Kaling, Michaela Coel.

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Florence had glowingly reviewed my memoir ‘Your Voice In My Head’ for Dazed magazine, and then emailed to ask if I’d do this. We met for the first time after her show at the Hollywood Bowl, when I was heavily pregnant. I remember I had on a blue A-line dress with a cat print and yellow high heels with red lips on the toes.

The album came out and the next time Florence invited me and my then one and a half year old to visit her at The Chateau Marmont where she was staying. My daughter immediately went behind the heavy curtains of her suite to work out a difficult poop, which is what toddlers do (it doesn’t have to require the presence of Florence Welch, just curtains). Unrelated (I think?) she gave me and my daughter that suite after she decided to check out early.

We were pretty friendly for a while - Florence was the first person to show me what instagram was and how to install it, at a long gone artisan tea house in Notting Hill called Teanamu. I was the first person to show her clothes by The Vampires Wife beside the swimming pool of the Chateau. I remember that her South London house was tall and narrow and off balance, just like her, as if she lived inside herself.

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Pic: Nona Summers and Mick Jagger

We might have known what was coming when the Paula Abdul cassette tape single melted on the hot dashboard of the rental car in the parking lot of Universal Studios - a harbinger of the glamour woman in meltdown. We might have known, but we didn’t because we were just kids. All I can say is I recognized Nona Summers wasn’t like the other Mums when she put her hands on the quilted steering wheel of that Range Rover, pulled over to the hard shoulder of the L.A freeway and said:

“I’m not dealing”.

She looked in the rear view mirror at us, her red curls bouncing as if they were trying to cheerlead her out of this bad situation. Vehicles honked and swerved, us three kids in the back - her ten year old daughter Tara, my nine year old sister Lisa and twelve year old me. ‘Groove Is In The Heart’ played on the radio, far too antic a song for these fraught circumstances. Nona craned her head around to make sure we understood she wasn’t joking. My sister was tiny, pale in the Golden State sun and still had jet lag from London “What’s happening?” she asked us, holding Tara’s hand. Tara and I looked at each other. What was happening? L.A smog shot through with sunset laid out a kind of red carpet for Nona as she stepped out of the car: “I can’t do this” she said. She didn’t close the door behind her. Dropping down from the tall seats, we all got out, too, and a call was made from a payphone to a nanny/assistant, who came to collect us all from the side of the road.

We had only been on the freeway in the first place because Tara wanted to take us to Ed DeBevick’s on north La Cienega in Beverly Hills. It was a mock 50’s style diner boasting, on its vinyl menu, the world’s smallest sundae. We excitedly discussed the petite sundae all the way there - an item we’d eaten a lot even at school lunches suddenly becoming fabulous because it’s tiny - until Nona stopped the car on the freeway. Ed DeBevick’s diner isn’t around any more and neither is Nona, but only one of them was truly authentic.

The day before, Nona had taken us to the iconic West Hollywood boutique, Fred Segal. “You can each spend a hundred dollars”. My sister and I could not begin to process this number or how to go about spending it. Tara, who is now the coolest, classiest, most self-deprecating grown woman, cried and wailed right there in the street because the mention of a spending cap wounded her very soul.

Only a week earlier, Lisa and I had been sitting in a grungey house swap in Venice beach playing Super Mario for the first time back when it still required joysticks. We were jolted from our Nintendo hypnosis when the call came that Tara and Nona were in LA too and we were to go to the hotel where they were staying and keep Tara occupied whilst her Mother dealt with things.

The hotel they were staying at was The Chateau Marmont of which too much has already been written, not least by me. Suffice to say it ended up the setting of my first novel, ‘Namedropper’, which I started writing at 17 and published at 21, because of my stay there with Nona and Tara, on the cusp of adolescence. ‘The castle on the hill’ was not yet an Andre Balazs property and had not been refurbished. The furniture looked like it had been scratched up by cats and the kitchen only served comfort food like milkshakes and fries.

The Summers were being put up in a two room suite by an old friend of Nona’s whose identity would soon become apparent when Tara picked up the poolside rotary phone and ordered room service for us. “Three orders of French fries, three slices of carrot cake, three cokes and charge is to Jack Nicholson, please”. My sister thought for a long time that was just what you’re meant to say when you place a room service order, and tried it at a Holiday Inn in Maidstone.

(Pic: My sister Lisa and I at the Chateau Pool)

We hunched over our fries, cross legged by the pool, the billboard for Flatliners visible beyond the wall. Elisabeth Shue was the guest we were hoping to run into, since she’d recently starred in Adventures In Babysitting. Nona would appear here and there during the day, asking to smell our food. She was on a diet and would watch us slurp milkshakes, insisting we describe how they tasted. Beyond trusting our descriptions, she was also interested in what we had to say, generally, which was surprising to me given that she had access to Jack Nicholson and Angelica Huston, Jerry Hall and Mick Jagger. She dated for decades Michael Lindsay-Hogg who directed The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus and was said to be the son of Orson Welles. Diane Von Furstenberg, Nona’s best friend since Geneva University, was in Europe. They all meant very little to us and every night Tara would scream at the century old hotel walls “GOOD NIGHT ELISABETH SHUE!” If those stars had meant more to us, we might have wondered what Nona’s place was among them since she wasn’t herself an actress, director or rock star? Her place, the internet said this month, when she died at 78 in a dreadful freak accident, was as probably the best loved society hostess of her generation.

Nona had curls on her head, sparkles on her dresses and ancestral trauma in her bones: as a ‘Jewess’ her mother Fritzi had survived Hitler’s rise to power by becoming a Bridge champion whose success took her out of the country and eventually to England where she became captain of the British bridge team. Her daughter Nona, perhaps sensing on a cellular level that what might seem to make a woman merely decorative can actually be a life saver, had a luminous mind and five languages in which she was fluent. I think of her as a society version of Charlotte in Charlotte’s web: she weaved “SOME PIG” over the sty of whoever she was in love with and everyone cried a lot when she died. I think of the hand woven exclamations of love and realize I’ve done that so many times, sometimes even in book form. Tara’s Father (Nona’s ex-husband, the art dealer Martin Summers) existed and was loved but, as with my daughter, he didn’t live in the same psychic bubble as them. They were a mother and daughter showing up at events where the people around them were mainly adult couples - as my daughter and I often are too.

I wonder now, when I think of how Nona listened to what we had to say as we babbled about En Vogue and how seriously she watched our stupid dances, if her patience had been honed by a lifetime entertaining celebrities. She took us to Tower records on Sunset to select the casette tapes that were so important to us. In hindsight, she may have been taking us places so she wouldn’t have to wait in for a call from Michael. That’s what I would do to take my mind off things. You can be a good mother and a struggling lover at the same time, I’ve definitely felt that at times since my divorce. Somewhere, that summer, the struggle briefly overtook her.

Let me be clear: as an adult I am terrified of the LA freeway as is anyone of right mind. This bold pioneering buccaneer woman was right to be freaked out by it and pull over. She was right in her regular mind, let alone high on cocaine.

Oh yeah, I buried the lede: Nona was on coke. A ton of it. She was on all of the cocaine in parallel to us stuffing all of the Chateau Marmont minibar into our mouths, one suite adjacent. The cocaine was sort of the least interesting part though my parents were very interested, our pedestrian world rubbing up against her glamorous life. I had noticed that my parents often had a single Mother “client” throughout our childhoods, an overwhelmed Mum who would show up in tears or with bruises and that they arrived at our home from across the class spectrum.

Nona had no tears and no bruises, I could see that, and, until that summer, she hadn’t needed my parents help. I hadn’t thought she had a “problem” and I couldn’t get a fix on her class. Extreme glamour obscures that, hence the reveal in Breakfast At Tiffany’s that Holly Golightly is really Lula Mae from Appalachian poverty. I remember that, in her Chateau Marmont kitchen, Nona only wanted to eat steak for weight loss, but then once she’d cooked it, she couldn’t cut into the meat because her hands were trembling. My parents were some of several people I guess who talked Nona into going to rehab.

A few days after the shocking news of Nona’s awful death, I was in London’s worst place which, for the unititiated, is a shopping centre in suburban north London. Inside it was located the uniform store for my daughter’s State School. Or behind the shopping centre. Or beneath it - the map on my phone was unclear and did not appreciate me trying to engage with it, like it was sitting beside me at a dinner party Nona had arranged, turning its back with disappointment at being placed on my table.

I became more and more flustered, mentally returning to the school we’d met Tara at, where some undiagnosed learning processing issue meant the maths teacher wrote 0 plus 1 on the board and I sat there and cried because I couldn’t answer it. As the north London pavement heaved and hollered with people expressing their drug addiction more publically than Nona had, the deep end of the Chateau Marmont swimming pool felt exceptionally far away. After one more failed round of the peeling shopping centre, I looked at my kid and said:

“I can’t do it”.

I believe, as Nona demonstrated, my child should be allowed to know my limitations and those limitations should, for both our mental health, be acknowledged out loud.

“I’m not dealing”.

“But,” my kid ventured, “my uniform is too small!”

“I tried my best but I couldn’t do it”.

She looked at me. She looked around at the crowds and computed that, yes, it was beyond me. “Okay” she said, and we went home where I ordered it online and she just had to wear a too small uniform the first three days of the new term.

Back in the Chateau that night after the nanny had “rescued” us, we lay in camp beds as Tara shouted “GOODNIGHT ELISABETH SHUE!” until hotel security came up and asked us to please stop. Years later, Elisabeth Shue would transition from being a teen idol to getting Oscar nominated as an emotionally beaten down woman past her prime in ‘Leaving Las Vegas’. Things change. Women age. Nona, slowly going blind, was right up to the very end, still invited to the best of the best parties and supported anywhere she wanted to be.

It’s odd that I now know of two women I admire who flourished as connectors and enablers of talent who’ve ended up, in later life, accidentally setting their clothes on fire with a cigarette - Eve Babitz and Nona Summers. It’s like their energy becomes too powerful as they age and they combust. Nona had not been under the influence of anything but a gust of wind that fateful day- in fact she had gotten clean at the end of the summer we stayed with her and remained so ever since.

Pic: Tara and Nona

Because I witnessed it in action, I have several times in my life as a single Mum been able to say out loud “I need help. I am not doing okay”. I’m not talking about anything as glamorous as a coke habit - more my sister coming to stay the night no questions asked when I was getting two hours sleep a night because, with my maths deficiency, I’d misundertsood the instructions for taking progesterone. It’s painful sometimes that, with the memory of single mothers my parents took on, I became one in the end, leaning on them, on my sister, on my girlfriends, pleading for people to occupy my child now and then so I can privately break down just a little, for a few hours here and there.

The other important thing I learned from Nona is that you can be fiercely intelligent - she always was, I am a lot of the time - and still enjoy movie stars and beautiful clothes. I smiled seeing she was wearing studded Alaia flats in the photos from Tara’s recent wedding. When she died, Nona had only just moved back to London from L.A to be closer to her only child, this daughter she’d loved so fiercely she’d pulled right over on the freeway and told her the whole truth.

For an alleged Bohemian I really like to admonish rule breakers. I like to tell off people for talking or texting during movies. I like to request that commuters take their feet off tube seats or move their bag on crowded buses so other people can sit down for Lord’s sake. At the end of term, I took photos of kids vaping outside my kid’s school in their uniforms and seriously thought of sending them to the Headmaster. Then, because they did look so stylish in their red blazers, I got stuck in a quandary of would Vivienne Westwood have wanted me or not wanted me to tell on the school kids? Let me explain. Nobody likes a Tattle Tale. But Vivienne Westwood - counter intuitively given that she invented punk- did like a Tattle Tale! She liked me!

When I was sent to interview her in my early twenties, for Nylon magazine, I went to her London HQ where I immediately told her the staff in her New York store were unfriendly and unhelpful and had made me feel bad. The Manhattan store was short lived because the sales people didn’t get the gist of Vivienne - yes a high end luxury label but snotty is antithetical to her brand (apart, purely in the old mosh pit sense.)

Looking askance as I relayed this mistreatment, she said, in her charming Derbyshire accent “I’m so sorry, please, go and choose some things on me as an apology”. “Really?” “Yes, just down that hall and into that room there”. I think I looked back at her like Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas when Robert De Niro tells her to choose free Dior dresses. Am I about to be killed?

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