A Week In London

What I saw, ate, wore, thought, bought. I'm gonna try to do this entirely in photo captions so help me god

I loved the Leigh Bowery show at the Tate (I put some picts and videos in Notes). Interesting to play the game “Could this happen for the equivalent butch queer woman from the early nineties?” (And who even would that be?) Imagine her letter soaked in cunt juice in a glass case in the Tate.

I am not a foodie and really just pick restuarants at random based on “healthy food nearby” typed into the map (which is a terrible way to find healthy food because it’s all smoothies chains.) But we had a good time at Govinda’s, next door to/part of the Hare Krishna temple. There was a lot happening all around us (like this photo shoot) while we ate our dinner at a table on the sidewalk.

My fellow Women’s Prize shortlist nominees. I got to know these women a bit, throughout a week of events, and by the end of the week I was saying things to my girlfriend like “Nussaibah wouldn’t say ‘Do I look allright?’ she’d say something like, ‘How can you even stand my beauty?!’ From left to right: Me, Aria Aber, Yael van der Wouden, Sanam Mahloudji, Nussaibah Younis, and Elizabeth Strout. Note these blue silk pants I’m wearing — there’s something going on with them that I didn’t know at the time (keep reading.)

It was extra nightmarish to watch Los Angeles on the news from London. There were multiple painful things going on back home, public and private, that made the whole trip surreal and challenging, but I tried to stay in the moment. Here I am getting ready to meet the Queen (it blows my mind how no one clicks on the videos on Substack):

We were given this laminated card to study before the Queen arrived. I did a sort of bow/curtsy flustered combo:

Waiting for the elevator, heading to the Women’s Prize ceremony. This person thinks maybe she will win. (Spoiler: she won’t!)

On the way to the prize ceremony Anna Frame from Cannongate (my UK publisher), shows me the images for an article that comes out the next day. I’m nervous about this but happy to see Chantal Anderson’s picts. Right now I feel like I’m writing in the voice of A Very Young Dancer. Did anyone else read that book as a girl? A Very Middle-Aged Writer. And now here comes the third picture of me in a mirror. Cameras do tend to nose their way towards mirrors; I guess we’re trying to catch life in the act of lifeing.

While I was standing to the side of the stage, waiting for them to announce the winner, I thought: I never seem to progress internally in relation to prizes; I’m standing here in a hell state, just as I always have. So, while I clapped and listened to speeches, I tried out this new thing I’d just learned in therapy, Attunement, Balance, and Coherence, the ABC of parenting (but you can do it on your own parts.) Attunement was thinking I feel nervous, excited, my feet and back hurt, I’m sad about other things right now, that have nothing to do with this. Balance was breathing, doing a little meditation, feeling my body relax. The biggest one for me right now is Coherence, which I practiced by thinking This is my reality. The fact that it’s my experience is enough to make it reality. It doesn’t have to be my dad’s reality/my mom’s reality/my girlfriend’s reality/the public’s reality etc to be real. When they said the winner (Yael, whose great book The Safekeep I mentioned a few weeks ago) I thought, Well, in a way I won because doing this ABC thing was a real breakthrough. But I was sad not to say my speech and thank many people, including my girlfriend. Here I am afterwards, massaging her feet while processing the whole thing. She laughed when I took this picture, thinking I wanted proof of what a terrific girlfriend I was, but actually I just didn’t want to forget this moment, how good it felt to sit on the bed with her and gab about it all.