Sword light!

Most of the time, though, I’m indoors, clack clacking away. May I interest you in a tour of the articles that I have recently published? I could tell you what this assignment was about, but with art like this, do words even matter?

I mean…. The printed page and the tooth split are just too much!

And while we’re getting hot and heavy, I got to curl up with an early copy of Robinne Lee’s sultry entry into saphcore, Crash into Me, and hang out with the author for a Bustle cover story.

And of course I saw The Sheep Detectives. How about ewe? Baa ha ha!

I savored every word of The Palm House, Gwendoline Riley’s stylish logic problem of a novel and now I’m reading The Ending Writes Itself, a bitchy-cozy murder mystery about the best villains: authors!

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE IF YOU’VE MADE IT THIS FAR.

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May 2, 2026, 2:03 p.m

From: Evie Snodgrass

To: Serena Zarrow

Serena,

It’s been sooo long! How are you!?

I ran into Tamara over the weekend and she mentioned that you and Arlo are members of Newberg House. As it happens, I’m applying for membership. Those pickleball courts are to die for.

I hate asking this sort of thing but wanted to see if there was a world where you would drop a line to the Selection Committee verifying that Dale and I aren’t psycho killers? lol

We should all get together. Throw out some dates!

Xo e

May 2, 2026 8:09 p.m.

From: Serena Zarrow

To: Evie Snodgrass

EVIE!

Your ears must have been ringing, cuz I was just talking about you over pickleball with Emily – only good things, obvi! And yes, there is a world I could drop a line to the Selection Committee, and we happen to live in that world, so consider it done.

Meanwhile, I told Arlo he should reach out to Dale. He’s been trying to secure an investment from Matteo’s firm for his latest startup venture (don’t even ask me to explain it - something involving injectable nootropics, whatever). Do you think Dale could nudge Matteo?

And yes, let’s throw out some dates!

xo/SZ

May 3, 2026 7:52 a.m.

From: Evie Snodgrass

To: Serena Zarrow

Serena,

Lol that’s so crazy we were on each others’ minds. Collective unconscious is real!

Yes, I will totally badger Dale about badgering Matteo about Arlo’s project. I mean. You had me at injectables.

And thank you SO MUCH for helping make my pickleball dreams come true. How does it feel to be my picklegodmother?

Speaking of getting pickled, we’ll be on the island for July. Apart from the 4th, and whenever Axel decides to invite his friends up for the week without checking with us till they’re all “low key at the airport,” we still have a guestroom. You and Arlo should come. That is an official “high key” invitation.

Tag, you’re it. Throw out a few dates!

Xo

June 10, 2026, 4:04 p.m.

From: Serena Zarrow

To: Evie Snodgrass

Hi Evie,

I’m an idiot. IDIJT. This reply has been sitting in my drafts. I thought I sent it ages ago! I’m so sorry about the delay. And that is so sweet of you to invite us to stay in your beautiful guestroom–not that I’ve ever been to your place on the island, but I’ve always been obsessed with your taste so how could it not be beautiful?

I was going to circle back with Arlo and throw out some dates when I drafted this email, and I most certainly will do so now.

In the interim, does Dale happen to have Matteo’s new email address? After a really promising meeting, he just switched firms without telling anyone and Arlo is, like, stalking him. You know how these guys get when they have a hot idea. It’s beyond. Mayday!

If you’re free in August, we’ll be renting that analyst’s Shaker-vibes house again on Fire Island. Come hang with us. We’ll have a guest room provided that Anya and Mabel-Claire don’t get kicked out of lacrosse camp (please God).

Throw out some dates!

xoxoxox/SZ

August 21, 2026, 9:34 a.m.

From: Evie Snodgrass

To: Serena Zarrow

Knock knock–it’s me :)

We’d love to come see what’s shaking at the Shaker house out on the island! How’s the sixth of….. whoopsie! Summer is already over. Seriously, how does the season always fly by so fast?

Back to reality and, sadly, not back to a reality that does not involve pickleball at the Newberg. I thought we were a shoo-in, but we didn’t make the cut. A woman named Lisandra Forange wrote to inform me that they need to achieve “the right mix.” I went back to my original email and double whoopsie! I see I never gave you a deadline or said who to write to. I guess it’s too late for you to write to the club, but do you happen to know Lisandra? If there’s any chance you could drop her a line vouching for Dale and me? Speaking of dates: Throw me some?

xox, wtf, etc,

Evie

September 2, 2026, 9:34 a.m.

From: Serena Zarrow

To: Evie Snodgrass

Evie, aaaaargh! I’m so sorry about the Newberg sitch. I don’t know what happened! I definitely brought this to Lisandra’s attention. I even called her since I suspected she might have some thoughts about that stupid PTA rumor-mill thing tangentially involving you and Dale, and I of course didn’t want to put anything in writing. She said she hadn’t heard boo about the ALLEGEDLY misappropriated funds – so I figured it was smooth sailing.

Any word on Matteo’s whereabouts btw? Still trying to track down that investment he promised Arlo!

And we remain overdue. September is NUTS, I know, but nobody here has a terminal illness. Throw out some dates!

Xo Serena

September 3, 2026, 2:13 p.m.

From: Evie Snodgrass

To: Serena Zarrow

Hi Serena,

Good news! Dale ran into Matteo at the Food Coop yesterday and gave him a little nudge about Arlo. I was there and as your witness can attest that he asked Matteo to call Arlo right then and there. They got into a whole back and forth about the obstacles at hand, and which one is more of a deal-breaker: the garbage phone service at the coop or the IRS investigation. It was so funny. Have lived with Dale for 20 years and only just found out he does a killer Warren Buffet impersonation. If Arlo doesn’t hear from Matteo (once he stops laughing) I’ll be shocked.

Back to our criminally overdue get together. How about September 21, the weekend of October 16 or 23 or the weekend of Nov. 14 still looks clear.

If not, throw out some dates!

xx/E

September 7, 2027, 11:09 a.m.

From: Serena Zarrow

To: Evie Snodgrass

E,

I was hoping I was being paranoid to think that after that “scene” you so illustriously recounted that Arlo would hear from Matteo. Sigh. Dreams go to die in the freezer aisle.

Speaking of dreams, Mabel-Claire has her heart set on Stanford and is taking so many AP classes. It’s killing all of us.

Random thought: I play pickleball M and W mornings at 8:15. Throw out some dates!

Xo S

April 21, 2038, 10:12 a.m.

From: Evie Snodgrass

To: Serena Zarrow

Dear Serena, I hope you and the family are doing well, and that Mabel-Claire made it to Stanford in the end.

I wish I had better news to relay, but I was recently diagnosed with Stage 4 Nomphins-Redd. It’s hard to process, and I’ve been focusing on tidying up my affairs.

So here is a very long overdue email. I’ve stopped playing pickleball but I’m sure we can find something else to catch up over. Have you heard from Matteo?

May is looking hairy, and June is when I will probably kick the can, but for now I’m still here, asking you to throw out some dates!

As ever,

Evie

July 21, 2038, 10:01 a.m.

From: Serena Zarrow

To: Evie Snodgrass

Dear Evie,

This is Arlo writing from Serena’s account. I’m so sorry to hear about your diagnosis. I wish I had better news on my end but I’ll just say it: Serena died last year following a boating accident. Matteo was “driving” and foul play is suspected.

Once the dust settles, I’d love to see you, to say farewell, to thank you for reminding Matteo to get in touch, and for inspiring him to have an affair with my late wife, who happened to have a very large life insurance policy. Who knew?

Throw out some dates!

Arlo

hat or lamp?

That’s right, yet again I found myself in the middle of a novel that I didn’t love, and yet again I forced my way to the end. I felt dutybound, both to my inner Tracy Flick and also to the author, who has no I idea who I am but whose work I have adored ever since I read his first novel, a dark and twisted masterpiece about a sociopathic gourmand. It was recommended to me by a terrible boyfriend and he was right: it’s terribly funny and erudite in all the right ways. You should definitely read it:

See? I saved you the trouble of dating somebody terrible.

The new book is a contemporary tale of terrible married people pissing each other off. “Fully drawn” is not the term I would use to describe it. But there was one part, a standalone monologue by a devious crypto bro, that made me laugh out loud.

Here it is:

Yet again, at your service, always and forever.

Lauren

P.S. Beef Season Two is a work of art, Olivia and Rodrigo and Cameron Winter are the most perfect couple, I found a Spotify playlist that’s exclusively songs about horses, I traveled to King of Prussia, Pennsylvania on Monday night to watch a volleyball “combine” that I kept mistakenly calling a “conclave” until a former Olympian quietly pointed out “The only conclaves I know about are at the Vatican?”, there are some seriously weird Italian lamps on Ebay (see holding image), and my sweet daughter went on a [whatever the tween word for playdate is] at the mall by Dekalb station and brought back a present for me: The new Gwendolyn Riley!

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Proof I went to BookCon!

It’s been getting bad. The work spigot is on full blast, and I’m too busy having “weird conversations not interviews” per the ever observant young journalist I live with, to sit down and devote a morning to my sacred Substack Practice.

And now other people are Substacking anout my work, which I’m hearing about through friends, and if it isn’t a sign to shoot off a “hi” straight from the horse’s mouth, then you might as well shoot the horse.

So here’s the latest and greatest. I wrote a piece about how perimenopause can impact a woman’s career. I spent several months reporting that piece. If you knew how much I got paid for a story headlined “the life change quietly derailing careers” (well actually how much I hope to eventually be paid) you would laugh at the irony. Ha ha ha ha ha!

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I also wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal about debut novelist Lila Raicek, whose new book The Plunge releases today. Mazel tov, Lila! And Paul Bogaards, the adorable cranky power publicist and fellow early riser.

Oh and I flew across the world to turn my skin into glass. This is what it looked like the day after:

I’ll be saying more on my skincare journey when I’m not frantically riding the A train to an appointment. But I’ll share this: one of the “clinic girls” told me that young people in Korea don’t date the way they do here. What they do seems imminently more sane:

Everyone has an app called Karrot. It’s like a Facebook marketplace, but the young hornys proceed thusly:

“Hello fellow Karrat-ers. I’d like to check out the new DIY charcuterie place in Sinsa on Thursday at 730. I’ll make a reservation for 8. The first 7 people to sign up are in. Only ages 25-30. Thanks!”

And then they all show up and mingle and make cute salami sculptures and maybe just maybe who knows what can happen next… (maybe “salami” was a bad idea, come to think).

If you want more regular updates, won’t you consider becoming a paying subscriber, or asking your rich cousin to?

I thank her for her blessing, and for hopping on FaceTime for an article that ended up being a nothingburger till it became a Substack post.

Writing a novel is hard. Sending you all the coffee and Diet Coke, FF.

Filipa Fino, above. A scene that transpired in Cuba and inspired her book, below.

And a not-quite-article that has not quite gone through a final fact check (as in it definitely hasn't, I can attest) from the sketchbook of Lauren Mechling:

Filipa Fino, once a Vogue insider and front-row fixture at Paris fashion week, is promoting a tell-all book about life at the magazine that’s studded with bold names and hot gossip. She’s only missing one thing: the actual book.

Fino, 53, has ripped a page from the Substack era, opting to captain her own literary adventure. She is working without a literary agent or a traditional publisher, choosing instead to oversee the release of Best Dressed, her forthcoming novel that charts the rise and fall of an impermeable fashion world in the lavish days before influencers.

She is producing the book with American Real Publishing Company, a hybrid publisher based in Binghamton, N.Y., run by Roger Brooks, a former loyalty-points executive turned podcaster. Brooks describes the outfit as “something in between the Big Five and self-publishing.” It employs a managing editor and a stable of freelance editors. Its catalog includes titles such as The Naked Darwin and Essential Projects for Off-Grid Living, along with Brooks’s own Vatican thriller, The Sacred Order.

Ever since Lauren Weisberger published The Devil Wears Prada, the bestselling and memorably damning novel inspired by her year as Anna Wintour’s assistant at Vogue, the book industry has been keen to to feed the appetite for dishy works centered on Vogue’s inner workings. Last October brought the publication of Caroline Palmer’s Workhorse (Flatiron Books), which (here comes the author’s note, where I share that I was asked, and agreed to, blurb said book) offered a fictionalized account of the author’s tenure at the magazine and zeroes in on its ironclad hierarchy. More recently, Ballantine Books announced its acquisition of The Mademoiselle Alliance, a novel by Natasha Lester that takes a meta twist on the Vogue tell-all. It follows an intern at the magazine in 1985 who is tasked with discovering the identity of the author of an anonymous tell-all.

“It’s always the story of: ‘Let me do my grieving here,’” Fino said of the genre’s tropes. “Nobody has told the story of the most extravagant and decadent time in fashion from this point of view.” She was speaking on a video call from Southhampton, N.Y., where she lives with her restauranteur husband, Stratis Morfogen, and their two teenage daughters. “I drank the Kool Aid and I thrived on the Kool Aid.”

Fino and Stratis—who is acting as her manager—leaked a story about the book’s imminent publication to Page Six. “We planned for it to go out the weekend of the Golden Globes,” said Stratis. “We started hearing from book scouts and Hollywood agents immediately.” After four meetings with interested book-to-film agents, Fino said she signed with a book-to-screen agent at WME.

The Page Six announcement caught Brooks off guard. Until the moment he read it, he was not aware of a specific timeline. Now he and the client he had met for the first time just three weeks prior, and whose book was still an assemblage of computer files, would have just three months to prepare a text for publication. Together, they devised a plan: each chapter, or “episode,” would run roughly 2,500 words, short enough to hold modern attention spans. Working backward from a 75,000-word manuscript, they landed on a pace of 5,000 words per week.

A May publication date will coincide with both the 2026 Met Gala and the release of The Devil Wears Prada 2, the long-awaited film sequel starring Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep.

“I’ve been working day and night,” said Fino, who appeared on FaceTime in her grandmother’s gold stud earrings, an old Givenchy sweater, and Amazon sweatpants. “I don’t even have a manicure,” she added, raising her hands in the air.

Pages shared with this journalist evoke a period when fashion editors flew on private planes and developed close relationships with models, photographers, and designers. Fino’s synopsis name-checks everyone from Gianni Versace to Kate Moss to Tavi Gevinson, the blogger who made waves when she occupied a prime seat at the 2013 Michael Kors show. “Remember that little girl with the bangs?” Fino said. “She looked like she was 12. That was the first time so many Vogue editors I was with heard the word ‘blogger.’”

Donald and Melania Trump also appear frequently in the pages. One chapter is a fictionalized account of Fino’s role in helping orchestrate Melania Trump’s makeover ahead of her rise as a public figure. “It was all about Melania—not Donald,” she said of which member of the couple was of interest to her colleagues. “Donald was just the checkbook.”

“Trump was starting to have political aspirations,” she continued. “So the woman by his side had to look the part. She had to appeal to Middle America.” André Leon Talley and a team of editors got to work. The transformation culminated in a marriage proposal at the Met Gala and a Vogue cover the following winter. “Trump, all of a sudden, looks like he’s got credibility,” Fino said.

Fino first met Melania prior to her job at Vogue, while working as an assistant bookings editor at Harper’s Bazaar. A general up-for-it-ness helped Fino burnish her reputation in the fashion community. She was eventually hired at Vogue as an assistant, with a starting salary of $28,000 a year. It was the start of a decade that she describes as a sensational dreamscape. “We mattered in the process,” she said. “Assistants were part of the elite from the beginning.”

Fino’s early responsibilities included ferrying Polaroids from photo shoots to Wintour’s office for approval. She later rose to accessories editor, overseeing a department and closets of jewelry, shoes and handbags. After her departure from the magazine, Page Six ran a speculation-riddled report. “I’ve never kept anything that wasn’t gifted to me,” she said in the piece.

Fino maintains a fierce loyalty to the institution. “I loved working there,” she said, noting that Wintour attended her wedding.

The book project began shortly after she left Vogue and launched a consulting agency. She said that an editor at a Big Five publishing house approached her about writing a novel inspired by her time at the magazine. It emerged that their visions diverged. “They wanted a tell-all about how terrible it was to work with Anna,” she said. “But that’s not what I wanted to write. I loved working at Vogue.”

Instead, Fino wanted to sift through her memories and weave a monument to a vanished era. “In the beginning, there was nothing—just faxes,” she said. “You traveled with models and designers, stuck on location for days. The industry was closed. And when you were on the inside, you actually knew the other people.”

Scenes gestured at in the outline draw directly from real experiences: staying at the Versace mansion; flying by private jet with Tom Ford from Milan to Los Angeles to deliver an Oscar dress. (“We’re both Virgos,” she noted dryly.)

There are stories of working on a dress for Kate Middleton, and flying to Cuba for a now-infamous Patrick Demarchelier photo shoot for Harper’s Bazaar. The supermodels who’d flown to the island for the assignment, Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, ended up finding an audience with Fidel Castro. “I got roped in because I was the only assistant who wasn’t American and so I could legally fly to Havana,” Fino said, explaining how a 24-year-old came to be the primary staffer tasked with overseeing a menagerie of superstars. “Kate Moss brought along Leo DiCaprio,” she recalled. “And Leo had brought along his mother.”

Only very recently did Fino’s daughters, ages 18 and 19, start to think their mother’s stories about the turn-of-the-millennium fashion world were cool. “It’s a moment in time that this became relevant again. And I’m going to catch that wave.”

So asked the mysterious sender of an email I received the other day. I usually let these solicitations slipstream away. There was the nude dinner party, all the presentations a world away at Copenhagen Fashion Week, and the dentist to the stars who recently invited me over to see the clinic that he modeled after a nightclub. For some reason, it was the needles that, shall we say, pierced me.

Facial acupuncture is the latest thing, apparently, and a few sessions can help the skin produce collagen and look glowier and less wrinkly. My reason for going wasn’t to do with radiance, though. It just sounded weird, is why.

Photo by Natalia

The WTHN acupuncture studio is as efficient as its vowel-less name suggests. The Flatiron location is hardly bigger than a lozenge, super clean surfaces punctuated with the pretty-blobby and colorful designs of the products for sale. The woman who let me in had truly amazing nails, and we got to talking about her personal passion and million-dollar invention: long nails that contain a microchip. She showed me a video of how it works. A be-clawed drag queen extended her index finger to a not-at-all-memorable person who pointed their phone at the manicure. Insto-presto! The memorable person’s Instagram page popped up.

This conversation was rather absorbing, and you can see why even though I had shown up on time, I was late for my treatment. Natalia, the aesthetician who was waiting for me, seemed irritated with my blabbering, but then I realized that was just because I was blabbering and she was wearing a mask and I am paranoid. Natalia, who is so patient and incredibly nice, brought me to a private room where I stripped down to my skivvies and settled on top of a heated table. Natalia draped one of those silver heating blankets that marathoners use over me, and got to work.

First came a gorgeous round of slathering my face and neck and shoulders with some oil I was already too relaxed to ask about (inexcusable reporting, but who’s the boss of this Substack). Next was a mini rund of gua-sha, where she rolled a stone-cold smooth instrument over my forehead and jaw. It felt sensational! In my next life I want to come back as a roll of wallpaper.

The needles were the last bit. “Your face is more sensitive than the rest of your body,” Natalia told me, pricking my cheeks and the skin by my ears. She was not wrong. The stinging was brief. Then it was time to bake me, which involved Natalia covering my eyes with goggles, placing headphones on my ears, and lowering a contraption over my face that bathed me in a warm and low-key alarming red light. The guided meditation commenced over a soundscape of bloops and chimes. It was like listening to elevator music in heaven.

“I wasn’t exactly asleep but I wasn’t awake either,” I told Natalia once the final artificial sound gonged and she started removing the needles. “It was definitely strange. I kept seeing tulips in my head.”

“Then it worked,” she said.

Two other fun sleepy things: On my way out of WTHN, I bought a XYLPHN. Just kidding. I got these intriguing chamomile-magic mushroom chocolates that are supposed to help with slumber.

I’m obsessed with this young woman who sued the bank where she was working as a junior analyst for not letting her have nine hours a day to shower, eat and sleep. Apparently it all started when she stopped responding to work emails after midnight, when she was, presumably, sleeping.

They reached a settlement right before the trial was supposed to start, so the bank’s secrets aren’t out in the open, and my hero has millions of dollars to keep her afloat while she dreams up her early-stage career pivot.

Unrelatedly to any of the below: Picnic by Taha Clayton.

My friend just wrote a zingy Substack about her experience walking the runway for the Proenza show at New York Fashion Week. It reminded me that a) it’s New York Fashion Week b) she’s very, very tall and c)that it’s been a minute since I have hit “publish” on one of these.

Sadly, no modeling stories, but not for lack of trying. I interviewed the fashion designer Eileen Fisher on Zoom a few months ago and she complimented me on my stripy hair. I took that as an invitation to oh so casually drop that my yearlong dream is to supplement my journalism by being an Eileen Fisher model. Eileen Fisher herself was very gracious. I think she may have even said “I can see it.” I actually thought I had a shot. But my follow-up with her publicist elicited an lol-ish “you totally should!!!!!” And when I woke up in the middle of the night a few days later, on my birthday, my first thought, swear to g, was: “Your silver hair is no longer ironic.”

Thankfully, the freelance gig spigot has been on full blast. I spent New Years Eve at a party with the girls of sober TikTok and published a story about it in the New York Times; read up on Fanny Fern, the most handsomely paid newspaper columnist of the 1850s, and wrote a tribute to “the original Carrie Bradshaw” for The Wall Street Journal; and for Bloomberg I took a good hard look at the popularity of May Cobb, the author of The Hunting Wives, thinking about how her work fits into the explosion of conservative-coded entertainment and fashion and beauty standards. (I guess you could say my silver hair has gone from being ironic to an act of political protest?)

I had to read a few books of hers for the story. I know it’s rude to say “had” to but she wasn’t exactly the most forthcoming interview subject, which made writing the story a lot harder than it had to be, and that’s not rude, that’s just plain fact. Cobb writes salacious stories about the Real Housewives of Oil Country, Texas, but, like Sydney Sweeney, she won’t engage in anything to do with politics. I wanted to go deep on MAGA country and customs — the Kendra Scott necklaces and tradwife Pilates smoothies and Trumptastic taste. She didn’t want to go there. So I went there on a solo trip, and listened to a zillion episodes of the magnificent podcast, asked strangers on Instagram to tell me about ways they’re seeing a shift in the new normal, and took a detour into Why Lonesome Dove is having a comeback. (Speaking as somebody who recently read and loved the hide out of Larry McMurtry’s 1985 barnburner of a novel, don’t forget to read it before you die.)

I managed to resist reading A Little Life, Hanya Yanigahara’s wildly popular 1,000 page novel about four male friends in New York, ever since its publication. I like funny books, so a grim tome on abuse and suffering would not be up my alley, is what I’d always thought. Somehow, a copy pitched up in the mail, and it was in four portable volumes. They were pretty, and I caved. I peeked at the first page, then the second, got sucked in, and stayed with the twisted thing till the end. While you probably know about the pain and trauma that abound in the book, what you might not know is that it’s also the ultimate in lifestyle porn, with descriptions of vintage Saabs and low-to-the ground Finnish club chairs that are arousing to the point of making you want to rip off your clothes and shoot to the moon. I’m not saying that I only liked it for the lifestyles of the DINK and famous vibes, but I am saying that they really helped the unmentionable portions go down. Sue me for being shallow.

I just started another epic book I’d been avoiding for a very long time. Hint: It’s a first-date red flag. No, not The Fountainhead.

MAGA Pop Culture Gets Another Boost From The Hunting Wives Author

May Cobb / Photographer: Tyler Dane Hansen for Bloomberg Pursuits

Longview, Texas, is a two-hour drive due east of Dallas. Incorporated in 1871, the city flourished during the oil rush of the 1930s before settling into a perfectly pleasant slice of America. Now it’s undergoing a second boom beyond its bustling downtown, this one marked by steamy trysts in dark pine forests, married women who stay out past sunrise and murder. So much murder.

May Cobb, best known as the author of The Hunting Wives (Berkley), the novel behind the hit Netflix series of the same name, has remade her hometown into a fantasyland of rugged, rich men and women who are masters of social warfare and sexual intrigue. But she’s not just world-building. She’s responding to a growing appetite for entertainment that plays out on stages other than coastal favorites like Nantucket, Massachusetts, or Beverly Hills, California, and centers on characters who reflect the new faces of conservative America.

Her latest, All the Little Houses (Sourcebooks Landmark), doubles down on the glorious East Texas landscapes and ladies in denim and diamonds while turning the clock back to the 1980s. The unapologetically lurid tale of two families locked in an ever-complex cat’s cradle of class resentments and adulterous power plays also swarms with queen bees and jaw-droppingly muscular men that feel straight out of the Real Housewives playbook.

Cobb, 52, insists she’s not writing stories about politics, but her parade of oil-slicked 1 Percenters and “trad wives” — as right-wing influencers who promote submission and other traditional, née regressive, gender roles are called — reads like today’s viral Instagram Reels brought to literary life. Texas, a state of 32 million that’s long flirted with secession, now occupies the center of the new map of influence….

This skit kills me.

If this stuff intrigues you, highly recommend giving Mike Bloomberg a click, checking out the podcast, and preordering the clever and creepy trad-wive time-travel novel coming out in April, written by the show’s co-host Caro Claire Burke.

The other day at school pickup, I told about my hunt for MAGA-coded bits and bobs and she told me about “the Ruby Jude jean” (emphasis on “the”). Pro tip: When you google this telltale pant, the first thing that comes up is a knockoff pair from Old Navy.

I kind of want them. In the same wash that the model is wearing: Abyss.

Last week, while trying to sculpt some nebulous feeling into a grandiose and finely articulated idea that I could shoehorn into an article I was writing, I leaned on my internet friends. I was trying to wrap my head around the MAGA-fication of our entire culture—you know, trad wives, beef tallow, the fact that every Sally Rooney girlie I know is a newly obsessed with Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry’s 1985 Texas Rangers masterpiece (I’m almost done, and yes, it is a masterpiece, and yes I am a cliche). I asked my digital friends to chime in with other examples.

The responses have been fascinating. And fascinatingly numerous! Every time I clear my messages, I find 10 more. Please feel free to add your favorite MAGA-coded anything in the comments!

Netflix’s Members Only: Palm Beach

Landman

Feeding meat to babies

Sourdough bread as Vogue’s “hottest accessory of 2026 so far”

The Bezos wedding

The girl power space shuttle

Bass Pro Shop hats

Butter yellow

Alix Earle and Tom Brody dating rumor

Sydney Sweeney

Ruby Jude

Tuckernuck

Under Armour

Taylor and Travis

Secret Life of Mormons

The end of body positivity

Kendra Scott

Floor length fur coats

The Bachelor

Tim Allen’s whole career

Hockey romance noels

Succession

Morgan Wallen

Tate McRae and Morgan Wallen

Erika Kirke

Elderberry Syrup

This vintage Tiffany’s computer bookmark is everything.

New year, same old problems. In the cold light of early January, when I take stock of my myriad failings, a few vows invariably appear on my list of resolutions. Spend more time reading books. Stay up past 9:30 p.m. every so often. Be a truly excellent giver of gifts.

The last one has proven the hardest to manifest. The Lauren of my wildest dreams is always on the lookout for perfect tokens of affection, no matter the time of year. Not necessarily the most lavish items, but the ones that say: I see you. I listen to you. I think of you at every turn. Sometimes I get it right, like the other night, when a book critic friend had me over for dinner and I brought her a fabulous pair of kiwi green Japanese slipper-socks instead of a so-so Sauvignon. She put them on at dinner and texted me the next afternoon to report that she had yet to take them off. More often, though, I’m short on time and strapped for inspiration. The scented candle industry owes me.

Late last month I found myself with a single item in my holiday hamper—a Canadian planner that I bought for my London, Ontario-born mother. One gift down, nine to go. The flurry of Black Friday emails was not getting me in the mood. So many lists! So much stuff! It was while unsubscribing from a particularly aggressive online retailer that an idea struck: Why not turn my panicked predicament into a treasure hunt? One that could double as a bulwark against all this unthinking consumerism, environmental waste, and the copy-and-paste gift-guide economy. Anything vintage, antique, used or preloved was acceptable. If it didn’t have a past life, well, I wished it the best. Turned out I wasn’t the only one to have this idea. According to a report from eBay, about 86% of Gen Z-ers say they are more likely to buy a secondhand holiday gift this year than they would have been in the past.

Even Kaitlin Phillips, creator of the wildly stylish Substack, said she thought the kids and I were onto something. “Risk-taking has gone out of gift-giving, and it’s a shame,” she said. Clicking on affiliate links and relying on big-box retailers “is how you end up giving someone an espresso machine or some other gadget they could just buy themselves,” she concluded with an audible shudder.

Project Re-giving officially commenced at the end of Thanksgiving weekend, while enjoying a “mindfulness” overnight with my family at a spa in the Berkshires, a patch of Massachusetts that happens to be a hotbed of estate sales and antique shops. My determination clicked in as I lay on top of bolsters during a restorative reiki session, my mind wafting over all of the people I am lucky enough to call family. Five minutes after checking out of the spa, I was stepping into The Galleries at Knollwood in Lee, Mass. Richard A. LaVigné, the kindly proprietor, greeted my husband and me in a camel hair suit and pocket square and let us ramble around his shop. Beyond a table laden with film history books, I spotted a pair of ceramic cats draped over a butter-yellow slipper chair.

Film history books galore

A tin box perfect for someone named Schmidt

And then I noticed something else: a large tin box with a design of dancing aristocrats and the word “Schmidt” across the side. Perfect for the Pokemon card collection of my sister’s partner, one Dr. Schmidt. “I didn’t even know what I was looking for,” I exclaimed in the car. “The piece was calling out to me.”

My children groaned, and requested that their gifts not be associated with this project.

*

We drove over to Great Barrington, home of the Berkshire Galleries, a supermarket-size complex that houses collections from around 30 vendors. I’d been here a few times before, enough to become partial to the husband and wife team who stocks their glass case with delightful curios, like oversize cameo hairpins or the Austrian figurine of a man in a doctor’s coat holding a jar of brains that used to occupy a lower shelf. Talk about the one that got away! Today, up on a high shelf, was a silver 1927 women’s tennis trophy cup. It was the chicest thing ever, and priced at $58. My home design-obsessed sister was one lucky duck.

The one that got away looked kind of like this.

Back home in the city, I dove in deeper. I’d given myself a key, and now I got to keep entering new realms. More motivating than the stress of the ticking clock was the adventure inherent in the mission itself. There were so many stores and markets I’d walked by countless times, so many objects with past lives winking at me from the stoops of their previous owners. And eBay almost made it too easy - all I had to do was type in “Nymphenburg porcelain figurines” or “Italian ashtray 1960s” and I was drowning in the stuff of my most elaborate fantasies.

My internet tabs began to include a consignment store in Montreal, another one in Houston; and the resale site Poshmark, where I located the fabulous vintage computer-shaped Tiffany bookmark that my literary agent mother-in-law is bound to get a tickle out of. One night at bedtime, during a boring volleyball-parents Zoom call, I found my way to the vintage Coney Island funhouse mirrorson the website of the design store Creel and Gow. May my 14-year-old son take back what he said in the car.

This left two more in-laws, my husband, my daughter, and my father. I combed through the exquisitely maintained consignment stores of the Upper East Side and also Long Island City’s John Koch Antiques, a favorite of set decorators for its jumble of estate sale pickings, like antique muffin stands and equine desk accessories. Of course I kept shopping when I came back to my decidedly un-horsey desk. I unheard my daughter’s cries of protest and located a pile of gossipy YA paperbacks from the 1980s on abebooks.com.

The trouble with vintage shopping is that once you start knowing where to look, the chase becomes conclusion-proof. Keep clicking, and you’re bound to find something even more spectacular or charming than your last favorite thing. I had to yank myself out of a sterling silver antique baby spoon eBay rabbit hole in order to get down to business (may the eventual owner of this cherubic beauty suck on it in good health).

The auction site Doyle had a set of Dodie Thayer lettuce plates and I made a note to return on the day I could place my bid. They would delight my other mother in law, an artist and excellent soup maker.

My father generally receives a Dad Book (you know, something 800 pages about the Roosevelts) for the holidays. A perusal of the RealReal’s home vertical served up a pair of sculptural Alexandra von Furstenberg bookends that I could see sitting on my parents’ bookshelves alongside their framed family photos and hardcovers. I opened a new tab and headed over to Gen Z-approved resale site Noihsaf (“fashion” spelled backwards, get it?) and happened upon this little mushroom lamp. It was just like the one that I’d seen my husband admiring at the MoMA design store a few months ago.

When my friend Ben asked me to meet him for coffee, I countered by asking that he bring me to his favorite shop that sells old things. Which was how I found myself at Mitari, a serene, low-lit gem specializing in Japanese crafts and antiques. I walked a few admiring laps, then stopped in front of the clay shards arrayed on the sale shelf in the back of the room. The shopkeeper told me that the remnants were from ancient Korea, and were now being sold as chopstick rests. The closest thing to sushi I’d ever seen my father-in-law eat was a smoked salmon bagel, but he is a brainy art dealer and he loves beautiful things. The pieces in my palm were entrancing — jagged bits still slicked with their original glaze, resilient enough to have survived some two thousand years, and the subway ride home with me.

Now the only thing left to do is compulsively admire my collection of secondhand spoils. I’m going to miss them. And I’m probably going to need a new resolution.

Gross, right?

A company called PureGym had the nerve to buy the blink gym chain. They jacked up the prices (it used to be, like $13 a month). They got rid of the welcome desk at my local gym and the pesky humans that manned it, and installed a pair of “safety pods” at the entrance. To get inside, you have to pull up an app, hold up your phone, wait for Door 1 to slide open, step inside the capsule, wait for Door 1 to close, stand there for the longest moment of your life, and wait for Door 2 to open. To leave the gym, you have to do the exact same thing in reverse. I heard one guy got stuck in there.

Here is what the whole ordeal looks like:

The fabulous editors at are all over this nonsense. The commenters on the publication’s Instagram page say they protesting via quitting their memberships and calling the fire department. There is no fire exit at present. And while we’re at it: there aren’t even any towels. Come on, man!

“How’s your Substack?”

A friend asked me this the other day when we met up for coffee. It came out as if he were asking after my cat*. Then he ordered a cup of Jello with whipped cream on top**.

(*I don’t have a cat, **pictured above)

The weird thing about this Substack business is that the more Lauren Gets a Life, the less love (and subscribers, ahem) Get a Life With Lauren gets. Let’s put an end to that!

First there was a v exciting date with and her mom, who told me that she self-identifies as an Ed Koren cartoon, and whom I got such a kick out of.

We met up at a wine bar presided over by the sourest lady, like she-deserves-an-award sour. Zoe’s friend was at the bar, too, on an internet date. We did a good job not harassing them. Their date appeared to be going well - lots of “mirroring” of body language, and they had matching glasses - but according to the postmortem, there was “no chemistry.” After Zoe’s mom settled the bill with the aerobically sour lady, we crossed the street and saw James L. Brooks and Albert Brooks (no relation) “in conversation” at the 92nd Street Y. They were there to discuss their new picture Ella McCay and the time they shot the sweaty news anchor scene in Network (there were space heaters by Albert’s feet and tubes of water behind his ears).

James L. has the least sour demeanor ever, which evened the evening out.

Weirdly, I found myself back at the 92nd Street Y, a venue I’d never set foot in before, a mere 24 hours later, this time to see . I met Tamar I met when I edited a piece of hers for Vogue. She made the most delicious deviled eggs for my How Could She book party in Hudson. Now we were there to celebrate her book, the beautiful and sage Feast on Your Life. She was chatting with her upstate mate .

The main takeaways : Malcolm Gladwell loves cars. Tamar’s brain is an international (she’s living in Madrid) treasure and her posture is bananas. Must revisit the work of M.F.K Fisher, Tamar’s hero. Oh and, if you’re a gazillionaire you can have an event at Prune, the most perfect restaurant in history, which had the audacity to close but is now back for special events. Throw Tamar a Feast on Your Life book party and invite me, why don’t you?

In other news, I started reading A Little Life, and I’m so glad I did. I prayed gift guide season would end soon (I’m glad you like your coffee maker / tapered candles / Sofia Coppola night cream but… [vomit emoji]). I spent some time contemplating this headline, and what it means for the state of civilization:

Last but not least sparkly, after reporting a forthcoming article on “party dressing,” I was inspired to put on the sequin dress that I ordered from Poshmark earlier this year, when I needed something to cheer me up. It did then, and it does now.

Sequins are highly underrated.

If you enjoyed this, share with a pal? New subscribers are the new sequins.

A masterpiece by Edward Gorey

The other night I did something wild and crazy and I left my apartment. I was invited to an event in Red Hook, by ’s Jones Road, the makeup line that all the over 40s love to smoosh all over their faces (smooshing rather than fine-tuning any techniques is a big part of the brand’s ethos, and I’m all for it). The shindig was at a candle factory in Red Hook, and the room was full of 20-somethings. I made chit chat with a woman who works in book marketing, as well as a nice beauty editor whose company’s increasingly strict policy means she now commutes from rural New Jersey to her Big City magazine job four days a week. As we spoke, it dawned on me that I don’t take nearly enough advantage of my tuned-out boss (that would be me) and my 24/7 WFH set-up. So I took a field trip!

Yesterday, after putting the finishing touches on an article, I made like Lily Allen and hopped on the F train. My destination: The Society of Illustrators’ Upper East Side townhouse. The girl at the front desk did a wonderful job letting me in without taking her eyes off her book, and up the creaky stairs I went.

World’s most awesome museum hallway

The third floor is home to the weirdest bar (in that it exists at the top of a townhouse that doesn’t see a lot of foot traffic). It’s also home to another weird and wonderful thing: an exhibition of Edward Gorey illustrations on the occasion of the centenary of his blessed birth.

Weird, amirite?

The townhouse with a bar on the third floor closes at 5 pm, so I only had twenty minutes to enjoy the work. A few highlights:

A book cover for a book that was called IS. The publisher changed the title, so the piece became a gift to the author.

A rejected New Yorker cover.

A “reverse illustration” literary challenge published in The New York Times Book Review. Writers were given two illustrations and asked to come up with short stories to accompany them. Here is Jamaica Kincaid’s.

The two patrons of the bar on the third floor of a townhouse, taking a break from their cocktails to stage a photo shoot.

The bathroom was pretty fab, too.

P.S. My new regular feature for The Wall Street Journal, Try Me, just launched. For the first one I turned my home into a coffee shop. You can read it here.

P.P.S. Next time I play hooky, where should I go?

I simplified it to meet my rudimentary baking skills. You can devise your own version.

(Heartbreaking) inspiration in pictures:

Not since that first-person piece about participating in a mud pit belly flop contest (a story that has been scrubbed from the internet) have I enjoyed such a flurry of reader mail. I wrote a piece for The New York Times about the jarring disparity between need for and supply of perimenopausal care, and I’m sad but very not shocked to say it resonated with so many strangers.

I get it. Years went by between the time I was brushed off when I told a doctor that I suspected that my terrible sleep and intractable potbelly might have something to do with hormonal fluctuations and the day I finally found my way to the clinic of a doctor whose whole raison d’être was actually believing in women. She wore Louboutins and reminded me of a fancy vampire. She shuttered her practice before I could book my next appointment, but at least we had our time together in her exam room. And my potbelly and I knew we were onto something.

You can read my story, The Perimenopause Whisper Network, here. And if you suspect you need help but you don’t have access to an enlightened local provider, the telehealth companies are standing by.

In other inside-baseball media news, I’ve noticed this new thing where publicists turn down interview requests if the story a journalist is pursuing isn’t going to be exclusively about their client. It’s almost as if they’d rather boss a freelancer into writing a lousy advertorial (at a lousy freelance rate) than have their client appear in the lamestream fake news a robustly reported work of actual journalism.

Finally, this exists:

Yes, it’s a scrunchie for your yoga mat.

Namaste!

A recent morning moment

For reasons professional and otherwise, I have been flipping through a ton of cookbooks lately. There’s a new tower in my home office, a profusion of volumes promising to help me bake like Ottolenghi’s pastry chef and cure my own salmon and nourish myself through menopause (fiber really is the new protein, to go by that book).

This morning I was up early, half-listening and absently glancing at my latest cookbook, looking for inspiration for my mother’s birthday dinner, when I came across something that caught me off guard. Embedded in the introduction to a bestselling cookbook was a startlingly raw and philosophical passage. tells her reader that she fell into a deep depression following the success of her last cookbook, the butcherblock-buster Salt Fat Acid Heat.

“Clinical depression, potent and ravenous, swallowed me whole. And the sense of joy I’d always found in cooking, eating, and more generally in life no longer felt attainable. This period of turmoil and melancholy led me (slowly, slowly) to recalibrate my values… My North Star — as simple as it is profound — is the hard-won understanding that our most precious currency is time… The beauty of cooking is that it’s a vessel for both time and attention. Cooking for someone, or sitting down for a meal together, is about more than nourishment.”

Something shifted in me when I read that. It was a flash of recognition, an explanation as to why I love to cook. It’s not for a passion for shopping and shlepping and slicing and dicing. The last time I lived alone, I subsisted on Grape Nuts with raisins. When I have you at my table, or stop to make something for yours, we are connecting in a way that no lunch out or text exchange comes close to. It brings me an acute sense of joy to make a batch of overnight chocolate chip cookies and mail them to my friend in New Jersey, or bring them to the guys who linger outside the men’s shelter around the corner from me.

Mom’s birthday dinner is tomorrow night. When I came across Nosrat’s words I stood there and let them soak in, and realized that birthday dinner for my mother isn’t “birthday dinner” so much as it’s “for my mother,” and “with my mother,” who just turned beep-beep years old. How precious is that, a few hours to put the rest of our lives on hold so we can be present, together. I don’t have to kill myself over the exact contents of the menu. If everything goes very well, we won’t even notice the food.

Do you have a warm and fuzzy home cooking memory that this brings up? Pull up a chair and share it, won’t you?

Ladies and germs, it’s on!

Extremely niche, but have you ever noticed how people who used to be regular-degular writers before they veered into screenwriting love to tell anyone who dares express similar ambitions how COMPLETELY DIFFERENT the two skills are, and how you may as well try to learn how to play the violin or memorize the Fibonacci sequence?

It’s a similar thing, I’ve found, when people in the journalism trenches start “consulting.” I’ve always been curious about what consulting actually entails. Is it a secret dark art or is it just a face-saving way of saying “freelancing”? When I ask my fellow members of the fourth estate who’ve added the C-word to their resumes, they tend to deflect. IT’S JUST THIS THING, they mumble. But I am nosy, and maybe a little eager to branch out and try new things?

So I am about to find out another way. Ten minutes ago I was minding my own business, working on final edits on a magazine article I’m writing, and then next thing I knew I launched a business. Let’s hear it for Mechling Media!

I took my new LinkedIn profile pic while on a FaceTime call let’s hear it for multitasking!

Given that I am tooting my strategic horn I should probably pretend to have a deck or game plan up my sleeve, but honestly I just want see how my one-of-a-kind brain can be of service to you - and you, and you, and your uncle, and your neighbor (assuming they are also nice enough and their businesses are above board). If you are looking for anything to do with words or messaging or brainstorming fun ways to get people excited about whatever cool thing you are working on, I’m your woman.

Come to think of it, I’ve already overseen editorial projects for Tory Burch, Apple and Gwyneth Paltrow (not Apple, Gwyneth’s daughter — Apple COMPUTERS). Have I been a consultant all this time without realizing it? Jump on this opportunity before my dance card fills up!

Speaking of Soft Launches

….

I made more pillows. Finding beautiful vintage fabrics and then transforming them into squares and rectangles that you can rest your head on or throw at your [fill in the blank] is weirdly satisfying.

Pillows are awesome. They’re soft and they do a lot of work. A couch on its own? Sad. A couch with a fabulous pair of decorative pillows? Now we’re talking. I’m open to commissions. The holiday’s are about to sneak up on us all.

The latest beauties.

My partner in pillow-ing.

Spotted in Great Barrington

Greetings and salutations! This is going to be short and sweet, a sign of life, a pulse from my home office, a finger waggle from the great beyond. I am here, my friends, and up to my ears in all sorts of business. I will have lots of fun stuff to share with you soon. For now I thought I’d give you a brief BTS tour of an article I just wrote for W Magazine: a guide to the beautiful Berkshires.

When my lovely editor at W reached out and said that she was looking for a travel story, and soon, there was no question what I wanted to share with the world: It’s the beauty of the Berkshires, the one place in America where everybody looks like Larry David or a character in a Roz Chast cartoon. I interviewed former Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl, who said that everybody there dresses “rich hippie” — picture flowing scarves, billowing skirts, no-nonsense REI footwear, and Eileen Fisher (whose head designer, Julie Rubiner, another voice in the piece, happens to be a superstar resident (and married to the area’s superstar cheesemonger Matt Rubiner - does it get more “rich hippie” than that?!).

‘Rich hippie’ cheese from Rubiners

As my old college chum and current Williams College art professor (construction worker whistle!) Luke Fishbeck put it, “part of the charm here is that it’s not “cool” - which can manifest as inconvenience - there is no rideshare, no food delivery, good coffee and pizza are very hard to find. But the public libraries are amazing and there’s lots of trees.”

I love the Berkshires because they’re just east of the super fashionable Hudson Valley, but completely different vibe-wise. As soon as you cross the New York - Massachusetts border, you will see far fewer faux-farmers tootling around in their convertibles. I recommend sitting at the cafe at the Great Barrington Food Coop and eavesdropping on the kings and queens on their coffee dates. Last time I did so, the two 80-something women at the next table were discussing Beck and Banksy and Scientology and I couldn’t resist chiming in. I even got one of their numbers (hi, Carol!)

So read my article and make your to do list and pray that there is no asshole invasion before you get your butt out of town.

In other news…

I am reading Jonathan Mahler’s juicy as heck history of New York in the 80s. It’s got subway incidents, super-textured accounts of tabloid culture (the once iconic Daily News office is described as having the atmosphere of an ashtray) and early glimpses of Rupert and Page Six and Giuliani and Mr. Cheeto.

Now that I find myself reading so much nonfiction, I wonder: am becoming a dad? All the better to win the Larry David lookalike contest.

P.S.

Here is a sample of Luke’s work, from a past life

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This image will make sense in a second.

I arrived on time but out of sorts — I’ve been juggling a lot, what with the first week of school and a couple of deadlines and a person from my past who keeps staring at my Instagram stories and my previously mentioned midlife crisis. ANYWAY.

Tanya, who had been up baking since the commendable hour of five, was already seated in the garden, nursing a glamorous looking coffee thing that comes served in a wine glass. (Hold up. Coffee things can come in wine glasses?)

I waved at her and placed my order. The baristas must have sensed my state of everywhere-all-at-once. One of them refused to hand me my enormous bottle of seltzer without twisting it open herself, and then suggested she carry it out for me. I said I was fine, that I used to be a waitress. “You sure?” she asked. “You got this!” her fellow barista said.

They both looked dubious as I headed to the garden.

This is going somewhere. I promise.

I might not appear to be built out of dotted Is and crossed Ts but … I made a pillow!

This is a big deal. This is growing and changing. This is Get a Life With Lauren-ing.

See, I never think about things like couches and grouting and cushions and lampshades. Well, that’s not totally true. My dear friend and I send each other pictures of knobs all day long. But that’s only because we think the word knob is funny.

Knob!

Anyway, I have no idea how I happened to stumble across this old pattern called Fairie Garden, but weird things happen when you are prone to procrastination. I encountered these fairies and my heart stopped. Will you look at this design? It’s part paper doll, part Henry Darger. You can go on the internet and read more about it. (If you learn what decade it’s from, please let me know!)

So anyway. My heart started up again and I ordered a bolt of fabric and then I waited and then it came and then I ordered two pillow inserts and then they came and then I found a guy who would stitch up pillows and now I will place them in my reading nook, so my ass can be more or less permanently fused to the fabulous fairiescape’s bluebells and butterflies and the daisy chain of babes that live among them.

I took my beauties home on the G train, and an older lady got up at the stop before me and muttered “good pillows” as she exited the train.

“Good knobs,” I replied. (No, I did not.)

I got this!

PS If you want me to make you a pillow, you know how to find me.

John Singer Sargent knew what was up.

Dear Estee,

I started this off as a mini essay, but I came back to the top and added the “Dear Estee,” part. This topic is too tender not to treat it as such. (Besides, your name is too lovely not to croon.) I am not used to writing about such vulnerable things, so maybe tricking myself into thinking it’s a letter makes it easier?

Ah, the woman's midlife crisis! Highly underrated. Men's breakdowns are the stuff of sportswear and swimsuit-model cliches, but we have a much richer and more mysterious unraveling, don’t we? For all our powers of communication (let’s hear it for our gift of gab, “born to yap” merch, etc.), women tend to fall apart in the shadows.

I have experienced a hundred personal essays' worth of mini-crises since I turned 45. The one that comes to mind as I think about your question is my professional midlife crisis. Somehow I seem to have blinked and became forty[bleeeeeeeeeep] years old, almost forty[bleeeeeeeeeepitybleep] years old, which means that unless something totally crazy is going to fall from the sky when I’m walking my future granddaughter around the park, I’ve reached the apex of my career — earnings-wise, and also status-wise.

Lady earnings in a nutshell.

We’ve all seen the Bureau of Labor Statistic charts that map a woman's earning power over her lifespan. It looks a little bit like that snake who ate a hat in The Little Prince: a slow march up and then a little plateau and then — boop! — back down you go. Men get more time to rock out and bring home the serious bacon. As for us, well, it was nice while it lasted?

I sort of feel like I’m hovering on top of that hungry snake-hat graph, and helping myself to the vantage point. I should back up and explain: It’s been a summer of soul searching, and now it’s going to be a fall of job searching. I have the most wonderful family. A place I call home. A community like no other. And now it’s time to plan my next step forward. I’ve been thinking a lot about what came before, and what comes next.

When I was younger, my job searches were driven by unthinking ambition, and, if we're going to be honest, desperation. Now there’s a huge element of reflection setting in, of taking stock and asking myself: What have I loved to do? What do I still love to do? What have I already achieved, and might not need to do again, and again? What new experiences do I want to try out? How do I want my days to feel: jagged and hopped up on adrenaline, or soft and curious? Do I want electric shocks or intellectual tummy rubs?

Tummy rubs!

When I think of all that I got to do in my youth, and in my late youth, and in my very extended late youth — jagged and stressful periods all of them — I feel a certain satisfaction. Or maybe the word is “gratitude”? I don’t entirely recognize the young woman who stayed in newspaper offices till 11:30 at night and who got to stuff a tape recorder in Beyonce and Anthony Weiner’s faces. Somehow I got to travel around North America for book events when my debut novel came out. I got to yap on podcasts with my dear friend Rachel when my other debut book came out (publishing likes to say you're a “debut” author).

When I line up my next proper job, I will be in the tummy-rub camp. I certainly won't be entering the chat as somebody looking to be formed. Just as I am proud of my silver hair, I am happy to say that my greatest skill is my experience. Not only in terms of newspaper clips and years in the service to various concerns, but what I can bring to the table in terms of a not-short lifetime of being a human, a mother, a friend, a wife, a reader, a writer and a joke-teller. Heart, brain, mouth.

Something I've been asking myself a lot these days is: "Ok, Lauren, what do you want to do with the second half of your working years?" I don’t have an answer. All I know is I don't want to copy and paste the last two decades into the future. I'd far rather be stupid at something completely new. Write a romantic comedy? Go to trade school? Start a pillow company? My days of being a young'un trying to line up mentors are over. Now it’s my turn to be a better listener, and do the giving.

Weird as it is to say, Estee, that is what being ambitious looks like to me these days.

I hope we can talk more — I’m dying to know how you’ve been making sense of these scary questions yourself.

Xo

Lauren

To everybody but Estee: If you like my Substack, would you please consider becoming a paid subscriber, and supporting my non-lucrative nor AI-assisted life choices? Otherwise, thank you for reading all this way down! xo