A man in a long black coat walked into the bookshop and asked to order a book called “Kill Your Darlings.” I took down his personal details – his name was William– so we could contact him when the book arrived. He wanted it soon, before he was due to travel. “No problem,” I said and he walked out the door.

Ten seconds later, I stupidly realized there were multiple books with this title, and I had no idea which one he actually wanted. I tried to quickly scramble out the door to catch him but there was a pile of newly delivered boxes of books blocking my way.

Once I cleared the boxes, there was a crowd of people by the card spinner blocking the door. The customer was getting away.

That’s how I ended up running down the street yelling, “WILLIAM!!! WILLIAM!!! WIIIIIILLLLIIIIIIAM!!!” on the one day I decide to wear a skirt, tights and large black boots. My oversized black cardigan began to slide off and my hair flew behind me as I sprinted – people on the street turned to stare at me chasing this man.

William was fast. He was over a block away before he finally heard me and turned around to see me hurtling towards him at full-speed.

“What…what was the author’s name?” I gasped.

William looked startled.

“Peter Swanson,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said.

I straightened out my cardigan and coughed. Then I headed back up the hill to bookshop.

Sally was at the register when I arrived back.

“WILLIAAAAAAM!!!!” she bellowed, leaning over the counter.

“You literally looked like you were out of a romantic comedy film chasing your long-lost love.”

Fridays are my favorite day to work at the bookshop. They’re busy and buzzy and everyone is in a good mood.

Behind the counter, I was asking Gregg something but he misheard me. “Did you just say ‘kung fu…guitar sports?’” he asked. And we loudly just kept repeating “kung fu guitar sports” over and over again when the man at the register tutted, because we were ignoring him trying to pay.

“Excuse me,” he said.

“Sorry,” Gregg said.

“But do you have any books about martial arts and string instruments – together?” the man asked in a deadpan voice.

We looked at him in awe, and then Gregg guffawed and wrote, “kung fu guitar sports” on his hand in permanent black marker, for reasons that still evade me now.

Then, a group of Americans came into the bookshop – a couple from Chicago who have lived in London for twenty years were showing a visiting couple their favourite spots.

I don’t know what it was, but they thought I was hilarious, and I say this not as a brag, but as more of a shock because British people don’t think I’m funny, simply because the Brits are so clever and witty, so I really just come in at average here.

I was also throwing them very low-hanging fruit dad-quality jokes.

“How did you end up getting to stay in London?” they asked me.

“I made a British man fall in love with me,” I said. “And it took a few goes to find one that would, let me tell you!” I added, while Sally (British) rolled her eyes next to me.

My friend Michelle was born and raised in New York City. She came to London a few years ago for a summer for while researching a book she was writing about different Chinatowns around the world. She told me that when she left London after a few months here, she sobbed.

“Why?” I asked

“Because I realized I’d been lied to my entire life. I was told that New York City was the best city in the world and that nowhere else compared,” she said. “That New Yorkers were the most interesting, funny people in the world.”

“And?” I said.

“Jess, the man who takes my ticket on the train here is funnier than my funniest friend back home,” she had said, stressed by this realization.

This pleased me. Most New Yorkers I met would not be swayed that their city wasn’t the best. I don’t necessarily think London is better than New York (I love visiting New York), but I would say it’s on par. The energy in New York, and in New Yorkers, is incredible, but it’s also exhausting.

Michelle’s comments reminded me of how all the kids at my university who were like her, born and raised in New York, always seemed slightly dissatisfied with everything. Nothing in Providence, Rhode Island or Boston was quite as good as what they were used to in New York (in their opinion). That was the first time I realized that it is a blessing to be from a mediocre place, like I am. People like me – we’re happy anywhere. Everywhere. I’m from a place with no trees, so just the mere presence of small oak tree can stun me. Everywhere I go, I think, “At least it’s better than my terrible town.”

And yet, my parents are finally selling our family home this year and moving to – of all places – a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, and I am devastated.

My brother could not care less. He’s thrilled: “I will never ever ever return to that town,” he says.

Whereas, I like going back for Christmas or Thanksgiving because I have what he lacks – a heart. An ounce of sentimentality. Nostalgia. It wasn’t a cool place to grow up, but I had a happy, safe childhood in Texas and so did he. I hate that I’m never going to be able to return home in winter to my childhood home and sleep in my childhood (and teenage) bed. I like driving by my high school boyfriend’s house once a year and cringing. I like getting bad coffee and blueberry bagels at the same spot my best friend and I frequented as teenagers who were dying to escape our town. I like eating at the Waffle House. I like wandering around a Walmart the size of Wembley Stadium.

I like the slow pace of life, the big roads, the giant sky with a horizon that stretches forever. I like how there is no traffic and there is no reason to rush, ever.

One week a year, that is.

If I had to move there as an adult, I would quickly perish. But I’m still coming to terms with the fact that after this final Christmas in my hometown, I’ll never return. I’m not even sure I’m allowed to care at this age, but I do. Can you be over the age of 35 and still cry when your parents sell your childhood home?

Anyway. Back at the bookshop, a ten-year-old girl with glasses walked up to the register and handed me the latest Diary of A Wimpy Kid and as her mom paid, she jumped up and down in excitement in anticipation of reading it.

What was the last book that made you do that? At the bookshop, I’ve seen it happen with Sally Rooney’s latest release. I also saw a woman jump up and down when she found that we had Golden Mole by Katherine Rundell in stock. And usually as soon as the Booker Prize is announced, people flood the bookshop to buy the winner and they emerge triumphant if they snag a copy before we sell out.

People also tend to do a jig when they find the right book they want to give to a friend for their birthday. That’s one of my top favourite purchase moments – when a person comes in who is so enthusiastic about a book that they’re buying multiple copies to give their friends (I’ve personally seen this with Orbital, Demon Copperhead and James). But my single most favorite customer purchase is a grandparent buying books for their grandchildren.

They come in with a hardcopy list, and they pull it out of their pocket. It’s a scrappy piece of paper with scrawled spider-y handwriting in ink, and we try to decipher the titles together. They are often from a series, so it is imperative that we grab the correct book.

“Dog Man…Lord of the …Fleas…” they’ll read out to me.

“Lottie Brooks…the…Mega…Complicated Crushes.”

“The Adventures of…Captain Underpants?”

They always buy a stack of books, and it is truly something that makes me feel better on bad days. May grandparents always spoil their grandchildren with books.

One day, I was chatting to a grandmother in the bookshop. She had seven of grandchildren. She leaned over and said, “You’re not supposed to have a favourite, but I do. Milo. They others whinge all the time, but Milo? Milo is special. He’s only eight, but he’s a thinker. An artist.”

***

I recently saw a play that moved me to tears. This is not uncommon. I cry at most performances, to the point where I try not to wear mascara or eyeliner when I see productions anymore.

The play was called (the) Woman and it was a brutally honest, smart, funny play showing in a small theatre in North London. As the lights came up, the man next me said, “Bit emotional for you, eh?”

My friend Rachel and I saw The Notebook when it came out in theatres. We were spending the summer in Chicago at internships – hers at an art museum, mine at…I don’t even remember what I doing, if I’m honest. I was working at university in Chicago and, I think I moved boxes of books or counted books. I don’t know. Lots of admin, I think.

Now that I live in England, I’ve realized how different university is compared to the US. I still find it slightly insane that the day I arrived at college, I had to sleep in a room with a total stranger 1.5 meters away from me for the entire year.

That’s apparently not a thing in England. Students get private rooms. Do you know how completely different my life would have been if I’d had my own room? Do you know many fewer cigarettes I would have smoked out the window with my European roommate if she had not existed? Thousands. Do you know how many more hours of sleep I would have had? Hundreds. My god!

But perhaps the biggest difference between university in the two countries is that American college students need fake IDs if they want to get into bars and clubs to drink, and British university students absolutely do not.

Some guy came to our freshman dorm (who??? I remember him being tall and massive and perhaps being a lacrosse player) and he made and sold fake IDs for everyone for the price of $10. I stood in front of white wall while he took my photo for mine. My friend Kim did the same.

“What’s your name?” the guy asked.

“Kim,” she said.

“Kim…what?”

“Kimberly,” she said.

A week later, when he delivered our fake IDs, hers read Kim Burly. Kim Burly.

The day I got mine, I put it on my nightstand and promptly spilled a glass of water all over it. It melted. I never got to use it.

However, a few weeks later Kim (Burly) had some visitors from her high school. It was a group of friends who were in their first year at Columbia University in New York. One of the girls ended up giving me her fake ID that she no longer needed, because she had a few (New Yorkers being cooler, etc etc).

I studied it. She was Asian, like me. That’s why we assumed this scheme would work. Let them try to tell me I’m not the Asian girl in the photo. They wouldn’t and if they did, let’s see how that goes for them. My new name was “Karen Fu.” I was now from New Jersey, 5’4 and 23-years-old.

I’m half-Asian and Karen was full Asian so it wasn’t a perfect match, but honestly, if there is a time to use ignorance in our favor, it would be with the bouncers while trying to get into a club called Fish Co.

Having an internship freshman year summer was not a choice. My father told me I wasn’t allowed to come home to Texas during summer break from Brown and that I had to find a summer job and it had to “further my career prospects.” Little did he know I was now Karen Fu. If he knew the absolute nonsense we got up to that summer in Chicago, I highly doubt he would have sent me there.

Anyway, that summer Rachel sobbed so hard during The Notebook that it sounded like she was choking. Heaving breaths. Gasps of agony. It was excruciating to be next to her.

But we were friends, not siblings, so I couldn’t shake her and say, “GET YOURSELF TOGETHER – THIS ISN’T REAL.” I tried to distance myself from her while she wept. Maybe a better friend would have comforted her but to be honest, but we were 18, not the age of the elderly couple at the end of the film. Plus, when I’m the emotional wreck, I don’t want any attention.

However. As she sobbed, I did not say, “Bit emotional, huh?” I would never. I merely leaned far away from her, like a decent human who is also really embarrassed by their best friend.

Anyway, after the play in London, the playwright, Jane Upton (brilliant, humble, articulate, mother, hero) did a Q&A with about 20 members of the audience after the performance. She mentioned that this was her most divisive work yet – she’s had more response from people than ever before but tonight, she had watched the woman in the row in front of her fall asleep during it.

Then a man in his sixties put up his hand and said, “To be honest, I too drifted in and out.”

Let’s be clear. A man saying he fell asleep during a show means absolutely ZERO about the quality of the thing he fell asleep to/in.

If you put any man over the age of 32 in a warm corner, he will fall asleep within 2 minutes. My father. Your father. Sam’s father. Sam. Hugh Grant. Billy Joel. Bill Nighy. Tom Hanks. You get the picture.

Men are SLEEPY, okay? And if they’re seated, they can turn their brains off swiftly, like flicking a light switch.

His other question for her was, “I felt discombobulated during the play because I’m a man. Did you think about men who might be in the audience when you were writing it?” To reiterate, the play was called (the) Woman.

“Did I think about the men as I wrote it? No,” the playwright said.

Anyway, if a man falls asleep during your play, it does not mean your play is boring. Sadly, I didn’t get to articulate this to Jane afterwards, though I did tell her how brilliant I personally thought her play was. When I asked for a photo with her, we overheard the (sleepy) older man’s voice say, “Shall I take the photo of you two?” and Jane and I both screamed, “NO!!!” as we backed away from him.

***

This is the busiest time of the year at the bookshop. The Christmas lights are up. The cinnamon and pine-scented candles are out. A significant amount of time is spent wrapping up books in festive wrapping paper for customers.

I know I’m not young anymore for one reason: I think Christmas should be once every two years. Or better, every four years, like the Olympics. Let me get excited about it. Let me miss it a little bit. Let me yearn for mince pies and mulled wine instead of dreading the sickly sweetness. The holidays come around too quickly every year. It’s too much. It’s far too much. The same songs. The same food. The same sweaters. The same arguments. Forced gift-buying. Forced joy at getting new socks. Forced pretending to like over-cooked meat.

I dream of a moment and that moment is this: I’m in a car driving. I hear the beginning of a song on the radio. And I think “Omigod, I haven’t heard this song in forever!” and I think “I forgot it even existed” and “WOW WOW WOW I never knew if I would hear it again, I may have never even thought about it again in my life, and here it is – how magical!” And I turn the music up and my dopamine receptors are pumping and I’m singing to the song and I’m so happy and alive and I can’t believe this song is finally playing on my radio after so many years out of my life.

The song I want this to happen with is Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You.” And it will never happen to me because it is played constantly.

Aren’t the Olympics so exciting? Don’t we all love the World Cup? Imagine that feeling for Christmas. I made the mistake of saying this to a customer at the bookshop – that Christmas should be every four years – and she looked at me with such shock and horror that Sally made me take it back. And I did.

Fine, have your Christmas every year. But you better buy books and jump up and down every year when you do. And grandparents must buy several books for the grandkids. And you must cherish your very average hometown spots on your visit back home because some of us will never get to go back home.

This winter I have found a new coffee shop to go to in London. Rebecca from the bookshop met me there and said, “This is Gilmore Girls-vibes,” and I said, “I know.” There were sleeping dogs, mugs of steaming coffee, blueberry muffins, a bell on the door that jingles when it opens. The baristas are obscenely friendly. It feels, dare I say it, kind of like America. I love it so much.

Maybe I’m not quite over you yet, America.

WILLIIIAM!!!!!!!!!!

*

If you want to gift someone a book for the holidays and if that person is an introvert, a person who just moved to a new city and wants new friends or a person who straight up hates other people and wants to imagine liking them again, then you can, if you so choose, to gift them my book (UK link) as a present. It’s called Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come (USA link).

It’s about about the year I spent: talking to strangers, performing stand-up comedy, travelling solo, trying out improv, going on friend dates and doing a bunch of extrovert-y things. It’s about being an introvert and trying to extrovert for a full year. I interview brilliant people throughout the book who guide me through these nightmares.

If your friend or family member likes the book, you can send them to this newsletter for news about future books. And if they hate it, you can play them Mariah Carey’s Christmas song 16x in a row.

Order the USA version of Sorry I’m Late I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes in paperback or e-book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Apple, Bookshop.org or on audiobook (the cover with the messy cake, frosted badly by me).

The UK book version is available in paperback and e-book: order at Amazon, Waterstones, Hive, or the audio book at Audible UK (the cover with the speech bubble).

It’s also been translated and published in the Netherlands, Korea, China, Russia, Germany, Taiwan, Poland and Hungary. I’m so grateful to all of my readers!!!!

Reviews for Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come

“I loved it! It’s such a wonderful title, and the book lives up to it’ Nigella Lawson

‘In a world of self-care and nights in, this book will inspire and remind you to do some things that scare you every so often.’ Emma Gannon

‘Hilarious, unexpected and ultimately life-affirming.’ Will Storr

‘Funny, emotional and deeply inspiring, this is perfect for anyone wanting to break out of their comfort zone’ Heat

‘Beautifully written and so funny! I related to it A LOT’ – Emma Jane Unsworth

‘Relatable, moving and fantastically funny’ – Rhik Samadder

‘Tender, courageous and extremely funny, this book will make us all braver.’ Daisy Buchanan

‘A chronicle of Pan’s hilarious and painful year of being an extrovert.’ Stylist

‘Excellent, warm, hilarious.’ Nikesh Shukla

‘You WILL laugh and laugh while reading this.’ Sun

“Very funny, very smart” Liberty Hardy

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The groom disappeared an hour before his wedding. We were in Italy, and he’d gone for a 5-kilometre run into the Tuscan hills. He had planned the run for months – even recruiting other wedding guests – 8 other men and one woman and, puzzlingly, five-year old boy twins – to join him.

The groom was doing a 5-kilometre run the morning of his wedding because he wanted to face the day properly – something the boxing community calls “Fight Day 5k!” – a ritual to get battle-ready for a big match. In this case, the big “battle” was a 41-year-old man getting ready to commit himself to one woman for the rest of his life.

We were in the rolling hills of Tuscany – a 2-hour drive outside of Pisa. It was October, a season in Italy with cool nights but hot days. The sun was shining, and the air was warm. The wives of the eight men running the 5k were laying in their swimsuits outside by the pool, and it was so hot they were shading their faces from the sun with their eyes. The pool was cold and fresh.

The entire wedding weekend, at a beautiful sprawling resort in Italy booked exclusively for the wedding – it felt like living inside of a film, but the guests just didn’t know which genre. There was Prosecco and Aperol Spritzes and a jazz band. It also appeared that 90 percent of the wedding party and the guests had attended Oxford University.

When the groom disappeared an hour before his wedding, the guests pondered exactly what kind of movie we were inside now with this new plot twist.

Were we inside a thriller where the groom disappears without a trace, until lie upon lie is revealed about his life, the bride left sprinting through the woods in her torn wedding dress, screaming in animalistic rage? Or were we in a murder mystery where the groom dies a gruesome death, and each of us would be investigated by a moustached-Italian detective smoking skinny cigarettes? Or was the groom’s absence meant to be a comic plot point – like a version of The Hangover – and we were all going to get drunk, high and eventually lose our sanity over limoncello?

We weren’t quite sure. A photo of the group was taken just before they set off – the young-ish crew with their arms around each other and smiling in the sunshine. I took this photo, which meant I was guaranteed a witness role in the future investigation, should there be one. The photo on my phone had a time stamp, so we knew that at exactly 10.06am, the groom and his gang of men, plus one woman, plus five-year-old twins (the children of one of the men), left the hotel resort grounds for a run that should have taken approximately 30 minutes, maybe 45 minutes or at the very longest, one hour.

Yet, two hours later, they still had not returned. We had not heard a word from any of them.

In this film, I get to play the best part. I was one of the wives lying by the pool. My husband, Sam, was one of the men running, possibly for his life, in the forest and foothills of Tuscany. When 40 minutes passed and they had not returned, I did not react at all. When an hour went by, I merely put more sunscreen on my legs and shoulders and lay back in the sunshine. When an hour and a half went by, I jumped into the cold pool and swam two laps of breaststroke. My heart rate remained low, my breath steady, my mind calm.

Other wives began to question where the men (plus the one woman, plus the five-year-old twins were). I did not. And here is why.

Sam has embarked on many a run in a foreign land. He has disappeared for hours on coastal paths in Cornwall, he has gotten lost in the hills of the Lake District, and miscalculated distances on London routes – only to eventually return to me. Me, the abandoned wife, who was always left fretting and angry, wondering if he’d fallen off a cliff or been impaled by a rabid stag or moped.

But here’s the main reason why I was calmer than all the other wives: Sam is an elite marathoner. The man has run multiple sub-3 marathons at a pace faster than Harry Styles in Berlin. He voluntarily runs cross country races through purposefully harsh conditions of muddy fields and rivers. He is limber and has flexible ankles. He could leap over over-turned logs and twisty tree roots. He could scale a wall and army crawl through a field if needs be. (Let it be known that I have seen the man try to swim and ice skate and if any sort of body of water had been involved, I would have contacted an elderly Italian priest to say last rites, rather than eating more blue cheese by the pool.)

Maybe it’s due to being married for more than a decade, but I simply could not rouse the fear in myself this time. We were in Italy, not the backstreets of Colombia, or say, our cute neighbourhood in London which turns very sketchy as soon as the sun sets.

“What will be will be,” I say as I spread blue cheese onto a fig and savour it before jumping in to swim another lap across the pool. I didn’t want to be in a dark drama or a murder mystery, but if I had to be in one in Italy by a pool, where I very much was, then I chose The Talented Mr Ripley, but strictly only the bit where Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow are on the beach and yacht and absolutely not any bit with Matt Damon.

The other reasons I wasn’t concerned, for say, the other runners and the two children, was that, and I can’t stress this enough, how intelligent this group of runners was. Yes, there was the Oxford factor, in that most did attend Oxford (not Sam – he went to Durham), but also the groom, a man called Nicky, was known as “Nicky-pedia” because he had a giant brain full of knowledge. So while he was merely an amateur runner, he has never met a pub quiz he hasn’t won or a riddle he couldn’t solve. I knew that with the collective intelligence of the group, and specifically the brain of Nicky, and the legs and lungs of Sam, they would be fine. Sam could always run an actual marathon to fetch help and deliver any information, just like the original Greek soldier did in 490 BC. You know, the one who ran 26.2 miles from Marathon to Athens to deliver vital news. (I chose to ignore the fact that he died at the end of that very first marathon out of exhaustion. Besides, Sam had run the race several times and also knew about something called “pacing”, unlike that Greek guy.) In short, I knew the group would be fine.

It was only when I saw a groomsman, one who did not go on the run, sprint past the pool and towards the parking lot that I began to think, “That doesn’t look right.”

I climbed out of the pool and briskly walked towards the groomsman. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“Have you not heard?” he asked.

“No…”

“They’re trapped inside some military compound and are having to scale a fence to get out. There are gun shots. They’re an hour and a half away! And the wedding is in an hour!”

So Oxford men are, in fact, stupid. I see. Did they not map the run beforehand? The groom didn’t think that might be important to do on the morning of his wedding in a foreign country, especially when taking a group of tourists with him? How did they end up in a military complex? Surely some of these fancy boys had studied Italian – what kind of fancy boys would they be if they had not? (Bad ones.)

And why couldn’t they run out the way they came in? Surely they must know that is how getting lost works – you retrace your steps. And let’s not let the children off – had the five-year-old twins not read a little tale called Hansel & Gretel? And I guess that’s not on the university curriculum, Oxford-men?

The groomsman said that the group had one phone among the ten of them. Once again, idiots. In this case, one must make the argument that although most Oxford men are intelligent, they are also arrogant – a flaw that can prove fatal. In fact, we only knew something was wrong because the wife of the one runner (ONE) who had a phone had called him wondering what the hell was going on – and he finally alerted her of their trouble.

“Is…is the groom stressed?” she asked on the phone. The wedding start time approached.

“…yes…” he replied, under his breath.

But now, the rescue plan was already in place: the man with the phone dropped a location pin and now this groomsman was going to find them and pick the groom and the twin boys up by car. The others would have to fend for themselves.

I looked at my watch. Nothing I could do in this situation, as I didn’t have a car. I had to go shower and get ready for the wedding. If there was to be a wedding.

Half an hour later, as I was drying my hair, Sam appeared. Scratches and bug bites on his legs, sweaty and sheepish.

To this day, we still don’t know exactly what went down at the infamous 5k run. Questions were asked, and just like in the murder mystery films, all the stories contradict each other. The gunshots were just hunters, some said. They didn’t scale fences, they climbed through broken fences, other claimed. We were lost in the forest, some said. The children were brave, it was proclaimed. The children were frightened, others said.

All to say, that at 1pm, the time of the wedding, the groom was in his rightful place. It was the first of two ceremonies, this one being Indian, as the bride was half-Indian.

It was then that the genre of the film changed again.

The wedding was in the hotel garden, and we were seated in the blazing sunshine with no shade. We waited. And we waited. And we waited. The wedding did not seem to want to begin. We began to wilt in the sun without a hint of shade. The man behind me began to sweat through his shirt, and he took off his blazer. The woman in front of me squirted sunscreen on the bald man’s head next to her and rubbed it in vigorously with one hand. People fanned themselves with the wedding program. More time passed and eventually the man behind me left to go stand under an awning for some shade. Five minutes later, I followed.

Finally, the ceremony began. It was my first Indian ceremony and there were several rituals. Among my favourite was when the bride and groom throw rice on each other aggressively and the one who wins the “rice fight” is destined to be the dominant one in the relationship.

The MC, to try to drum up the languishing heat-stricken crowd, kept encouraging us to make more noise during the traditions.

“Clapping, clapping!” he would admonish us. We’d comply, quietly. “Clapping, clapping!” he’d yell again. We’d try to clap louder.

When the bride and groom were competing to find a ring in a bowl of rice water, the MC shouted at us, “Clapping makes it more fun! Clapping, clapping!”

We began clapping clapping. As commanded.

But soon, every time the MC demanded, “Clapping, clapping!” I began to imagine him following me around while doing chores. “Clapping makes it more fun!!!” he would say as I did the dishes. “Clapping, clapping!” he would yell as I did my taxes.

It was my first Indian wedding, and I sat down to get henna drawn on my left hand by two women hired just for this purpose. The thick paint was supposed to remain on my hands for at least half an hour to dry before I could scrub it off, to leave the remaining ink stain.

In the evening celebration, there were dozens of choreographed dances. The bride’s family. The in-laws. Friends of the bride. The bride and groom. They all had carefully prepared dances.

And then, it was time for the British groom’s male friends (Oxford idiots plus Sam) to perform their group dance.

For months, the Whatsapp group had texts with the best man and the groom begging the other male friends to perform the dance. The men fought this as hard as they could by the most British way possible: they ignored it. They simply, collectively, did not respond to the pleas to dance, to join a Teams call to rehearse together, to even acknowledge that it was happening at all.

The bride’s sister, who was half-Indian and half-American, sent videos of herself performing the dance to the group. She begged them to practice. She sent up online practice sessions that were not attended by anyone.

I wanted to shake her and say, “THESE ARE BRITISH MEN. IN THEIR 40s. THEY WILL NOT DO A CHOREOGRAPHED DANCE IN PUBLIC. IT IS IN THEIR BLOOD. LET IT GO. SOME THINGS JUST AREN’T WORTH IT. FORGET IT, DIVYA. IT’S CHINATOWN.”

As the wedding approached, the groom became more desperate. He recruited the best man to help him convince the others to dance.

At that point, one groomsman just wrote, “Nah. I’m out. Good luck, lads.”

“What if we just do the macarena, and Nicky does the dancing in the middle?” another groomsman suggested.

More silence from the group.

On the day of the dance, I knew the groomsmen dance wasn’t going to happen. They hadn’t practiced once. For one, most of the wedding guests from London flew into Pisa on 8am flights. After alarms set at the ungodly hour of 5am, if they were anything like me, they’d be absolutely wrecked with sleep deprivation.

On the flight, I was squashed in the middle row of the flight next to a giant man – about 6’7 with massively long thick limbs. He stole the arm rest between us. Fine. But if you’re going to do that (without asking), then you must have the courtesy to not, I don’t know, say, elbow a person every single time she drifted off on your early morning flight. I tried to sleep the entire time but every single moment I went off, he’d nudge me again. I cannot express how much I wanted to end this man. I fantasised about knocking his elbow off the armrest while he held a hot cup of tea. I fumed with my eyes closed as he woke me for the tenth time in half an hour.

I can’t express how angry I become on little sleep. Each time he nudged me, and did not apologise, I wanted him to DIE. At one point he dropped his phone and made a big song and dance about trying to find his phone on the ground, and I merely peered down at him shuffling around on the floor, thinking, “Good.”

And yet, I could not bring myself to simply ask him to be more conscientious of where his elbows were or weren’t poking. The most I could muster was a heavy sigh and exaggerated re-shuffling of my body every time his asshole elbow interrupted my sleep.

Perhaps I too had become British after my decade time in London.

I’d eaten one bag of crisps at the airport in the morning but after the flight and the 2-hour drive to the hotel, it was now late afternoon and all the restaurants nearby and at the hotel were closed. The sleep deprivation combined with hunger meant that a migraine was burrowing into my head. At the airport, there’s always a Pret a Manger and you can get a decent chocolate pastry, a very cold ham and cheese sandwich, emergency crisps and some fresh mango, but at the terminal where my gate was, there was no Pret (cue horror film music). I wasn’t to know what hell awaited us after this terrible misfortune.

After a two-hour drive to the hotel where the wedding would be held, all I could think about was food. But there was no food. I know because I asked. I asked everyone. I asked at the bar, the only thing that was open in this rural part of the country. I asked the women checking us into the hotel. I asked passers-by. I even, and yes I’m ashamed that I did this, asked the bride. We’d briefly passed her, and she asked how we were and before I could stop myself, I said, “Hungry.”

We ran into other guests at the hotel who had also just arrived, and the only thing we could talk about was how hungry we were.. We wondered if we could perhaps kill one of the cows we had passed on the road. If the lemons in the tree in the courtyard could sustain us. One of the women advised that we just had to pretend we were at a spa and that we were fasting and that this feeling of hunger and near fainting was what we wanted.

Please, please, please I beg you, future married couples – FEED US. Feed your guests in that downtime between 1pm and 7pm when nothing is happening after a long journey on the day before wedding – we are starving. And we are not picky. A box of stale Krispy Kreme donuts would have been met with happy tears.

I say this as someone who had a wedding in hard-to-reach part of England and also, did not provide any food when people arrived after their four-hour journeys from London. I am guilty of starving my guests, and I guess karma was still having her way with me.

Later, while I was lying by the pool (I was by the pool a lot) and trying to really lean into the “spa health fasting retreat” narrative, the bride appeared. She handed me two apples.

“For Jess. Who is hungry.”

I felt like such an asshole and the other women by the pool (Oxford wives) stared at me jealously. But wait – a beautiful dark-haired woman handing me a red apple – that was an ominous fairytale plot point, wasn’t it? I didn’t care. I was going to bite it.

I offered the other apple for the women to divide amongst themselves, and they voted to give it to the celiac one, as she hadn’t been able to partake in the lone biscotti packet they’d found at the bar.

The celiac and I ate our apples like two famished horses. We knew it would be hours before our next calorie.

It was then that the groomsmen went to the bar – the (foodless) bar that had endless alcohol. And they drank several beers. At least they were consuming some calories. And then the best man of the wedding did the impossible: he got them, these reserved British men, to agree to head into one of the hotel rooms and rehearse the dance.

Moments later, we heard loud stomping and aggressive counting to the beat of “ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR” over and over and again. I went to lie down in our hotel room, but unfortunately, they were rehearsing next door.

Then, I heard them singing, “Start spreading the news… I’m leaving today….!” A song they were not dancing to that night at the Indian celebration. No. I hopped up and walked down the hallway and opened the door to find them in a chorus line wearing sunglasses, waving their hands in the air like showgirls. They saw me and froze. I quickly shut the door again.

The best man emerged triumphant an hour later.

“They didn’t want to dance – they really didn’t want to dance – but at the end of the day, each of those men is a people-pleaser,” he said. “I never doubted they would eventually do it.”

Though I think the hunger and then being plied with beer in the hot sun after little sleep also had something to do with the coercion. Tortured and drugged into compliance.

That first night, in the end, though, nothing went to plan. When the groom hit the dance floor with his groomsmen, he threw them off by starting at a different point in the dance, and it was just a mess of limbs and stomping with no sense of cohesion whatsoever. The women danced impeccably. Meanwhile, I ate so much pasta, bread and tiramisu. I was in heaven.

The next day, after the Western wedding ceremony in the sun, we retired to the lawn in the shade and the jazz band played, “Tu vuò fà l’americano” by the pool while we lounged in chairs and waiters handed us Prosecco and Campari cocktails and hors d’oeuvres were passed around. I cannot state how happy I was to be fed in the downtime before the wedding meal.

“I feel like we’re in Succession,” I overheard another wedding guest said. We had changed genres yet again.

The next morning, we woke at 6am (WHY GOD) to drive back to Pisa, drop off the rental car and catch our 10am flight back to London. I heard another woman in the queue at check-in say emotionally that she had been to a wedding in Florence and also hadn’t slept in three days. Little did I know that my hoarse voice meant that I was currently incubating some vile virus that would send me to bed for 10 days.

Destination weddings are glamourous and at times, dramatic, but my god, they take years off your life. In some ways, the weekend was tinged with sadness. The groom was 41. The last of his friend group to marry.

“Oh and he took his time, he did,” said the best man, in his Northern Irish accent during his speech. “He. Took. His. Time.” The guests laughed, hard. Too hard?

The groom was Sam’s oldest friend from childhood. Nicky had dated a LOT. Twenty years of dating. He finally became engaged after meeting a half-Indian, half-American woman in London, who was, in terms of how big the US was and how close she and I grew up, basically from the town next to mine.

When they became engaged, I made the joke that Nicky had searched London high and low for the love of his life, and finally he had to follow in Sam’s lead and marry a mixed race American woman from smalltown America to make all of his dreams come true.

Nicky never, ever laughed at this joke.

It was, as they say, the last first wedding. Sam and I didn’t know the next time we would be invited to a wedding. Did this happen to everyone: a fast and furious parade of matrimony in your twenties and thirties and then a big gap until the next generation comes of age? Would we go to a single wedding in the next decade?

Tired, hungover and once again, extremely hungry, I settled myself into the line at airport security. As I placed my backpack and liquids into the airport tray and placed it into the X-ray machine, I steeled myself for a body scan.

A security woman motioned for me to come towards her for a pat-down. She then gave me the nod to gather my things and go on my way. As I walked away from her and grabbed my bag, I said found Sam tying up his boots. I knelt close to him and whispered into his ear, “Clapping clapping.” He looked up.

Clapping makes it more fun,” I said.

We were back in London three hours later. Through passport control. Clapping clapping. Finding our luggage. Clapping clapping. Getting onto the Heathrow Express. Clapping, clapping.

Clapping makes it more fun.

*My newsletter has been more sporadic lately because I’m currently working on my new book, which I cannot wait to share with you later! And yes, I still work at the bookshop!

In the meantime, you can read more of my writing by checking out my other book, “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes.” (The UK version is “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously).

It’s about the year I spent: talking to strangers, performing stand-up comedy, travelling solo, trying out improv, going on friend dates and doing a bunch of extrovert-y things. It’s about being an introvert and trying to extrovert for a full year. I interview brilliant people throughout the book who guide me through these nightmares.

Order the USA version in paperback or e-book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Apple, Bookshop.org or on audiobook (the cover with the messy cake, frosted badly by me).

The UK book version is available in paperback and e-book: order at Amazon, Waterstones, Hive, or the audio book at Audible UK (the cover with the speech bubble).

It’s also been translated and published in the Netherlands, Korea, China, Russia, Germany, Taiwan, Poland and Hungary. I’m so grateful to all of my readers!!!!

Reviews for Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come

“I loved it! It’s such a wonderful title, and the book lives up to it’ Nigella Lawson

‘In a world of self-care and nights in, this book will inspire and remind you to do some things that scare you every so often.’ Emma Gannon

‘Hilarious, unexpected and ultimately life-affirming.’ Will Storr

‘Funny, emotional and deeply inspiring, this is perfect for anyone wanting to break out of their comfort zone’ Heat

‘Beautifully written and so funny! I related to it A LOT’ – Emma Jane Unsworth

‘Relatable, moving and fantastically funny’ – Rhik Samadder

‘Tender, courageous and extremely funny, this book will make us all braver.’ Daisy Buchanan

‘A chronicle of Pan’s hilarious and painful year of being an extrovert.’ Stylist

‘Excellent, warm, hilarious.’ Nikesh Shukla

‘You WILL laugh and laugh while reading this.’ Sun

“Very funny, very smart” Liberty Hardy

Subscribe now

Did you miss my latest post?

At the bookshop, we hosted a book launch for a young Irish debut novelist. She wore a plaid skirt and black tank top and for her speech, she took off her ankle boots and stood on top of a chair in her white socks. Her sister helped her up.

“Do you want your socks to be seen like this?” the sister asked. “Is this the look we really want?”

“Shut up,” the author said. Then she began her speech with, “Welcome to my wedding book launch.”

This is exactly how I have always felt about book launches since I started working at the bookshop: they are the closest thing you can get to a wedding without involving another person.

The champagne. The speeches. The toasts. Fancy cake. There are even mother-of-the-bride vibes.

My favorite thing to do when I work at book launches is ask the mother how they’re feeling. One exclaimed, “It’s like getting another grandchild!” Another one said, “I just love seeing her sparkle.” Another one refused to pay for her multiple gin and tonics, saying, “I’m the mother of the author!!!!” each time we subtly tried to charge her.

And if book launches are weddings, then I am bartender and caterer. At one launch, one friend banged her spoon against her glass too vigorously during a toast and it shattered. Everyone backed away as the shards scattered across the hardwood floor. I grabbed a broom and had to sweep up the glass as the crowd of 50 people formed a circle around me. They surrounded me, and people kept saying, “There’s a piece,” and “You missed a shard over there,” and “No, over there,” and “No, over there,” while I silently prayed in my head, “Please let me die,” with visions of me being Cinderella with a broom as the evil stepsisters looked on.

I once worked a book launch at a swanky hotel. I was told that the book launch was at the offices of the London Evening Standard and since I’m a journalist (sometimes), I should go.

It was not at the London Evening Standard. It was at the Standard Hotel. The book was not written by a journalist. It was written by an influencer and the book was exclusively about female self-pleasure. No one at the book launch seemed to be wearing a real shirt – it was a sea of bras with blazers and sheer tops. I looked fully Amish in an opaque t-shirt.

The mother of the author came over to me. “Have you read her book?” I couldn’t resist asking.

“GOD NO,” she said, before buying two copies in support of her daughter.

There was no speech that evening.

At the bookshop, a man came in and bought six copies of a book called Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico.

“Is this for a book club?” I asked him, as I scanned the items at the register.

“Yes,” he said.

“Does your book club have men and women in it?” I ask him.

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you only read books by men?” I ask.

“What? No,” he said.

My book club is only women (though there used to be a few men – I genuinely don’t know what happened to them) and we only read books by women. This is because my friend knew of a book club with only men and they exclusively read books by men, and we were determined to right this wrong in our own way.

The man told me his book club is actually three couples who have known each other since college. And that he loves that books are great way to have meaningful conversation without feeling like you’re revealing too much about yourself. At the end of every meeting, each person had to give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to say whether they liked the book or not.

The other day I went to a supper club where the theme was High Beige. All the food was beige. The dress code was beige. In London, we would call this “Peak Hackney.” Two handsome chefs came out and announced that the food was supposed to be comfort food that actually wasn’t even that good but that you were happy to eat because it reminded you of food your grandmother had made. Also, all the food was vegan.

I think these hipsters are asking too much of us.

I was seated next to a woman wearing a cream-coloured blouse. I wore a chunky white sweater. We sat across a man in a taupe vest. As we ate brown soup out of giant bread bowls, the woman told me she was a psychologist, specializing in eating disorders. “How did you get into that?” I asked her and she told me, “I went to boarding school, and I was a dancer.” The simplest explanation.

Fifteen minutes later, we are eating potato dumplings and I begin to have the feeling that I was asking her the same questions everyone must ask her. That she’d probably had this exact same conversation hundreds of times. I hated myself for this, but I had no idea how not to ask: Was your boarding school all girls? Did you miss your family? Would you send your kids to boarding school? Were you in love with the janitor because he was the only male on campus?

I hate when I feel like I’m having a conversation that has been had dozens of times before. I also really feel for any dermatologist or personal trainer who is placed into a pen of new people who would absolutely love to show them their suspicious moles or correct push-up form.

So the woman psychologist and I discussed what was the best line of work to pretend to be in to avoid any career questions. “Insurance,” she said instantly, as if she had thought about it before.

“Oh, that’s good,” I said. But I could imagine someone like my dad asking about the effects of climate change on house insurance and then suddenly you’re stuck in a really boring conversation that also has nothing to do with your life.

“Marketing for insurance,” I decide. That was boring. You could just say, “I write brochures trying to sell home insurance.” I myself often tell people I work in financial marketing when I do not want to discuss anything having to do with my work.

Finally, the last course of the supper club was served: a chocolate burnt caramel banana cream pie. All 50 of us at the supper club devoured it. And so, for the hipsters, all was forgiven.

Recently, we had a leak in a small closet in my flat and we had to empty it while they re-carpeted it. Then we were faced with the challenge of putting the washing machine back into the closet and putting the dryer on top of the washing machine. My husband and I are small. We cannot lift a dryer above our heads. Who can?

Kevin can. We found Kevin on an app called Taskrabbit and his skill was “lifting heavy things.” All the reviews for him said things like “this dude is really strong” and “really good at lifting heavy shit” and “Kevin can literally lift anything.”

Kevin was in our flat for about three minutes. He came in, he lifted the dryer and place it on top of the washing machine and he left. Sadly, my husband let him in because I was out, so I didn’t get to ask him my many questions about his profession.

“Was he a weightlifter? Former athlete? Body builder?” I asked Sam.

“I didn’t ask,” he said.

“How big was he?”

“Big but not like … gigantic.”

“His full-time job is just lifting heavy stuff for small, weak people like us? That can’t be true … can it???” What must Kevin think of us?

I’ll never know. Why, why, why don’t our partners ask the right questions? I would love to sit by Kevin at a supper club. “Could you lift this table? Could you lift those two men together? Could you throw an industrial printer across a bridge?” (I wonder if Kevin tells people he works in finance to avoid these questions.)

I’ve started going to acupuncture for my migraines and anxiety. I see an Argentinian woman who my friend Tiffany recommended, describing her vibe as “foreign grandma.” Direct, bossy, but caring.

This is exactly what I want in a practitioner. Or a best friend. It was only after I was married to Sam and introduced him to my friends, that I found out most of my friends are of a particular type: they are bossy. By this, I mean, they always have ideas and solutions and are always saying, “Do you know what you should do? You should see my physio,” or “Trust me, this is what you should do. You book a holiday to Crete and turn off your phone for a week and eat raw carrot salad only.” I love having someone confident tell me what to do. In fact, I crave it.

I’ve always desperately wanted an older sister, and I think this is how it manifests. I want someone to give me a makeover. To teach me how to tie a scarf. To tell me which probiotics to buy.

I thought all good friends were like this. But when Sam met them, he was taken aback at the onslaught of unsolicited advice. “Why does X always think she knows what we need to do?” he’d say. ‘She doesn’t know better than us.” It surprised me.

“I love that she cares enough to tell us,” I’d say. “But she literally doesn’t know enough about our situation,” Sam would say. Of course sometimes my friends are spectacularly wrong with their opinions, but I love that they care enough to give them.

But at this particular book launch, the Irish author finished her speech by reading out loud an old letter from her friend from school. The letter read: “Please write your novel. You are ready. You have serious serious talent. Write your novel this year. Promise me.”

See, we all need friends like this. I would not be writing at all anymore if it weren’t for and telling me I should during one fateful lunch in September a few years ago. I was very, very ready to quit writing forever, and I am so thankful that I have these two particular forthright friends tell me that this simply would not do.**

Back to my bossy acupuncturist. For each session, Isabella pokes me with needles and then leaves the room for 30 minutes and during that time, I pass out into a deep, rigid sleep. Comatose and still, as to keep the needles perfectly placed.

Yesterday, she had finished placing the needles in my shoulders and head and was about to walk out the door, when she glanced back. She approached the table I was lying on and rocked my torso gently from side to side, frowning at my body. When she was satisfied, she stopped.

“Did you just … did you just shake my qi?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said and then left and closed the door.

A few years ago, I went to an energy healer. She told me all sorts of fantastic things that I had apparently told her, during the session, where I thought I was just lying there listening to a recording of a man chanting and smelling incense while she played a sound bowl over my stomach.

At the end of the session, she told me the things I had told her. But the images she conveyed were so vivid and so fantastical and so layered that I didn’t actually know how she was producing such a detailed story like this. I had the sense that I was witnessing a one-woman-show that was always the same, that would always produce the same effect.

“Do you have clients come back more than once?” I asked. I was convinced that if she said “No,” then she really did tell the same story to everyone. When she said she had some clients come back every year and others come back every month, I began to be less sceptical.

Here are a few things she told me: that my uterus was like a radiator and turned up too high and that I needed to treat it like a radiator and only turn it on when it was needed.

I didn’t say anything, but then she said, “And then you made some joke about how you really couldn’t afford to have the heat on full blast all the time in this economy,” and when she said that, well, that’s when I started to believe. This is exactly the kind of stupid joke I would say.

Then she told me how the 16-year-old version of me had appeared and was sitting at table full of books in a room full of dark wood and kept saying that I needed to return to that place.

“But … I don’t have any rooms in my childhood house with dark wood. Or my current flat. Or any flat I’ve ever lived in. Are you SURE it’s dark wood?” I asked. She was insistent.

She told me many, many more things, things that beggared belief. Quicksand made an appearance. As did me carrying an anchored rope through a turbulent ocean.

At the end, I asked, “So, are you psychic?” and she laughed and said, “No.” Then she added, “But my grandmother is,” and gestured to a photo of an Indian woman on the wall.

“The best way to describe what I do is that I hear a different radio frequency,” she said. Like how dolphins can hear ultrasonic frequencies. Or how a dog’s sense of smell is more than 10,000x stronger than a humans.

“I tell you what’s already there. Like an internal message,” she said.

I studied her face. She was very striking and wore no make-up. She looked to be about 26. “How old are you?” I asked her. She told me – she was the same age as me.

I sat up. “WHAT?!! HOW??! Honestly, how?! Do you wear sunscreen every day?” She said she did not. It was this final epiphany – that she was a beautiful ageless witch – that really made me believe in her.

Anyway, for days I walked around wondering what she meant by how 16-year-old-me wanted me to return to a place with books and dark wood. And then, one day, walking in North London, it hit me.

When I was 16, every day after school, my best friend Jori and I would go to one of the only bookstores in our town. We would sit at tables and gather books and magazines and skim them and laugh and make plans. Nearly every day.

The bookstore and the café were decorated in dark wood.

I’ve tried telling this story to various friends and it does not go well. Over lunch, my friend Sarah said, while buttering her toast, “Wait, so your – let me just clarify – your Uterus told you this?” On a different occasion, my friend Chantal said, “So, do you think … do you think she was just really good at lying?”

I don’t know. Let’s all acknowledge that it is very brave of me to tell the story here, in a public forum, because I sound insane and naive. Because this story is the kernel, the tiny seed, that led me to walking by the very bookshop I now work at, wandering in, and asking if they were hiring.

Did 16-year-old me tell the energy healer to tell Present Me to go get a job at my local bookshop because that would make me happy? I don’t know.

But I do know I work at that bookshop every week now. That I turned my uterus down a few settings. That maybe some people can feel vibrations or hear different frequencies.

After all, some of us have perfect pitch, right? And a shark can smell a drop of blood in a pool of water. A bat can detect the heartbeat of a mouse 50 meters away. Our best friends often know better than we do.

And Kevin? Kevin can lift heavy shit.

** ’s book Table For One, a modern romance story about finding happiness within yourself, is out now and I adore it. has just released her book, Pathways, about how she decided to leave London and create the life she always wanted by buying land and moving to Portugal. Two thumbs up for both of these books!

***If you’re in London and you’d like to hear me and talk about writing on Substack, then you can come see us on June 11th at the Women’s Prize Festival. I think you have to buy a day-pass to the entire festival (where you’ll hear from so many other writers) and then add on our event, found here. Tickets to our Substack talk are VERY limited, so I’d act fast if you want to join in! We’ll be discussing how Substack nurtures our creativity, how it helped us land book deals and the best ways to get what you want out of this platform.

You can read more of my writing by checking out my book, “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes.” (The UK version is “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously).

It’s about the year I spent: talking to strangers, performing stand-up comedy, travelling solo, trying out improv, going on friend dates and doing a bunch of extrovert-y things. It’s about being an introvert and trying to extrovert for a full year. I interview brilliant people throughout the book who guide me through these nightmares.

Order the USA version in paperback or e-book at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, IndieBound, Apple, Bookshop.org or on audiobook (the cover with the messy cake, frosted badly by me).

The UK book version is available in paperback and e-book: order at Amazon, Waterstones, Hive, or the audio book at Audible UK (the cover with the speech bubble).

It’s also been translated and published in the Netherlands, Korea, China, Russia, Germany, Taiwan, Poland and Hungary. I’m so grateful to all of my readers!!!!

Reviews for Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come

“I loved it! It’s such a wonderful title, and the book lives up to it’ Nigella Lawson

‘In a world of self-care and nights in, this book will inspire and remind you to do some things that scare you every so often.’ Emma Gannon

‘Hilarious, unexpected and ultimately life-affirming.’ Will Storr

‘Funny, emotional and deeply inspiring, this is perfect for anyone wanting to break out of their comfort zone’ Heat

‘Beautifully written and so funny! I related to it A LOT’ – Emma Jane Unsworth

‘Relatable, moving and fantastically funny’ – Rhik Samadder

‘Tender, courageous and extremely funny, this book will make us all braver.’ Daisy Buchanan

‘A chronicle of Pan’s hilarious and painful year of being an extrovert.’ Stylist

‘Excellent, warm, hilarious.’ Nikesh Shukla

‘You WILL laugh and laugh while reading this.’ Sun

“Very funny, very smart” Liberty Hardy

Subscribe now

Did you miss my latest post?

Sam and I went to see a West End play that my parents had recommended from their visit to London a few months before. The play was three hours long with two intervals (2!) and when we arrived, we were surprised to see that we were sitting in the third row.

“Wow, great seats,” Sam said.

We took off our coats and scarves and settled in, enjoying the view so close to the stage. An hour into the show, at the first interval, we were chatting in our seats when someone stumbled into my leg.

“You’re in our seats.” I looked up to see a tall man standing over me.

“What?” I said, confused.

“You’re in our seats. Get up,” he said.

He was holding a beer and sneering at me.

“I think maybe you’re in the wrong row?” I said. It had happened earlier with a woman insisting we were in her seats, when she was actually in row D.

“Our seats are C6 and C7. You’re sitting in our seats. Move.”

“WHY are you being SO RUDE?” I asked him, suddenly furious. I stood up. That’s when I realized he was about 6’2.

But, so what? We had our tickets had been scanned at the door, and I knew our tickets said seats C6 and C7, because I’m not an absolute IDIOT, like this man. I was also baffled at how aggressive and hostile he was being. A woman appeared by his side.

“They’re in our seats,” he told her.

“How? Where have you even been? You missed the first hour of the play,” I said to him.

“We were late, so we had to watch it on a screen. And you took our seats. Now move,” he said. He looked at us, disgusted, like we were criminals who had stolen their third row seats when we thought they were no-shows.

I grabbed my phone to pull up the tickets. There they were. “C6 and C7.” I was just about to wave them in front of this man’s face when the red-hot realization hit my body before it registered in my brain.

I sat back down. “Omigod, omigod,” I say to Sam. It’s sort of a given in these situations that I am the confrontational one (American female) and Sam is the polite one (British male), but in this instance, Sam also began getting outraged at the man’s behavior.

“Let’s grab an usher,” Sam said.

“No, no, no,” I say to Sam. I start grabbing our coats and bags.

Read more

The other week I worked a very fancy book launch at a bar in Soho. The waiters felt bad for me sitting alone with a pile of books in a corner and they kept offering me more and more food, before they handed it out to the guests. It became like a game. “Smoked duck?” “Goat cheese tart?” “Smoked salmon?” I kept deftly saying no and they kept insisting that they were going to break me. They did, eventually. A platter of tiny boreks. Pastry will get me every time.

The author arrived, extremely glamorous, like a British Carrie Bradshaw, in a shiny gown and glossy make-up. I overheard her tell her friend that she felt slightly unwell and she was going to take a Lemsip. Could she take the Lemsip* in her champagne?

“I don’t think you can do that,” the friend said.

The author’s mother arrived and they hugged. They had the exact same body – very slim and they were both wearing long, clingy dresses with heels. Dresses I wouldn’t even dare try on in a dressing room alone because I don’t want to hurt my own feelings.

It made me think about how in my husband’s family, every single member is naturally very thin without ever having to exercise, diet or limit food in any way whatsoever. But then, they also don’t seem to love their food either, at least not in a primal way. Boxes of fancy chocolate from Christmas last until late April. Leftover slices of the good pizza go unclaimed at dinner. The cheeseboard is discarded half full. It’s baffling.

The first thing my mother, a woman who has been on a diet every day of her adult life, said about my gentle, sweet English mother-in-law after meeting her was, “Is she naturally that thin?” and I said, “Sadly, yes,” and my mom said, “I hate her.”

On the night of the book launch, there was a deluge of rain, but many of the guests gathered on the balcony to drink wine under an awning as the heavens poured down.

And then the most insane thing happened.

The author went outside in the rain to join her friends under the awning and she … she … she smoked a cigarette in front of her own mother!

There is no amount of money that you could pay me to smoke a cigarette in front of my mother or in fact, anyone’s mother. First of all, if I did that in front of my mother, she would immediately tell my father.

And if someone said to me, “We will pay you five hundred dollars for you to smoke a cigarette in front of your father and the only stipulation is you can’t tell him that we’re paying you to do it or discuss the money whatsoever. He has to just think you’re doing it because you want to,” I would not do it. The price I would pay is far too high.

I mentioned occasional smoking in my very first book that covers my life in my early twenties and my dad never said a word about it and then years later he introduced me to a doctor colleague of his.

Apropos of nothing, absolutely nothing, he said to her, about me, “Can you believe she smoked cigarettes in college when she has had asthma since she was five?” and his eyes filled with tears, leaving both me and his doctor friend speechless.

The emotion from my father was rare. I mean, this from a man who, when he hugged me goodbye when dropping me off at college 2,000 miles away (me being his youngest child and only daughter) dropped the parting phrase, “Three little words.”

“What?” I had asked. “I love you?”

“Don’t fuck up.”

Anyway, you can see what drove me to smoke those cigarettes.

Back at the book launch in Soho, I was stunned and probably a little bit jealous of the British Carrie Bradshaw. The author thanked her mother in her speech and said they talked every day and were best friends. Imagine being yourself, your whole self, in front of your parents. Wow.

As someone paid for a book, they asked, “Oh, are you American?” and I said yes and she said, “Where are you from?” And I said “Texas” and her eyes lit up.

“That’s why you have big hair and a big smile!” she said.

I looked at her. She looked at me.

“I’m watching the Dallas Cowboys cheerleader documentary on Netflix,” she explained.

As a half-Chinese kid with parents from Southern California, I didn’t know how to explain that I was such a poor specimen of stereotypical Texas. I wanted to present the woman with my high school friend Alison. She had blond hair, blindingly white teeth, blue eyes and a grin as big as Julia Roberts. In our sophomore English class, we had to give a presentation on our favorite word and hers was “pizzazz.” The most important thing to her in the entire world was to be a cheerleader at our high school.

I flicked on the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader documentary for about 30 seconds before I had to switch it off. It was so painfully similar to high school and watching the cheerleader tryouts. The girls would perform a choreographed group dance and then one by one, they would run up and down the school gym as their individual audition. Later that day, the entire school body would vote on who made the team, the only metrics being popularity, beauty and who could do the most backflips.

Alison tried out for cheerleader every year and cruelly, she was cut from the team our sophomore year, the year they had to dance to N’Sync’s Bye Bye Bye!  She was popular, but she couldn’t do the backhand springs and flips that wow a crowd – she would just run up and down the platform waving her pom poms and grinning so hard. She was white knuckling PIZZAZZ!!!!!

To this day, I’ve never heard howls more primal than Alison’s while she sat in my car and Bye Bye Bye came on the radio that afternoon. Rivers of black mascara streamed down her face as she wailed.

So no, I didn’t need to watch the Dallas Cowboy cheerleader documentary. I saw it in real life, up close. Although, it’s recently been hard to prove it.  

When renewing my American passport at the US Embassy in London, I had to prove I was not merely born in America, but that I had spent significant time there. I explained to the passport officer that I lived there my entire life until I was 22, but he wouldn’t take my word for it. He needed concrete evidence. I showed him my college diploma, but that wasn’t enough for him.

“Can you show me proof that you went to high school in America? In Texas?”

How do you prove that? My freshman year boyfriend was named Tye and he drove a blue pick-up truck? People prayed to Jesus at the swim banquet?

It was frightening to be questioned about something that is so obviously true to you, so true in your bones – and yet without an official file on hand to prove it, you’ve got nothing.

I thought about the elderly British man at the bookshop who had asked if we took cash and when I told him, “No, sorry,” he’d muttered under his breath, “Your time here hasn’t blunted that American accent.” And yet, here I was, trying to convince a fellow countryman that I was just like him and failing.

“Okay well… what was your high school mascot?” the passport officer asked me.

I froze. Would this actually count as proof?

I’m from a flat, windy part of Texas where every week of summer, there’s a tornado warning. Where it’s a given that there would be several summer storms – deafeningly loud thunder and hail the size of golfballs. Thunderclaps so loud they will jolt you out of a dead sleep, leaving you gasping at 3am. Moments later, as the heavens beat down on the roof above your head, you will try to be brave as you gingerly pull your duvet back over your body and roll over, trying to convince yourself that you are safe.

Sam’s English friend Shaun cycled across America a few year ago and when he camped near my hometown, he told us, “If I’d grown up with weather like this, I’d be God-fearing, too.”

And so our high school mascot at my high school of 2,000 kids was a sandstorm named Sandie, a nod to the wild winds. We were knowns as “the Sandies” and our football cheer was “Blow, sand, blow!”

I told this to the passport officer and he looked at me with a mixture of awe and disgust.  “There’s no way anyone could make that up,” he said and stamped “Approved” on my application.  

****

A few days after the book launch, my right armpit began to feel…weird. It felt like razor burn but it also ran up over my right shoulder-blade. Had I accidentally been sunburnt there? I kept checking in the mirror and seeing nothing, just kept feeling this weird tingly, burning feeling.

Had I used a new soap? A new deodorant?

For two days, I kept pulling my shirt up and facing backwards in mirrors to study the skin on my back – convinced there would be something there. Nothing.

On Day 3, the burning feeling spread to my right boob.

I started trying to figure out how to book my first mammogram.

As I was getting ready for bed, I decided to check one more time. How could there be burning and no sign of anything? I raised my shirt up in front of our bedroom mirror and there it finally was. A red bumpy rash. In two different spots. All located on my right shoulder blade.

Shingles! I had shingles. In some ways, a relief.  I knew these were the symptoms for shingles without even consulting the internet, probably from a lifetime of always thinking I’m suffering from some rare, weird disease. Except this time I was. I felt vindicated, like the person resting under a gravestone that reads, “I told you I was sick.”  

Immediately I thought, “But I’m not 67!!!! How do I have shingles???” Shingles was something my mom’s friend’s husbands were coming down with. Not women like me, women who had ice blue nails for summer (first manicure in a year!) and a fresh haircut (first haircut in more than a year!), women who still had muscle memory in their quads on how to roller blade.

And yet.

I did what I always do when I’m ill: my husband took photos of the rash and I sent them to my dad, who sent them to his best friend Dean in Los Angeles, an infectious disease doctor, and Dean diagnosed me remotely. Shingles. The telltale symptoms being a tingly feeling, a rash and all of it relegated to only one side of my body.

You can only get shingles if you’ve had chickenpox. After you get chickenpox, the virus never actually leaves your body and instead lies dormant in your spinal cord and in a third of people, it appears again several years later, in the form of shingles. So for God only knows what reason, the virus in me has re-awoken this summer of all summers. Maybe it wanted to see the Paris Olympics? I have no idea. It’s been just lying in wait inside me for more than thirty years.

The theory is that, because once an entire community became infected with chickenpox, every member then became immune. This would cause the virus to die out, so to adapt, the virus became latent for years inside its former hosts, only to appear decades later to infect new children (virus hosts) in the community. It’s so clever and so frightening. Chickenpox dates back to ancient times and its own viral ancestors date back to when the dinosaurs roamed the earth.

It’s moments like this when you realize, “Oh I thought I was a human doing cultural things like reading library books and going to the National Theatre and reading Mary Oliver poetry and stirring my matcha with a tea whisk from Japan, but all I was really doing was passing time while the virus waited for its moment to reactivate in my body and spread to other virus vectors.”  

I am merely a virus vessel, one of billions of others, to help spread more virus. What do I do for work? I work for the virus.

It reminded me of the first year of Covid, when we all called it coronavirus and we watched it from our homes and every morning I’d wake to text messages from my parent about who the virus had struck that day – the President. Prince Charles. Tom Hanks.

I had stood 6 feet away from our neighbours, a Dutch couple named Hannah and Robert, outside the front of our flat in London. Robert is an actual scientist, and I came to him with my many questions and queries.

“I just feel like it’s malicious. The virus. Like it wants to harm us.”

“It’s not sentient,” Robert said.

“No, I know, but it genuinely feels evil. When you wake up and read Forrest Gump has it. That’s just mean.”

“A virus doesn’t have feelings or a sense of morality,” Robert had said. The combination of Robert being Dutch and a scientist means he has less than zero tolerance for bullshit.

Do you have any Dutch friends? We seem to have a lot and they are all like this, and I love them for it.

***

You can’t give shingles to another person, but your shingles can give someone chickenpox, if they’ve never had it before. Ninety-five percent of adults are immune, but try saying, “I have a rash” in public and watch as people quietly make moves to leave the situation.

In reality, it is two red splotches on my back, each about the size of an apricot.

Our senior year in college, my friends use to drink and play Would You Rather? The one that sticks out the most is, “Would you rather, every time someone touched you, even if it’s just to shake your hand or brush behind you to reach something, you had to either say one of two things. Option A: every time someone touches you, you have to say, “Ohhhh, that feels sooooo gooood,” or Option B: every time someone touches you, you have to shout, “OUCH, YOU’RE HURTING ME!!!!” For the rest of your life.

For hours, we found this the most important question in the world, imagining the most awkward scenarios to use either of them. Shaking hands with your new boss. “Ohhh that feels sooo good.” At the hairdresser. After vigorous CPR. Brushing against someone on the tube: “OUCH YOU’RE HURTING ME!” Giving blood: “Ohhh that feels soooo good.”  

Somehow my life had become a game of: Would you rather, every time you met up with someone have to say, Option A: I have a contagious rash on my back, don’t touch me or come near me OR Option B: Have you had chickenpox? Because if you not, I could kill you.

I’m only a danger to those who haven’t had chickenpox, so mainly babies, small children and recluses on their walkabouts. Before my next shift at the bookshop, I vow to avoid children and also check that everyone I work with has had chickenpox, but of course they have already had chickenpox because we’re all adults.

One by one, they tell me, “Of course” they’ve had it. Until Gregg, the new guy, replies, “I have NOT had chickenpox!”

My friend Lin contracted chickenpox when she was 35, and she was so unwell that her fiancé actually thought she might die before they got married. It knocked her flat for three weeks and she’d gone to the hospital saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong but I think I’m dying.”

Rebecca from the bookshop tells me that her mother got chickenpox as an adult and ended up in the hospital, too.

“The pox was so bad that they were inside her lungs and now on x-rays it looks like she has TB.”

Kids in the UK don’t get the chickenpox vaccine, so children just keep getting them and giving them to each other, like they have for centuries. But you can go to a pharmacy and pay privately to get the chickenpox vaccine.

Gregg and I are due to work together in two days. I think about Lin’s grave tale. I think about the pox in Rebecca’s mother’s lungs. I don’t want to kill Gregg. Also, Gregg’s wife is pregnant and I don’t want to kill that child’s father with a rogue brush of my back rash (OUCH YOU’RE HURTING ME!!!).

I tell one of the other booksellers that I personally think Gregg should get vaccinated. Actually, what I do is send a link to a pharmacy that provides the chickenpox vaccine with the words, “GREGG WILL NOT SURVIVE HIS CHILD'S NURSERY YEARS WITHOUT IT!!!”

The bookseller writes back a few hours later, “Good to see you’re being chill about it…”

I like this person but I hate people “with chill.” Specifically, I hate people telling other people to “be chill.”  Chill means you don’t care. Unchill people get things done. Unchill people are the ones you want on planes when you are having an allergic reaction because they have packed two epipens just in case. Unchill people are the ones you want babysitting your kids because they will never let a tick bite turn into full blown Lyme disease – not on their watch. Unchill people are going to be on time for the plane, with snacks and an extra layer in case it gets cold.

Okay, sure, maybe I could just be chill about this. Or maybe I’ll just KILL GREGG?

I get that “unchill / non chill” people merely aren’t as fun as others and we do tend to lose our shit over things other people will shrug their shoulders at. But by the time you tell an unhinged person to chill, it is far too late. The only thing worse than telling them to “just chill” is to punch them in the face, throw tabasco sauce in their eyes and then yell, “JUST CHILL, YOU FOOL!”

“Just chill” is the simplest way to say, “You are irrational, insane and embarrassing.”

A better, original and more effective way came from my friend Rosie over dinner at an Italian restaurant in London. I was talking about – I don’t know what – probably asking why we can go to Mars and grow ears on mice but we can’t cure eczema when one in every five babies has it, and she said, very calmly and not unkindly, “Do you think you might have an undiagnosed anxiety disorder?”

The tone was so calm and the question so shocking that it knocked me out of whatever state I was in. “Hmm, maybe, actually,” I said, taking a breath and a drink of water. I don’t even know if I do have one, but it was the way she said it, calmly but caringly, that it made me realise I was ranting instead of eating the plates of pasta in front of us.

But of course, I’m also so very wrong. Chill people, truly chill people are the best. My god - a slow-talking craftsman who makes his own coasters out of driftwood he finds on his daily morning beach walk? Marry me. Surgeons with steady hands, pilots making smooth emergency landings, sleepy-eyed skateboarders? I long to walk among them.

My best friend in Texas, Jori, is so chill. She has three sons, the first being an accident and the third one being a complete surprise. Her reaction to both, “Oh! Okay!” She is the definition of can-do.

However, this is also a recent conversation we had when I was visiting her in Houston a few months ago.

“Well, at least my car wasn’t stolen this year.”

“Your car was stolen last year?” I asked. She hadn’t mentioned it.

“Yes,” Jori said.

“Were … were the keys in the car when it was stolen?” I asked.

“No comment,” Jori said.

And so the email, the one that said, “Good to see you are being chill about it…” annoyed me because it embarrassed me.

Gmail suggested an AI-generated response based on the email thread, so to save myself from writing an embarrassing non-chill comeback, I clicked send on the first auto-reply:

“Yes, very sad.”

***

Then I get annoyed. Like irrationally angry at Gregg. What do you mean you didn’t get chickenpox as a child? Okay little prince living in a castle in the woods with only royal regal adults as friends? Were you reading your books wearing white gloves?

You mean you didn’t get chickenpox from your two older brothers when you were three and it happened to be the one week the circus was in town and somehow the timing worked out that they still got to go and you had to stay home and miss the circus? And you cried so much that your very first memory of being alive on this earth is sobbing in the bathtub because this pervasive itchy virus has taken you from the things you love most in the world (elephants and cotton candy)?

And you, Gregg, are a 35-year-old man living in busy, dirty, crowded, germy London and you’ve never had chickenpox?

Okay, Gregg. Grow up, Gregg.

***

At the bookshop, we offer a gift subscription service, where if you pay less than £200, we will select, wrap and mail a new book to the giftee every month.

To try to avoid disappointment, we send off questionnaires to the gift recipient to gauge their taste. We ask questions like “Who are your favorite authors?” and “Are there any genres or authors you definitely don’t want to receive?” to try to choose a book they’ll actually enjoy.

We also ask a far more important question: “Are there any subjects you’d like to avoid?” One person wrote, “Grief / parent loss” which, same (I want to read Crying in H Mart, but I find that I simply cannot) and another wrote “Anything with cancer.” Someone else wrote, “Cricket, maybe?”

I identify with the person who wrote, “No sci fi or horror or anything too dark” but I want to be the person who wrote, “No, I’m game for anything :) .”

It’s so tricky to select the right book to read at the right time, especially for yourself.

Everyone I knew kept saying, “You’re too young to get shingles.” Then they eye me up and say, “They say it can happen if you’ve been really stressed.”

I have a theory that if you took any given person and said, “You have shingles. It can be caused by stress. Have you been under any stress lately?” that every single person would think about their life and their daily struggles and say, “I have. Yes.”

Had I been through undue stress that month? I…had. Sort of. But I had also been drugging myself to sleep and was convinced that since I was sleeping (with the drugs), then I couldn’t really be stressed because to me stress is almost always sleep deprivation and insomnia.

But it got me anyway. (Why? Because this is a fact about unchill people: they get shingles).  

As for the stress, I think I will share more about that in the book I’m working on. They say “write from scar, not the wound” and it’s very much still a wound, a wound that blew open the dormant varicella virus and gave me a rash with tiny pinprick blisters on my right shoulder blade. A wound that is itchy and sore and means I take an antiviral pill 5 times a day, including at 3am.

So for various reasons, I’ve been having a sad summer and when I’m in certain depressed moods, I can only reread books I’ve read before when I’m sad. I can’t watch new TV shows or films. I can’t handle new information or sorrow, even fictional. I don’t want a single surprise or reveal.

I was scouring my bookshelves and I couldn’t find anything that felt like the right read to pull me out of my darkness. I’d read Heartburn too many times, Sedaris doesn’t hit the way it used to, and any novels with any kind of death or sadness or illness were eliminated. Funny novels didn’t feel right, either.

Then I saw Solutions and Other Problems, an illustrated sad, but funny book by Allie Brosh. I had read this a few years ago, in another very anxious time in my life, but couldn’t remember it well.

At my favorite coffeeshop, I like to sit and drink my coffee on the benches outside. There’s a house across the street that I love staring into and I often imagine living there – glass windows, huge kitchen, gated walls.

A few times a month, I see a Dalmatian wander inside or mosey out, living the life I covet. I am very jealous of this Dalmatian.

On this particular day, I sit outside the coffeeshop and open up the Allie Brosh book. I can’t explain what the book is about because it’s honestly impossible to explain but at Chapter 2, I am laughing. And then I am crying. Then I’m turning pages of Chapter 2 while cry-laughing. It is very funny. But suddenly I am sobbing. And then sobbing harder because I was sad, but also relieved that I could still laugh. On that particular day, I didn’t know I could still laugh.

I was just caught in this loop of laughing at the pages of this strange funny book and crying so hard, and it is a gift that during this time, not a single person walked by to see me. When I finally close the book for the morning, I look up to see the Dalmatian, this wealthy Dalmatian, walking into his gated brick house.

Be well. I’ll be here, Typhoid Mary – not holding babies, not hugging anyone, not swimming, not wearing a backless dress, not touching Gregg, not even allowed in the bookshop.

Instead I will be sitting on benches outside, like a blister in the sun, reading and cry-laughing.

But do not touch me. I am still contagious.

*Lemsip is like a dissolvable tablet of Tylenol and Sudafed combined

You can read more of my writing by checking out my book, “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes.” (The UK version is “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously). It’s also been translated and published in the Netherlands, Korea, China, Russia, Germany, Taiwan, Poland and Hungary.

It’s about the year I spent: talking to strangers, performing stand-up comedy, travelling solo, trying out improv, going on friend dates and doing a bunch of extrovert-y things.  It’s about being an introvert and trying to extrovert for a full year. I interview brilliant people throughout the book who guide me through these nightmares.

Reviews for Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come

“I loved it! It’s such a wonderful title, and the book lives up to it’ Nigella Lawson 

‘In a world of self-care and nights in, this book will inspire and remind you to do some things that scare you every so often.’ Emma Gannon

‘Hilarious, unexpected and ultimately life-affirming.’ Will Storr

‘Funny, emotional and deeply inspiring, this is perfect for anyone wanting to break out of their comfort zone’  Heat

‘Beautifully written and so funny! I related to it A LOT’ – Emma Jane Unsworth

‘Relatable, moving and fantastically funny’ – Rhik Samadder

‘Tender, courageous and extremely funny, this book will make us all braver.’ Daisy Buchanan

‘A chronicle of Pan’s hilarious and painful year of being an extrovert.’ Stylist

‘Excellent, warm, hilarious.’ Nikesh Shukla

‘You WILL laugh and laugh while reading this.’ Sun

“Very funny, very smart” Liberty Hardy

Did you miss my most recent post?

A man in his twenties walked into the bookshop. He was looking for a birthday present for his girlfriend. He asked me to look up two very obscure books on conflict in Africa, and when we didn’t have them, he sighed and went to browse our non-fiction section. He wore a white hoodie under a jean jacket, and he seemed extremely concerned about getting her the right book and very annoyed at me, specifically, for the bookshop not having what were essentially university textbooks.

He was striking in a very specific kind of way, with a lip piercing, an eyebrow ring and a chin stud, the kind of man who would never ever have expressed any interest in me when I was in my twenties. Sometimes you just know.

In the end, he bought her a book about migrant history (she was getting a PhD in….something) and a card with a cat on it and a book of cat poetry.

What makes hard men like him so soft that they purchase cat poetry in public?

I will never know.

I’m sort of obsessed with (publicly) rude men and the women they love, because all of my boyfriends have only ever been the sweetest kindest man in any room who ooze affability. If Sam had asked for that book, he would have apologised 15 times.

I recently asked two friends who they had chosen as their partners: in short, did they marry their dad or their mom? I was Freud over a plate of nachos. “Dads” they both said, quickly and simultaneously and then they both looked like they wanted to retch.

I’ve fought with my dad ever since I went to college up until the last time he visited London last winter – shouting matches in Beijing, in Melbourne, in Los Angeles, in Greenwich Park, over high tea at the Langham. So many beautiful spots ruined by us fighting while Sam and my mom sit silently looking at each other, internally pleading for us to stop. My dad can be fun – very fun – and loving and generous but he also has zero filter and a temper, and in my twenties, I decided that it wasn’t fair that only he got to shout, so I started shouting back.

My main beef with my dad is that I can’t understand why he can’t censor himself. Fair enough that I can’t change his low opinion on things I like or value (writing as a career, the Thai restaurant with a Michelin rating near my flat, reading for pleasure) but why must he always tell me these hurtful opinions?

In one particularly heated dinner, I was ranting to my mom afterwards. I was basically asking her how could she live with someone so annoying.

“Well, I like him!” she said. They’ve been married nearly 48 years.
”Why can’t he just not SAY the hurtful things he things? Why can’t he just say them BEHIND MY BACK, like every other sane, normal person does? Why can’t he just give me, his daughter, that courtesy?”
”Jess, he’s not going to change! He’s 72!!!”
”Why? WHY CAN’T HE CHANGE? He drives an electric car now and is a vegan now! See? He changed!”
”People. Don’t. Change,” my mother said.

Anyway, all this to say: angry men or men with a temper - men who are in a bad mood and must therefore make everyone else be in a bad mood - could not make me run away faster.

On the surface, Sam seems like my dad in that they are both avid runners with less than 12% body fat (how do we know? My dad thought it would be fun to have Sam stand on a body fat scale the first time he came to my home for Thanksgiving so they could compare). But that’s where the similarities end.

I married a man who cooks, who doesn’t wake up grumpy (I genuinely didn’t know this was possible until I met him), who doesn’t hold grudges (how???? what are you living for???).

I told my mom my theory and she said, “Of course you married me, your mother. That’s because you ARE your father.” She went on, “Stubborn, particular, always think your way is the right way, obsessive.”

Which frankly haunts me to this day.

So. Did you marry your mother or your father?

(Though I haven’t finessed this theory long enough. For instance, I don’t think Sam married his mother or his father when he married me. Actually I can’t match it to most people, but I would like to hear your own theories.)

I was working last week, in the lead-up to Father’s Day. It was pouring rain outside so it felt very dramatic when people would burst through the bookshop door with dripping wet umbrellas and soaked coats.

A mother came in with her two little boys. They were trying to buy a Father’s Day present in secret and they quickly bought a book and a card and the mom said, “Quick, hide the bag so he doesn’t see!” to one of the boys. They stood at the window as they watched the father approach the bookshop and they giggled conspiratorially and it made me believe in humanity again.

A couple hid from the rain at a table in the bookshop. You know how you can interlock your arm with someone as you face them and toast and drink champagne? They had their arms intertwined like this as they scrolled on their respective phones for about an hour waiting for the rain to pass.

Our Father’s Day table selection was a mixture of World War II books, bleak novels, books about fishing, cricket and football and a huge tome of a cookbook just called, simply, SPAIN. The SPAIN book sold almost immediately, a woman saying, “My husband will LOVE this!” and beaming. I never know what to get my dad for Father’s Day and my brother said, “It literally doesn’t matter. You’re just ticking a box.”

My dad is friendly to strangers, up for adventures, great in disaster scenarios and if you ask for his help in something, he will go to great lengths to help you, even (especially) if he’s just met you. We are both hypersensitive to each other’s approval and instead of that resulting in us being extra-nice to each other, we tease each other relentlessly until one of us storms off offended (because the other one of us took it too far). It happens, without fail, every time my parents visit me.

Recently, a friend told me that her father asked if he could give a 40 minute speech at her wedding. When she told him he could have five minutes, he told her that she clearly didn’t love him as much as he loved her. They negotiated him down to a fifteen minute spot, and my friend said she can’t remember how nice the speech was because halfway through he mentioned where she went to grad school and he said the wrong school in a different state and that’s all she can remember now.

A few months ago, a woman came into our bookshop to order a coffee from us. She complained that the cafe next door charged too much for coffee and added, “Plus, they are SO rude.”

“I know!” I said. “They are SO RUDE.” By “they” though, we meant “He.” The male barista had a withering gaze. He’s become semi-famous for his apathy. When I asked what was in some special crunchy breakfast bun on the counter and he looked at me with an annoyed sigh and said, “Bread?” Sadly, it is the best coffee in this neighborhood, but in that moment, this woman and I jointly vowed to never go there again.

That conversation with the woman was over a year ago and yesterday I was sitting in the cafe writing this and drinking a coffee made by the surly barista when the same woman came in. We locked eyes. I knew she recognised me and we both sort of sheepishly looked at each other. I guess I’m not alone in that I will tolerate rude men if they have good coffee.

It’s also Taylor Swift week in London – she’s performing here this weekend – and a Little People book about her and a paperdoll dress-up book with her Eras outfits have been flying off the shelves. So many excited young girls. A dad came in last weekend with his three kids and bought his daughter a book about Taylor’s songwriting.

“Are you going to see her?” I asked his daughter. She shook her head sadly no.

“I actually am,” the dad said.

“Oh?” I asked.

“I just found out - I’m going to be taking some clients.”

“What do you do?” I asked. He ignored my question, as people who have jobs like this always ignore that question when you ask, because it’s probably something like “gas burning professional” or “finance crimes” - I don’t know. I don’t have clients, especially ones that would let me attend the most popular live show ever.

Sally, who works at the bookshop, is the biggest Taylor Swift fan I have ever met and I think that is saying something. She was recently hospitalised with a kidney stone and a gnarly infection but she told the nurses and doctors that under no circumstances, ZERO, was she not going to see Taylor Swift at Wembley this weekend.

If we are working together, we exclusively play Taylor in the bookshop and we often get into long discussions with customers, usually about who Taylor should be with. One day an older woman said, “I know!!” and Sally and I said, “Who??” and she said, confidently, “Donald Glover.”

Walter was working on Sunday when I went to drop off a few books from an event I was working. Apparently, I had missed all the action – an elderly woman had fallen while taking the big step to get into the bookshop and she’d smacked the back of her head on the concrete outside.

Walter, a doctor, had jumped up into action, cradling her head with a cushion and asking her questions and checking vitals. He held her hand and told her, “Don’t worry, I’m a doctor. Unfortunately, my speciality is sexual and reproductive health.” The woman had laughed.

She lay there for awhile on the concrete, her head bleeding. Luckily she was with her adult children who had come with her to the bookshop that day. Eventually an ambulance came, but meanwhile, the bookshop had one of its best days in ages because … people love a scene?

However when I arrived in late afternoon, it was nearly empty. I asked Walter how things were going with Lucy (Beautiful Lucy).

“Good. We’re looking to move into a new flat together,” he said. He currently lived with a woman who worked late nights as a bartender and detested him because she claimed he woke her up every morning by chewing his granola and scraping the bowl with his spoon (dink dink dink) in the kitchen. Hence, why Walter wanted to move in with Lucy sooner rather than later.

“Do you think you’ll marry her?” I ask him. It was a Sunday at the bookshop and at that moment, there were no customers in.

“I think so,” he says.

And then…I did something. Should I have done it? Probably not. I don’t know why I did it. I wasn’t planning on doing it. My brain went into dangerous auto-pilot.

“So…how old is Lucy?” I ask.

“31,” he says.

“Do you think she wants kids?” I ask.

“She definitely does.”

“More than one?”

“Maybe.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“Well … you know that every woman I know in London with a long-term partner who also wants kids … they usually try to get pregnant at 34.”

“Why?” he asks.

How to explain this to him? It wasn’t merely that women are told that at age 35 our fertility begins to decline. Thirty-five has also become this huge scary destination that we’ve been warned about our entire lives. Once we are in our 30s, it becomes a huge traffic sign flashing in neon, and by then it’s not just theoretical – it’s so close we can see it.

But we are scared by motherhood and everything we have heard about it, so we procrastinate and wait until the very last possible moment before we reach that exit. And if you have a willing partner, 34 was often go time, I explained.

Walter typed vigorously on the shop’s keyboard and quickly pulled up some fertility by age charts online. Together we looked at the squiggly black line – the one that headed direct South as soon as age hit 35.

“Errrrrr,” Walter says, his eyebrows furrowed.

“Of course, many women I know get pregnant in their early 40s,” I say. Which is true. I currently have three friends in London who are pregnant and in their 40s, all naturally. A phenomenon that seems to astonish my mother and Sam’s mother, who both seem to think women just dry up the day they turn 36. It’s hard to accept that both things can be true: it is harder to get pregnant after 35 than it was at 25, but it is also possible to get pregnant in your 40s.

And yet I don’t stop here. No.

“How old is Lucy again?”

“31.”

“Does she want to be married before she has a baby?”

“I think, so yes.”

“And does she want more than one baby?”

Walter isn’t sure.

So I did it. I did the cruel thing that has been done to me, that I do to myself, that all women do to themselves, that society has done to all of us. I went for it.

“Well … if you maybe want to try for a baby at 35, then you probably want to have been married for a year at 34 and you’ll probably want to be engaged for a year at 33 … so … by my calculations, you have about one year before proposing to hit that timeline. Because Lucy’s 31, right?”

Walter paled.

“She turns 32 next month.”

Right.

I went to go put away a stack of books and when I came back, Walter was still standing there, his arms braced against the bar.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m just … I’m just taking all that in for the first time.”

Many of my friends in their mid to late 30s in London (some single, some not) are now choosing to freeze their eggs or embryos. We have had hours and hours of conversations over coffee and cake weighing the pros and the cons of doing so. And my friends in New York? They froze their eggs years ago.

But this is what I found so astonishing: that Walter had never thought about these things in this way. He’d never scribbled frantic numbers on a piece of paper, doing simple math, working it all out backwards so he could find the last possible moment when he had to decide, to “jump” if he wanted a safer landing. And Walter is a sexual health doctor, so what hope do we have for our other partners?

Later, talking with others, they tell me that, no, actually now everyone who wants kids “someday” is planning to get pregnant at 39. The new scary exit is 40.

See, there are two camps you come across if you are someone who expresses that you do someday – way in the future – want kids. You will meet women with young children who say, “My god, WAIT WAIT for goodness’ sake wait, EVERYTHING changes and you can’t go back once you’ve done it, there is NO. GOING. BACK,” and these are the women we want to run into at the grocery store. They make us want to fly to a remote island in Greece, lie back on a sun lounger and chain smoke while drinking Diet Coke while we still can, because we are still young, basically still babies ourselves.

Then there is the other camp of women we meet who say, “DO NOT WAIT! Do not wait ANOTHER SECOND. Go home and get pregnant right now. RIGHT. NOW. JUST TRUST ME.” They are less fun, but they are trying to save us from something traumatic they have been through or seen good friends go through.

It was hard to watch myself shape shift into a nosy aunt at Christmas saying, “The clock’s ticking.” I was now part of the problem. It was like a cycle of abuse: it had been done to me and then I did it to Walter. Deep down I merely wanted men (or at least one man) to carry that anxiety with us for once.

Maybe, like what I’ve always wanted from my father, I should have just silently thought these things in my mind and not said them to Walter. But it was too late now. I apologize and he tells me it’s okay, but still looks wounded.

Soon it’s nearly 6pm, so Walter and I close the bookshop together. We put the tables and chairs inside and clean the coffee machine. We lock the back door.

We’re going for drinks and meeting Rebecca at the pub across the road. It is summertime in London but freezing. We huddle in jackets at a table outside at the pub (because it’s summer!!) and I pull out a beanie from the bottom of my backpack.

Rebecca’s cousin just had twins and Rebecca is completely obsessed with them. She tells us that she is worried that she won’t find someone in time to have a baby, because she is currently single.

Rebecca is 25. I look at Walter and say to her, “You don’t need to worry about that right now. Not at all.”

Still feeling guilty, I buy Walter a beer and a pizza.

“But,” Rebecca said, and I held my hand up, exactly the way my mother does about certain things and I said exactly what she would’ve said to me.

“You’re fine. Don’t worry.”

It’s the best advice I’ve ever had.

You can read more of my writing by checking out my book, “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes.” (The UK version is “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously). It’s also been translated and published in the Netherlands, Korea, China, Russia, Germany, Taiwan, Poland and Hungary.

It’s about the year I spent: talking to strangers, performing stand-up comedy, travelling solo, trying out improv, going on friend dates and doing a bunch of extrovert-y things.  It’s about being an introvert and trying to extrovert for a full year. I interview brilliant people throughout the book who guide me through these nightmares.

Reviews for Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come

“I loved it! It’s such a wonderful title, and the book lives up to it’ Nigella Lawson 

‘In a world of self-care and nights in, this book will inspire and remind you to do some things that scare you every so often.’ Emma Gannon

‘Hilarious, unexpected and ultimately life-affirming.’ Will Storr

‘Funny, emotional and deeply inspiring, this is perfect for anyone wanting to break out of their comfort zone’  Heat

‘Beautifully written and so funny! I related to it A LOT’ – Emma Jane Unsworth

‘Relatable, moving and fantastically funny’ – Rhik Samadder

‘Tender, courageous and extremely funny, this book will make us all braver.’ Daisy Buchanan

‘A chronicle of Pan’s hilarious and painful year of being an extrovert.’ Stylist

‘Excellent, warm, hilarious.’ Nikesh Shukla

‘You WILL laugh and laugh while reading this.’ Sun

“Very funny, very smart” Liberty Hardy

Did you miss my most recent post?

A woman came into the bookshop, rolling a suitcase behind her.

“Sally?” she asked me.

“No, I’m sorry,” I said.

“Neil?” she said.

I had to tell her no again – that Sally doesn’t work Mondays and that Neil was off sick and I was Jess. Just Jess with no real power in the bookshop.

The woman contained her disappointment well. Then she pulled a book out her pocket – a proof of a new book of hers coming out – historical fiction. She had shiny mauve-brown nails and was in her sixties, smartly dressed.

We chatted a bit about her book and how this was her second novel (out in July). I paused and then asked her if she’d been a writer for a long time and she shook her head no, with a glint in her eye.

“No, not at all. I told myself my entire life – when I turn 55, I’m going to quit my job and write full-time. And I did it!”

I love stories like this, that we can re-make ourselves at any moment. I don’t know why I relish these stories, as if my own life is so disgusting / repellent and I need to a fresh, dramatic new start, but it’s so comforting to think, if I just made a few right choices in the future, then I too will have two published novels and shiny mauve nails. (The author who came in was Annie Garthwaite and her book The King’s Mother is out in July with Viking!)

At the bookshop, Rebecca (25) recently told me, apropos of absolutely nothing, literally just looking at my face in a quiet moment: “You don’t look that old. More like…33.” Right after this, another man came into the bookshop. He was looking to buy Alastair Campbell’s book, But What Can I Do? He mentioned it was for his book club. I asked him more about his book club and he said, “Well, it’s really my running club but we read books, too.” He told me the name of his running club, and it’s actually the same running club my husband Sam trains with.

I texted Sam, “A man from your running club is in the bookshop.” Sam asked me to describe him. In a hurried text between customers, I wrote, “old AF?” And Sam instantly guessed correctly.

Look, I googled the running man and he’s in his mid-80s, so I think it’s okay to call him old. Though Rebecca would probably say to him, “You don’t look THAT old. You’re more like…79.”

I do feel bad about writing “Old AF” even though it’s unlikely he will ever find out that I did this. Last summer when my mom was in a hotel swimming pool in summer, some teenager accidentally hit her in the head with a beach ball, but this was nothing compared to the agony of what followed after. The kid yelled to his friend, “Hey! You just hit that old lady on the head with the ball!” and my glamorous mother, a very young 72 with elegant nails, designer sunglasses, a Fitbit that regularly gets 10,000 steps a day and most importantly, hair like Jane Fonda, was fuming. She still recalls the anecdote with fury. “That old lady? THAT OLD LADY?! Old lady my ass.”

“Do you still run?” I asked the running club man and he looked furious at the question, I guess at the insinuation that you don’t run at 85. He nodded his head vigorously and looked disgusted at me for asking. I’m still reeling from the shame.

And then, I swear, a few days later, I was sitting in a café eating a cheese and mushroom omelet and a young man and an older woman in her sixties sat down together. I was eavesdropping about how he was some big deal manager or agent or something and she talked about all the plays she had written and was currently writing.

I went to a baby shower last weekend, and we were supposed to write encouraging advice for the mother-to-be to read during the birth. A big thing I have been saying to myself and to other people, in an annoying all-knowing way is, “Trust in the timing of your life,” so I scrawled this onto a post-it on the message board.

Later, I realised how infuriating this will be while writhing in agony in the labour ward, begging the midwife for pain relief. Imagine the midwife cooing, “Just trust in the timing of your life, sweetie,” on her way out the door.

But I still like it - trust in the timing of your life - because so much of our life is not in our control, so I’d rather feel hopeful about that fact than spiral into despair. I’ve convinced myself that I must write X amount of words by Y date, so that I can get it published by Z and it never ever pans out the way I want or hope. But often, yes, it is better than I could have personally imagined. But it is never ever in the time frame I wanted.  

I worked an evening book launch at the bookshop last week. The author’s debut novel. She wore a long patent leather skirt with a slit up the back, sky-high glittery slingback heels, a black sweater and had light pink nails. She was gorgeous, but more than that, she was just very, very beloved. Everyone there was so excited for her.

My very favorite part about book launches is the speeches. I get to hide behind the register, in the shadows, watching these big moments unfold, for an author’s dreams to come true. The author was also a theatre actress, so she was very beautiful in a dramatic way and she wasn’t nervous at all – just blooming in her speech, out of her high heels. In her speech, she said that actually, her book was supposed to come out a year ago, but it was delayed, mostly because she was heavily pregnant at that time. The agony: to have your book publication date pass you by and having to wait another full year.  

“But it’s better this way,” she said. “Now I get to have both my babies.” She held up her hardback book “baby” and, in the very back of the crowd, her partner held up an adorable 9-month old baby as proof. The tiny feet in a red velvet onesie bounced on his shoulders and the baby grinned. “I love you, darling!” the man called out to her from the back of the bookshop. “I love you, darling!” the author called back.

Afterwards, when I was pouring wine and negronis, the books were flying fast. Soon, we only had one copy left. A woman in a grey sweater asked me to save it for her, in the back, and she would purchase it later. But two minutes later, someone else approached the bar.

“Are all the books gone?”

“Unfortunately, yes,” I said.

“But I see one behind you. Why can’t I have that one?”

“Oh…that’s…reserved for one of the other guests. She’s going to pay later.”

“You can’t reserve. Why does she get to reserve it?”

I secretly agree with her. You can’t just “reserve” things willy-nilly. You can’t just go around pointing to nice things yelling, “Mine! For later! Don’t touch!” But I’d already promised to save it for the woman in the grey sweater.  

At this point, I didn’t really know what to do. I kept frantically trying to wave and get the attention of the grey sweater lady, so she could hurry up and buy the book, but she was busy chatting to someone else. The bookshop can hold about 50 people in it, and it was at capacity.

The woman at the register leaned in.

“What if I pay more for the book? Then can I have it?”

“Uh….”

“You don’t understand. The author is my GIRL. We used to work together every day. I have to buy her book tonight.”

Finally, FINALLY the other woman in the grey sweater saw my frantic gesturing and made her way over. I explained the situation. The grey sweater woman decided that clearly the other woman wanted the book more than her and she relinquished the final copy.

As I rang up the book, I said to the winner, “So you and the author must be really close, huh?”

“Not really,” she said. “We just used to work together, that’s all. I haven’t seen her in ages.” Then she laughed.

Fucking hell.

Sometimes, it really is just about winning. Or at least not feeling like you missed out.

A recent bit of advice that I’ve heard recently that I cannot stop thinking about is this: if someone, especially someone you know well, says something rude or insulting or just makes you feel so taken aback or unnerved, don’t jump to attack or react. Pause, then look at them with big innocent cow eyes, maybe put a hand on their shoulder and say, “Are you okay?”

I love this because it immediately takes the power out of their hands and back into yours. Like, “I am not even going to acknowledge the low insult you just gave me because I am so enlightened, so holier than thou, and that comment was so batshit crazy, that now I am concerned for you.”

Part of me wanted to put my hand on that woman’s arm before I passed the book over and say, “What’s this really about?”

A few weeks ago, my husband and I had dinner in Soho, at a swanky vegetarian restaurant called Bubala. I was floored by the babaganoush. It will change you.

For dessert, I ordered an old-fashioned (whiskey, sugar, bitters, orange peel), which years ago I decided is the only alcoholic drink I will ever have again. Truthfully, my body hates alcohol. I hate the sour taste of any wine. I have never finished a beer. But for some reason, I can tolerate and almost like whisky, with ice. I have about one drink a year and this is the one I choose. Why I felt possessed to drink this that night, I do not know.

I drank it, but I also drank it fast. “THIS TASTES SO GOOD!” I said to my husband. “It takes the way whiskey should taste.” Then my skin flushed red because I have the Asian gene that means we can’t process alcohol properly and instead look feverish all evening.

We realised we were nearly late for our comedy show and stumbled a few streets over to it. We took off our eight layers of jackets and sweaters and sat down. We didn’t know a single thing about the gig and had booked it because it happened to be on the night we were having dinner nearby.

I was so buzzed off the novelty of alcohol that I thought I was sitting next to Lena Dunham, was truly convinced it was her. “You know, actors and directors and comedians go to these things scouting for talent,” I whispered to Sam, mentioning how one of his friends had seen Sharon Horgan on her own at this very venue. I kept leaning over trying to peer into her face, as she was faced away from me talking to her friend.

It was not Lena Dunham.

As the lights went down, we weren’t quite sure what we were watching. It transpired that it was two best friends, Harry and Diego*, a comedy double act, who had been writing comedy shows and performing at Edinburgh every year for over 15 years. Fifteen years. Some of the humour was forced and “punny” which I hate and at the beginning, I thought, “Oh no, this is terrible,” but halfway through the show they won me over.

My feelings of warmth towards them were less about the show and more about them: as best friends and comedy duo. I loved their enthusiasm. The fact that they were pursuing their dream. Then it revealed that they were in their mid-30s. I was so … so impressed that they were still doing this. Impressed and scared for them. Proud of them, as if I was their mother. How they had kept going, even after they had a TV sitcom and the sitcom was then cancelled? And yet they did - they kept going even after one of them, Diego, had married and become a dad. The show was about fatherhood (and their friendship), and it was a mix of recorded interviews, silly props and musical numbers. In the end, Sam and I both laughed a lot. We were charmed.

And at the very end, Harry and Diego played a recording of a video call between them while workshopping this very show. (They seem to record everything they do, in case they can use it as material later.) Diego was at home with his kid, Harry at home alone in his flat.

Everything is normal and then this candid interaction happens:

Harry: Do you have any other ideas?
Diego: Can we…?
Harry: What?
Diego: Can it be … our last show? (he grimaces, nervously)
Pause
Harry: Like, our last show … ever?
Diego: Yeah.
Harry: Our last show … ever.
Diego: Yeah.

Then an excruciating moment of silence. Of Harry’s face realising that Diego is ending their comedy dream. That this isn’t a “bit” he’s doing. That this magical safe space of what they were and who they were together – it was ending. Forever. That they would not make it, at least as a team. That they would not do this until they were old men. My heart physically hurt seeing the dawning realisation on Harry’s face and the guilt and fear on Diego’s face as he ended 15 years of partnership with one sentence: “Can it be … our last show?”

The tears streamed down my face and they kept going. The lights came up. People put their coats on. I kept crying. Not Lena Dunham left. Everyone else left. How could they? We’d just witnessed a brutal break-up.

I kept saying to Sam, “But they had a dream and it was okay if it wasn’t working out because they had EACH other, they always had each other and now Harry is going to be all alone.”

Meanwhile, the comedians were headed to the bar to sell their merchandise.

“We have to go! I have to talk to them!” I said, suddenly hurrying. When we got there, I reached Diego first, but truthfully, I had nothing to say to Diego, the man who had ended things. You can’t say anything to a Diego. Their minds are already made up.

I got to Harry. In his tuxedo. He felt younger and shorter than he had on-stage.

“Is it really over?” I asked Harry. He looked at me, bewildered. I still had shiny eyes and mascara streaks on my face.

“Yeah, I think so,” Harry said.

“You made me cry,” I said, starting to tear up again. “I can’t believe it’s over.”

And then I did something, so weird, so out of character, so insane. I touched him. I patted his shoulder and I said, “You’ll be fine.”

Harry looked at me, so confused, so perplexed, and he looked at me, really looked at me. “Are you okay?” he asked.

Sam escorted me out. We took the night bus home.

When I got home, I kept wondering: “What’s this really about?”

***

In February, a man walks into the bookshop pushing a sleeping baby in a stroller. He scans the bookshop quickly. I point to a corner. He nods. He browses for 5 minutes and then buys a red card that says, “Baby Light My Fire.”

Another man walks in. I steer him towards the corner, and he picks out a card of a furry Yeti that says “You’re a Special One.” He’s about to pay when he lunges for a heart-shaped candle from the table by the window.

Another man walks in. He makes a beeline for the corner without any help from me and buys a card with a black and white photograph of two people holding hands.

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The lunch hour on the day before Valentine’s Day is my favourite time of year at the bookshop. I was called in to cover lunch for someone who fell ill (a UTI! I rest my case). It was rainy and grey but I was warm inside and drinking my coffee and thoroughly enjoying the steady parade of men coming in from the rain, most spending about 45 seconds in the bookshop. (I assume most women bought their cards in advance?)

I love observing the pairing the man with the card choice. What caused one man to buy a card of a mermaid and a merman kissing? Why did one man grab the card that said, “Be Mine, Valentine” and then put it back and grab a generic card of cupid shooting his arrow. Was the statement of “Be Mine” too committal? Too possessive? Did they recently become polyamorous? What was it?

Another man with broad shoulders and a thick neck picks up a card of two hedgehogs kissing. Delightful.

Nothing is for certain except for this: I will see most of these men in here again the day before Mother’s Day.

Valentine’s means practically nothing to me now (though Sam did get me a red card that said “First you stole my heart, then you stole the duvet”). I worked a book launch this year on Valentine’s Day evening, pouring wine and beer. It was the least Valentine’s-y Day I’d ever had, as it wasn’t mentioned at all at the book launch and when I got home, my husband was already in bed.

Valentine’s Day used to be different. My sophomore year at Brown, a college friend and I were asked to write an anonymous column for the school paper about dating from our two different perspectives, and our first column was about Valentine’s Day. I just dug it up and reread it and could not be more thrilled that that column was anonymous and that it does not exist on the internet. I’m so grateful to be so old (38) that so many of my embarrassing mistakes are gone forever and not online.

In the column, I was reminded of the term we would use when our college roommates would lock us out of the room to have sex. “Sexiled.” So many references in the writing: “On Valentine’s Day, the three of us were sexiled, so we were in the hallway splitting a bottle of red wine.”

I was so frequently sexiled during my freshman and sophomore years at Brown that I lived mostly in the library and the staircase in our building.  My assigned roommate was a very beautiful European boarding school girl who always, always had a boyfriend.

It’s so odd to think that when many of us are 18, we go to college and we have to sleep in the same room, about one meter away from someone else’s head, someone who is a complete stranger to us. Due to the close proximity, my roommate’s boyfriend for most of sophomore year, Brian, and I had to tolerate each other. We were together so much that it was like we became our own old bickering couple, with no romance or warmth left between us.

He was so utterly irritated by me. I used to balance Nantucket Nectar bottles of juice in the space outside between the window screen and the window sill overnight because it kept drinks cold. I called it “my refrigerator” (we didn’t have a real one) and Brian absolutely hated this. Every time I said, “Hold on, let me check my refrigerator,” he would shout, “IT’S NOT A REFRIGERATOR!”

College was not at all what I expected or wanted. It snowed and was very cold. So many of the other kids had been to boarding schools and it felt intimidating. It was a) hard, academically and b) lonely and c) I just didn’t anticipate being sexiled that much merely because some housing admin matched me with the hot foreign girl.

I also really wanted to take a fiction course, but it was full, so I ended up signing up for an intro to playwriting course. I did not know one thing about playwriting, which made me feel insecure. But why would I have known anything? I was only 18! I don’t know why I thought I needed to know everything before I started college.

In my playwriting class at Brown, there was a guy named Kevin who is now a foreign correspondent for a major newspaper and a regular on NPR. However, I just remember him as Kevin – Kevin who had excellent hair and was very handsome and wrote a brilliant play called something like Nick Drake was Ernest Hemingway’s Father (or vice versa? I don’t know. I will not be asking Kevin. He is reporting on crime and politics and far too busy for this). I’m sure I understood none of it.

Years later, my college friend Fritz told he that he finally, really knew that I actually loved my husband – because I wasn’t following Kevin on Instagram. (He had checked!). It’s true! I’ve moved on, Kevin! I hadn’t even bothered to search for him on Instagram. Though I did just now and he seems very successful and also very single. (Which makes me relieved that he didn’t reciprocate my crush on him because he feels like the type who was always going to choose his career and his elite marathon training over a romantic partner that would tie him down.)

I remember always feeling like I was very awkward and strange whenever I ran into Kevin. I confided this to my friend Kim, who in turn, told Kevin that I thought this (why??? Why, Kim, why????). He told Kim something like, “That’s weird because actually she’s so normal. Probably the most normal person in the world,” which is the most insulting thing you can say about someone and wow, Kevin, who hurt you so badly that you had to burn me like that?

Maybe he partly thought this because for me, the hardest part in these creative writing classes was sharing and workshopping my work, so I always wrote very simple, plain, boring, safe pieces. I often have anxiety dreams about going back to college - and it’s always college - because I feel that I did it completely wrong and something deep inside of me wants to right it.

Every year, the Literary Arts department would put on a contest called, “Once Upon A Weekend.” The drama department would tape up a prompt for a one-act play on their door and you had only 48 hours to write and submit a play based off of this prompt. That weekend, my roommate was out with Brian, mercifully spending the night at his dorm instead of ours. It was snowing, a lot, and I was sitting at my desk in my dorm late at night, warm light from the lamp on my desk, when I suddenly felt this surge of energy to write.

The prompts for the play were: a secret, a knock, a kiss, a dramatic entrance.

I just started typing and stayed up until 3am. I loved that it wasn’t an assignment for class and that you couldn’t spend weeks and weeks on it – everyone could only write during the allotted 48 hours. I could write and nobody I knew would even read it – just the graduate students judging the contest. It was fun to just write for me. On Sunday evening, I printed my play off and anonymously submitted it in the tray before the deadline at 6pm.

A week later, I get an email.

Dear Ms. Pan,

Congratulations, your short play has been accepted into Once Upon a Weekend. Please meet at the Literary Arts Lounge tomorrow Thursday at 6pm to discuss production aspects and director/actors.

Thank you,

Jonathan Ceniceroz

I hadn’t realised what exactly this contest was. Apparently, they choose five winners and they perform all the plays in the blackbox theatre. And mine had been chosen!!!!

Except, well. Well. Hmm. Except now the play was going to be performed. And there was just one tiny issue. Two of the characters were based off of …. Brian and my roommate. The story was fiction, sure, and they weren’t the main characters, but the main character just happened to live with this couple who were a LOT like my roommate and Brian. They also called each other the same pet names, they also ate pints of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream in bed watching the show 24, they also chain-smoked out the window.

At our next playwriting class, our professor informed us that we were the ones who would be acting in the plays. I couldn’t act in my own play, so I had to act in someone else’s. And who would I be acting with? Brian.

Brian. I had to a) perform in front of an audience and b) have my play performed in front of an audience and c) the work that was being performed was making fun of Brian and my roommate, who would, of course, definitely be attending.

And then I read the play I had to perform with Brian. It’s a two-hander, as they say, and in it, I have to sprint down a set of stairs in a pair of high heels and then I have to... I have to… I have to kiss Brian.

Except his name wasn’t Brian in the play. It was Harold. And a lot of the play is me screaming, “HAROLD!!!!!!” angrily, which obviously was going to come very naturally to me given the pent-up rage Brian and I felt towards each other.

During rehearsals, the director could feel the (extremely non-sexual) tension between Brian and me (mine: trepidation, abject fear; his: fury at showing affection for the woman who calls the windowsill the refrigerator) and so the director changed it to me just placing my hand lovingly on Brian’s cheek instead of kissing him.

One problem solved. Now I just had to tell my roommate that all of our friends were about to watch a play in which all of her private relationship’s quirks will be played out onstage.

My roommate took it so well. She knew Brian and I did not get along and she knew that I did not ever think this would be shown publicly and in the end, she laughed. We agreed that we would tell no one it was based off of her and Brian and just pretend it was all made up.

When my play was performed, I held my roommate’s hand and my friend Rachel’s hand and we sat in the dark in the theatre. It is so scary and embarrassing and exhilarating to watch your work being performed. My face went so hot and red and stayed that way for hours. I will never forget that moment for the rest of my life, laugh-crying out of joy and embarrassment.

Did I go on to write more award-winning plays? No. (Not yet?) I mean, this was great, but I wasn’t “discovered.” It was just a small moment that felt very big.

Maybe it was the thing that made me keep writing, a little bit. Maybe everyone needs these little bits that lead to another little bit that lead to another. An encouraging word from a teacher or a stranger – something to buoy your dreams, even slightly. My life hasn’t been full of massive wins, but I’ve had a lot of tiny ones and a few medium wins, which add up greatly to me.

Neil Tennant of the Petshop Boys coined the term “Imperial Phase” as the time in an artist’s career when they are at their peak and can do no wrong.

The author, Annie, who came into the bookshop and started writing at 55, now with two novels and a third on the way, is in hers right now. Taylor Swift is certainly in hers, as is Emma Stone. I’d throw Cillian Murphy in there, too. Claire Keegan. Richard Osman. Everything is just firing on all cylinders for them right now, but we forget that it wasn’t always this way, even for them.

Maybe that’s why I cried at the comedy show. Because Diego was done. Harry would go on, but would he make it? Would he go on to have an Imperial Phase? Will I? Is his version already over? Is mine?

Harry and I are similar ages. We are too old to be ingenues. Our names will never be next to the world “prodigy.” We are too young to be Annies and infamous late-bloomers. Will we keep going? Will we keep writing? Will we “make it”?

The other day, I was walking home and I looked up and saw a woman taking her bins out. I balked. I instantly recognised her as a famous writer who always looks very glamorous and made up - but today she was in sweatpants and wearing glasses and zero make-up, and I only recognised her because of that weird face memory thing I have.

I texted two friends immediately who between them know everything about everyone: “Did I just see XXXXX taking out the bins????? In sweatpants??? Glasses? No-makeup?” It was thrilling! Seeing the author in sweatpants was very exciting because she always appears to be in cocktail dresses. The friends confirmed that they had heard the author had just moved to my area.

And then last night, I was on a double-decker bus and hovering near the door as it made its way towards my flat. I felt a man coming down the stairs but didn’t look at him. Then, when he was getting off at the next stop, I looked up and saw him: David Nicholls. I only noticed him because he was overly polite in letting a woman get off before him. He didn’t take off a top hat and tip it towards her, but it somehow felt like he would have if he was wearing a top hat. I saw him and my brain went “DAVID NICHOLLS!!!” and my body went all tingly. David Nicholls, the author of the novel One Day, that has just been turned into the Netflix hit TV show.

Ah. So that’s how I’ll know when I’ve made it. When a woman texts her husband at 9pm with the enthusiasm of, “I JUST SAW DAVID NICHOLLS ON THE BUS. I’M SHAKING.” When two friends nearly get into a fistfight over who gets to buy the last copy of my book.

When someone calls their friend to say, “I just saw Jess Pan taking out the bins, and she looked fucking dreadful!”

Boom. May we all be so lucky.

*I changed the comedian’s names, mostly because I said that I didn’t like their puns and ‘Harry’ doesn’t need another kick in the teeth.

You can read more of my writing by checking out my book, “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes.” (The UK version is “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously). It’s also been translated and published in the Netherlands, Korea, China, Russia, Germany, Taiwan, Poland and Hungary.

It’s about the year I spent: talking to strangers, performing stand-up comedy, travelling solo, trying out improv, going on friend dates and doing a bunch of extrovert-y things.  It’s about being an introvert and trying to extrovert for a full year. I interview brilliant people throughout the book who guide me through these nightmares.

Reviews for Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come

“I loved it! It’s such a wonderful title, and the book lives up to it’ Nigella Lawson 

‘In a world of self-care and nights in, this book will inspire and remind you to do some things that scare you every so often.’ Emma Gannon

‘Hilarious, unexpected and ultimately life-affirming.’ Will Storr

‘Funny, emotional and deeply inspiring, this is perfect for anyone wanting to break out of their comfort zone’  Heat

‘Beautifully written and so funny! I related to it A LOT’ – Emma Jane Unsworth

‘Relatable, moving and fantastically funny’ – Rhik Samadder

‘Tender, courageous and extremely funny, this book will make us all braver.’ Daisy Buchanan

‘A chronicle of Pan’s hilarious and painful year of being an extrovert.’ Stylist

‘Excellent, warm, hilarious.’ Nikesh Shukla

‘You WILL laugh and laugh while reading this.’ Sun

“Very funny, very smart” Liberty Hardy

Did you miss last week’s post?

I am in Finland, crunching through the snow and looking at Christmas lights and trying to keep my beanie on as snow falls on my eyelashes. I walk into the Helsinki Christmas market and suddenly I am inside of Christmas with twinkle lights, mulled wine and vendors selling roasted nuts and snow – so much snow on the ground that it lights up the sky and tiny flakes cover my coat.

When I landed the evening before, in darkness, I saw the words “Helsinki Airport” appear through the fog as the plane taxied to the runway. I suddenly realised how alone I was, how far away from home I was, how close to Russia I was. For a moment, I thought, “What have I done?”

It is the exact same feeling I had in my stomach when I landed in Beijing in summer when I was 22, having decided to move there without knowing the language or having a job or a plan.

I recently read about a British woman, Preet Chandi, who pulled a sled 900 miles through Antarctica alone through 60mph winds. She’d walk 13-15 hours a day and melt snow at night for drinking water. It took her six weeks to untangle her hair after she returned home.

God, I enjoy stories like these greatly, and not just for the pure delight in not doing that very hard painful thing, but because they make me feel less insane for the things I sometimes do, like looking for witches in Northern England at twilight on Halloween or convincing a farmer to let me shear one of his sheep in New Zealand. I often don’t even know why I do these things – I just feel compelled to do them.

I can’t imagine the Antarctica woman had a super-solid answer for why she was doing it either.  Other than, like “I just really wanted to do it and see what happens…” I mean, sure, the “hero” and “role model” stuff comes after but I’m sure most of the people in her life at the time were like, “What in fresh hell, Preet? You want to drag a 260lb (120kg) sled across Antarctica alone for 70 days just…because…?”

That’s the best way I can explain why I flew to Sweden and then Finland alone in mid-December when it was -9 degrees Celcius and heavily snowing. I had bought heat-tech long underwear and gloves, but somehow forgot a scarf. I had also completely packed the wrong shoes, so the first thing I had to do when I landed in Helsinki was crunch through a mile of snow in my sneakers to an outdoors shop and buy a pair of winter hiking boots from a rugged man named Walter, which of course made me think of Walter from the bookshop.

For my travels to the Nordic countries, I had made a mistake graver than only packing trainers. I had brought the wrong books with me – two books by the same author who I had never read before – huge, rookie mistake. Holiday reading is the best of all reading and to screw this up so fantastically was making me grumpy. I disliked the two books I brought so much that I left them in Finland. I won’t say who the author was, but it meant that I had to immediately find a bookshop to correct my wrongs (I will say that the author is dead so if you’re reading this, it’s not you. I love you. All of your writing is very good).

I searched the Copenhagen Airport (where I was flying in and out of from London) and there was no bookshop in my terminal, just very beautiful clothing and personalised phone chargers for sale and beautiful tins of tea, including one called Mermaid Tea, inspired by Hans Christian Anderson, that as far as I can tell was green tea with some seaweed sprinkled in.

When I finally found a bookshop that sold English books, it was attached to a Starbucks. I never go to Starbucks in London and rarely in America except in smaller towns, but for some reason, when I’m abroad, it calls to me. I realise this probably makes me the same as someone who eats at McDonalds on their one night in Shanghai, but I accept that. For me, Starbucks is a safe haven in any foreign land where I can always speak the language and today the language was, “Decaf tall gingerbread latte with oat milk” in a red holiday cup, and it brought me intense joy after wandering in the cold  -9 degrees with a windchill that made it feel -15 degrees.

I spent the next few days hiking in forest in a national park and then visiting a sauna with a tall blond Finnish woman named Sanna. Sanna at the Sauna. The sauna was on the edge of the snowy shoreline of the Baltic Sea with a ladder disappearing straight into the icy waters. Sanna said that Finns believe it’s healthy to heat up in the sauna, dip into the freezing sea, and repeat 3x or more to feel euphoria.

Then she said, “But I don’t do that!!!” I knew immediately though, that I would do that, just as surely as Preet knew she’d try to cross Antarctica. It was 7pm at night when Sanna and I met and the sea was a black icy abyss – just a vast dark nothing – next to the snowy beach.

“It is normal to jump into the black water of the sea shrouded in total darkness, where the sea is frozen at the edges, because…” I say to myself, as I clutch the frozen ladder covered in icicles and lower myself into the black water. “Because somewhere there is a woman or man doing something more extreme.” Like climbing Everest. Or swimming the English Channel. There is someone running an ultramarathon in the Sahara Desert for fun. There is a lunatic out there doing a 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzle because they want to and not because someone is holding a gun to their head. That’s insane. This is merely lively.

I found I could easily get into the water the first time, for novelty’s sake, and Sanna joined me, getting in as far as her calves. But the second time, I started to feel fear, maybe because my fingertips and toes went completely numb. Now I knew just how cold that water was and I had to do it again.

As I exited the sauna and approached the cold water, I felt my body hesitating. Then I saw a Finnish man in a swimsuit nearby, exiting a different sauna.

“Come with me! Get in with me!” I shouted at him, something I would never do in daily life, but while standing in a black one-piece, hysterical in the snow, it felt acceptable.

He scampered over in his red swim trunks and together, on two ladders side by side, we lowered ourselves into the freezing cold dark water, screaming in unison.

I descended all the way down and then let go of the ladder and kicked back so that I was fully in the sea. Total black water and darkness. Cold icy stabbing all over my body.

He looked at me, in the water but still clutching the ladder. “We normally only dip!” he said. I tried to count to ten, treading water in the darkness.

 “That is so brave!” he said, already out of the water. I swam back to the ladder, my limbs already numb from the cold. As I pulled myself up, he already running back into the sauna to warm up. He turned around.

 “Where are you from?” he shouted at me from afar.

 “I’m from Texas!!!” I shouted back, which is something I never ever shout about, but the extreme cold prevented me from saying things like, “But I’ve lived in London for ten years, and I’m a very reasonable person.” 

I did it one more time and survived, Sanna joining me and going as far as her waist this time. I actually think I found the hot saunas much harder to bear than the cold water. At one point, a man poured hot water on the stones and the resulting scalding steam felt so incredibly hot on my face, my ears, my neck that I felt like I was actually on fire. None of the Finns in the sauna balked at all.

I put my head between my knees, in the airplane brace position, and held my face in my hands to try to endure the scalding steam and heat. “Doesn’t it BURN??!” I cried out to Sanna. “Let it burn,” she said. I grabbed my water bottle, which was also now SO HOT, and ran out of the sauna instead, barefoot into the snow.

And so I spent the last week or so in Sweden and Finland, doing lots of things like this and eating a lot of herring and salmon on rye bread and lying in the snow under trees and wandering around and talking to lots of Swedes and Finns. (I’m going to be writing much more about all of this in my next book, so if you haven’t already subscribed to this newsletter, you can do so here so you don’t miss out on any book news.)

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It has been a delight to travel alone, after not enjoying it previously – on other solo trips, I always felt aimless or like I should be having more fun. But after being stuck at home for so long during Covid, it suddenly it feels like this immense privilege and I have loved it. I have loved doing whatever I wanted to do, like buying the Mermaid Tea (the packaging was impeccable) and wandering in the snow across the city for an hour to try the most amazing rice porridge and pastries just because and ordering spruce ice cream twice, which is made from the tree and tastes like a Christmas candle in the best way possible.

That said, if I had to do it for another week by myself, I would have died of loneliness in the snow.

When I was away, we drew names for Secret Santa at the bookshop in London. I got the name of a new guy who works there who I barely know, a man named Neil who told me he spent last Sunday watching a six-hour silent film about Napoleon by himself at the BFI. Six hour. Silent film. Alone.

“I wanted it to go on even longer,” he said.

How am I supposed to work with this?

One day Rebecca came in to say hi on her off-day and grabbed some things, left and texted me the harshest thing someone from Gen Z can say to you.

“There were no vibes in the bookshop today,” she wrote.

Neil and I have zero chemistry. I find us struggling to find any common ground. If in England, men talk about football to bond, I wanted to enlist the universal code of what women talk about to find some sort of common ground in 2023.

 “Does…does your girlfriend like Taylor Swift?” (I knew without having to ask that Neil himself does not.)

 “No,” he said.

How was I supposed to work with this?

I texted Walter for ideas on what to get Neil for Secret Santa, but he was taking ages to reply. When he finally did, he wrote back, “Sorry I just had to see a guy who had a painful penis.”

When Walter isn’t working in the bookshop, he’s a part-time doctor at an STD clinic. During slow days at the bookshop he reads the Oxford Handbook of Genitourinary Medicine, HIV, and Sexual Health. For some reason, this book gets lost in the shop often – last month, Walter was looking for it for ages and we found it in the history section. I like the idea of a customer finding it on a table and putting it away for us.

Walter recently lost the book again and had to send a group text asking us all to keep an eye out on it, this traveling book of STDs, the most promiscuous book on our shelves.

I tried to get Neil a voucher from the Italian deli down the road that I’d heard him talk about, but they didn’t do vouchers, so in a panic, I ended up buying him a pound of beef shin tortellini and storing it in the bookshop fridge. A mistake, for sure, but it’s too late now.

Back in Finland, my hair was super staticky, perhaps from the central heating in my hotel room. My skin was also extra dry and even though I’d been drinking so much water, I felt so thirsty. I’m usually very bad at drinking water away from home, but as I looked out at all the Christmas lights in Helsinki, I guzzled a glass of water and thought to myself, “I can’t, I just can’t let ‘it’ happen to me for the third Christmas in a row.”

I once wrote a story where the main character gets a UTI (urinary tract infection, cystitis, a bladder infection, burns when you pee and makes your life completely miserable, etc). The character eventually becomes so unwell, that she has to go to A&E (the emergency room) and pumped full of antibiotics with an IV for several days.

The note I’ve received from two different women is, “Isn’t that a bit over the top? Going to the emergency room for just a UTI?”

Something you can’t say in the middle of an editorial meeting with several people in a London office in Soho is, “Well, hmm, no, it is not over the top to go A&E for a UTI because it has personally happened to me. Twice.”

Instead, you have to reach into thin air and wave your arm around and say something like, “I just feel like this is where the character’s journey would have taken her.”

And then you lock eyes with the woman who made the comment and you wonder what kind of gilded life and long urethra she must be blessed with.

The difference between the character’s experience and mine is that when I get my UTI’s, I get them on Christmas, when all the GPs are closed and the pharmacies are closed and there is no choice, absolutely none whatsoever other than leaving Christmas dinner and having the most awkward conversation of your life. It’s that or die and I know this because I swear to God if there was another one I’d have taken it.

Imagine looking your British mother-in-law in the eyes and saying, “I have a UTI, I need to go the emergency room and miss dessert. Please save me some apple pie.” And she will nod slightly, her eyes barely giving away the truth which is that she now knows you, you who have been staying in her house for the past week, eating the food she cooked and drinking the cups of tea she made, have also been apparently, f-king the beloved son she birthed. In her own home. That she welcomed you in. Eating the food she cooked you and drinking the cups of tea she made you while you were off etc etc etc.  

There is no shame greater. What’s so wonderful about all of this is that I did it twice, two Christmases in a row.

When I was explaining this to my friend Chantal, she was bewildered. She knew what having a UTI meant. WE ALL KNOW WHAT IT MEANS. OKAY. WE KNOW. We know. We know. We know.

To which all I could say was, “IT’S CHRISTMAS!!!!”

Also, may I refer you to yearning and Paris and how I don’t drink water when I’m not home. Not drinking water + “it’s Christmas” spirit = fever, crying, dying, burning, emergency room.

The first time it happened, I could not get a doctor’s appointment, so I called 111 in the UK. I called and called and no one really seemed to care? Then I had a fever that kept returning. I kept taking ibuprofen at night and it would go away and I’d think “I will be better in the morning.” And then in the morning I would have a fever again.

I texted a group of female friends and they all had advice because this is such a common hell we must endure. Drink cranberry juice, drink bicarbonate soda mixed with water to make yourself alkaline, drink gallons of water, take a bath in bicarbonate soda. None of it worked.

I had started shivering uncontrollably and googled, “What happens if you don’t treat a UTI” and an article came up about a woman who had sepsis from one and died. That’s about the point when I start filling my backpack with snacks, books and water and decided that I shall be spending the evening in A&E.

When you go to the emergency room at Christmas, you know that everyone in the waiting room is extremely ill because this horrible, germy, miserable room is not where you want to be on Christmas.  

My infection was so advanced that I had a high fever, kidney pain and felt dizzy. I’m allergic to penicillin and the doctor on duty told me I needed intravenous antibiotics and that I had to come back 5 days in a row to get them administered.

My doctor was called Louis and he wore a mask and despite this, I was convinced that he was very handsome. I was also wearing a mask, sweating from the fever and delirious. He had to go through a questionnaire and when he asked, “Any recreational drugs?” I answered, “No, I barely drink, I’m the purest person ever,” because I need all doctors to think I am virtuous and wholesome and that none of this could be my fault.

It was 2am when I got my first round of IV antibiotics but my heart rate was so high that they wouldn’t let me leave until it came down, so I just sat there for hours chugging water and praying that my heart rate would slow down enough to be allowed to go home. When it finally did, the two nurses on duty clapped for me and I shuffled out the door, ready to return the next day for another round of antibiotics.  I walked out into the cold air and there was a brass band outside the hospital playing “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”

I remember walking by them thinking, I will not die of this UTI. I refuse. I simply refuse to let this be how I die. I will not permit the following situation to happen:

Person 1: “Remember Jessica Pan?”

Person 2: “ Yeah?” (or “Hot husband?”)”

Person 1: “She DIED!”

Person 2: “What? She was so beautiful and humble and full of life HOW HOW HOW WHAT COULD HAVE POSSIBLY TAKEN HER FROM US?”

Person 1: “ A UTI.”

Person 2: “That’s a bit over the top, don’t you think?”

The second time I got a UTI on Christmas, I sought help before things got that bad. However every pharmacy and GP was closed and so, once again, I delivered the grave news to my mother-in-law, her eyebrows saying, “What? Again? Really? Two Christmases in a row? In my house where you sleep on the sheets I washed and eat the roast dinner I cooked, and open the presents I bought you, you dare to … etc etc etc” and then I headed to the emergency room, as is now tradition. ** 

My husband came with me this time (as he should as it’s mostly his fault, anyway, isn’t it?), and we sat together, watching a man in his thirties with grey skin cough all over us. We were both convinced he was more dead than alive.

After my name was called, the doctor said, “Yep, you definitely have a UTI.” She handed me a prescription and then a worried expression came over her face.

“What?” I said.

“There’s only one pharmacy open right now and they close in 15 minutes.”

“There’s no pharmacy here in the hospital?” I asked, aghast.

“No,” she said.

I grabbed the prescription from her and ran, grabbing my husband Sam from the waiting room and shouting, “WE ONLY HAVE FIFTEEN MINUTES!!!

He drove as fast as he could, but when we pulled up the building, it was dark and the door was locked.

I started crying, then wailing. The next day was Dec 26^th – Boxing Day –  and most pharmacies would be closed then, too. I would be in agony for another night. And then…

I saw him. The grey-skinned half-dead man walking. He was coming out of a parking lot next door, carrying a little paper bag.

 “OMIGOD!” I shouted. I jumped out the car and ran to him.

 “WHERE IS THE PHARMACY? IS IT OPEN?” The half-dead man pointed to a building hidden behind the dark one we were parked in front of. I saw Christmas lights inside and my heart soared. I ran towards it, opened the jangly door, slammed my prescription down on counter shouting, “DO YOU HAVE NITROFURANTOIN?”

And the man behind the counter said they did.

Minutes later, I jumped back into the car, swallowed my first pill and kissed Sam. And that’s how the Hallmark Christmas movie of my life would end.

Happy holidays, everyone. I’ll see you here next year.

And remember: be merry, but also, drink lots of water. I hope you don’t get a UTI, because those things can kill you.

** My mother-in-law is actually very kind and understanding, but she has also never had a UTI.

You can read more of my writing by checking out my book, “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes.” (The UK version is “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously). It’s also been translated and published in the Netherlands, Korea, China, Russia, Germany, Taiwan, Poland and Hungary.

It’s about the year I spent: talking to strangers, performing stand-up comedy, travelling solo, trying out improv, going on friend dates and doing a bunch of extrovert-y things.  It’s about being an introvert and trying to extrovert for a full year. I interview brilliant people throughout the book who guide me through these nightmares.

Reviews for Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come

“I loved it! It’s such a wonderful title, and the book lives up to it’ Nigella Lawson 

‘In a world of self-care and nights in, this book will inspire and remind you to do some things that scare you every so often.’ Emma Gannon

‘Hilarious, unexpected and ultimately life-affirming.’ Will Storr

‘Funny, emotional and deeply inspiring, this is perfect for anyone wanting to break out of their comfort zone’  Heat

‘Beautifully written and so funny! I related to it A LOT’ – Emma Jane Unsworth

‘Relatable, moving and fantastically funny’ – Rhik Samadder

‘Tender, courageous and extremely funny, this book will make us all braver.’ Daisy Buchanan

‘A chronicle of Pan’s hilarious and painful year of being an extrovert.’ Stylist

‘Excellent, warm, hilarious.’ Nikesh Shukla

‘You WILL laugh and laugh while reading this.’ Sun

“Very funny, very smart” Liberty Hardy

Did you miss last week’s post?

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A woman came into the bookshop looking for a book for her twelve-year-old daughter, who was an advanced reader. I thought about it for a moment and went to go look for a classic English book that I love: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. It’s about a 17-year-old English girl living in a rundown castle and the summer she spends with her sister and two intriguing American brothers who arrive on her doorstep. I picked it up off the shelf when an older woman in her 70s intercepted me.

“No,” she said. I paused.

“That book is about yearning,” she said, very seriously. “Her daughter is too young. It’s so important to read that book at the right age. Fourteen, I’d say.”

She shook her head no. I put the book back.

I’m back from Paris.

I caught the Eurostar, which is honestly the best thing about living in London, and I sat next to an older French woman reading Sally Rooney in French, but I couldn’t make out which book it was without staring an awkward amount.

I was still nervous about bed bugs, so despite feeling extremely self-conscious about doing so - I put my backpack in a trash bag so that it didn’t touch the Eurostar’s faded red carpet. ­­I’ve found that even if these things do nothing and you look insane but it helps you sleep better at night, then it’s worth it. Like how my friend Annie who will carry around her hair straightener in her purse because if it’s with her, then she knows she didn’t leave it plugged in at home. Let’s call these things our “quirks.”

A woman at my book club (this month’s read was Yellowface by R.F. Kuang) mentioned that the best way to not get bed bugs was to put your suitcase in the bathtub, because apparently the bugs aren’t able to physically crawl up the slippery slope into the tub. I told this to Sadie, who said, “Oh okay, so you’re just going to sleep in the bathtub, too?”

My college best friend Rachel met me at Gare du Nord and then we dropped of my things at her apartment in the Marais and we went to café where we proceeded to talk and laugh a very concentrated amount in three hours. A woman in her 60s with long red curly hair sat nearby us. She wore tiny round sunglasses and a beige trench coat, and I couldn’t tell if she was amused by us or annoyed – she had this small smirk on her face, as if she were thinking, “These fuckers are so loud and excited, and I just want to drink this glass of white wine in peace.” It is the exact face I make when three teenage girls sit by me on the bus.

But I think that if you are reunited with one of your best friends for the first time in almost two years in public, there should be a judge-y woman 20-25 years older than you cursing you and your volume and your joy. It is a sign that you are doing it right. I myself have been the judge-y woman far too many times recently, and it is always preferrable to be one of the annoying ones. 

Another fun “quirk” I have is sometimes I don’t like drinking unfiltered tap water in new places. I don’t know why. My body just doesn’t want to do it, to the point where I get dehydrated and miserable. I could never reason or explain why I am this way (maybe something with germs? Or certain cups?), but recently my dad visited me in London and he bought two gallons of water from Tesco to take back to his Airbnb and as I watched him buckle under their weight, I thought, “Oh good god.”

Anyway, I’ve never studied French and so I asked Rachel at the restaurant if she could order a glass bottle of water for me, instead of the carafe of water on the other tables.

Rachel spoke to the waitress in French and I saw the woman nod and then she and I made eye contact. While she was listening to Rachel, her eyebrows went up like “Oh?” Then she scurried away.

I had started eating my brioche toast with lots of butter and jam when Rachel said, “I just told the waitress that you wanted bottled water because… because you were strange.”

Ah. Hence the eyebrows.

She could literally be saying anything, and I’ll just dumbly nod my head along in agreement.

A true test of friendship is having a friend who will accommodate these quirks. In fact, I think it’s one of the best questions to ask someone: what are you weird about? My mom does this weird shuffle thing before she steps onto an escalator. My sister-in-law says she can handle any kind of bodily fluid spill but if you so much as say the word “lice” or “nits” to her, she will start to feel faint and hot. Rachel has a phobia of pigeons so anytime we sit outside anywhere, I have to kick and shoo them away from her.

I used to be deathly afraid of spiders as a child (now it’s been downgraded to just a low-grade, cold fear) and my mother would roll her eyes and say, “They’re more scared of you than you are of them!” She would say this, to me, a seven-year-old flattened against the kitchen wall, screaming, terrified that the spider would see me and life as I knew it would end. If I saw a spider on the ceiling in my bedroom at night, I wouldn’t be able to sleep and I’d have to take my comforter and sleep on the couch in the living room, but mostly I would just lie awake afraid he had followed me in there. Meanwhile the spider was scaling walls with whimsy, spinning webs in corners with gusto.

But sure, he’s more scared of me than I am of him. Now my husband disposes of spiders for me without any sort of proverb that makes me feel bad about being this way. (And for this reason, I will never, ever leave him.)

After breakfast, Rachel had to go teach her writing course at the American University of Paris. I wandered the streets alone for a little bit, touching things and smelling fancy soaps. I ended up in a French clothing shop near her apartment and I bought a navy blue beanie. I recognised the man in the shop, who had sold me my favourite burgundy beanie nearly five years ago. I had tried the burgundy beanie on, and he had adjusted it firmly to make me look, I don’t know, more French? To confirm, I asked if he was working there five years ago and he said he was. Then he adjusted my navy beanie.

I once took one of those facial recognition tests and my score told me that I’m a borderline “super-recogniser” – not the top 2% of the population that gets recruited to work for the police and solve crimes, but maybe the top 15% of the population who are very good at recognising and remembering faces. The people who say things to you like, “We were on the same flight six years ago. You spilled tomato juice all over your white jeans? You were watching Eat Pray Love? You cried at the bit where Julia Roberts prays? You fell asleep and drooled a little? You snored so loud you woke yourself up? Don’t you remember?”

When you recount these little details to someone who doesn’t remember you at all, their eyes become wide and searching. They react as if they’ve discovered you’ve been spying on them in their own home. They weren’t doing anything wrong, but they feel violated nonetheless. Sometimes I pretend not to remember someone or a detail about them just to make it less awkward.

See, I am abysmal at pub quizzes because I cannot remember any dates or facts unrelated to gossip or animals. I don’t know what year World War I or II started or the Latin word for wind or who won the Superbowl in 1995.

But if we met on a bus and you told me you went to a reflexologist and she told you she knew when you were going to get mono next week and you did, I will remember that nugget, and your face, for the rest of my life. If you’re getting your nails painted next to me and you say on the phone, “You know what I like in my coffee? Chocolate! Because then it tastes like chocolate!” then your face and that quote will go in my brain forever. Yet I can’t remember my own blood type off the top of my head.

Rachel’s superpower is that she remembers everybody’s birthday and star sign. I asked her, “When is Mark’s birthday?” - Mark being a guy we went to college with and haven’t talked to for 18 years. She thought about it and said “He’s definitely a Taurus and I think he’s an April Taurus - I’m gonna say April 28.” She was right.

According to Rachel, who loves astrology, there are significant differences between the same star sign born in different months. I am a March Aries and she says March Aries are much intense and “zesty” than April Aries, which is her way of saying March Aries are “a lot.”

My mother’s superpower (gift from God?), is that she can remember every single meal she has had at any given restaurant and usually, what you had, too. “You had the tamale corn cakes and you thought they were dry and I had tortilla soup and then a chocolate cake that was to die for,” is the sort of thing she will say.

On my last morning in Paris, a gray, cold day, Rachel and I had coffee outside at a café near her house, sitting under outdoor heaters. I had brought these special tarot-esque cards with me from London. We always do things like this – we used to always answer the Proust questionnaire together, which I highly recommend doing. I spent a year learning how to do “Deep Talk” for my year of extroverting - this is like the cheatsheet for an easy win on how to begin.

I shuffled the deck and then Rachel shuffled it and she picked a card. We consulted the little guidebook that came with the cards and her card told her to “stalk her fate.” We did the same for me and mine was basically “you need to be disciplined: exercise more, sleep better and eat healthier” which was SO ANNOYING to hear when you’ve had whiskey and pastries in Paris and were in fact in that very moment drinking strong black coffee with cream and eating a pain au chocolat. But as I had only slept five hours the past few nights and was wrecked, I conceded the message of the card may be prescient. I resisted the urge to reshuffle.

Anyway, I returned to London from Paris and instead of bed bugs, I caught Covid. I had the tiniest scratch in the back of my throat and I knew.

I spent the week in bed, fatigued and weak and so bored. Too tired to read, but I also found that watching TV or films was hard. I felt so lonely and isolated from the world. I wanted to watch films with only one requirement: no yearning whatsoever. I could not take it. The tiniest things were making me cry. I skipped any nature documentaries - just the thought of a wolf cub would make me well up.

My brother Adam texted me to tell me he was reading Little Women. Not because he’s a big Louisa May Alcott fan or wants to be cosy, but because my brother likes to read everything, just so he can ostensibly know everything and be right. He’s read The Iliad, The Odyssey, the entire Bible and the Old Testament in his spare time. He’s not religious but when he’s arguing with someone, he wants to be able to say, “You’re wrong and here’s why.” He’s a lawyer and a middle child and an August Leo.  

His text reminded me about the time I saw the Greta Gerwig version of Little Women in the theatre a few years ago. I went alone, because sometimes things are too special to see with someone else, especially if they shaped your childhood. I remember that I cried but also that a man in front of me, also alone, sobbed and sobbed.  

So anyway, I could obviously not read or rewatch Little Women when I was ill in bed – too much yearning and too many similarities to Beth lying in bed helpless with a blanket over her legs.

Nine days later, I am back to the land of the healthy.

My first healthy day back, I worked at the bookshop. The weather had officially turned when I’d been away and it was busy and full of people in their beanies and winter coats. The fairy lights were up and there were Christmas candles for sale.

We hosted a writing class at the bookshop my first evening back. As I poured a glass of white wine for one the attendees, I asked if she lived nearby, as most people who come into our bookshop do. She said, “Oh no, I live in Herefordshire.”

“Oh, so you came to London just for this?”

“You don’t understand. I live in Herefordshire. I yearn for culture.” I immediately laughed at her choice of words, handed her the glass of white wine and the class began.

The teacher for the class was a fiction writer and he gave a short talk on inspiration and how to channel your creativity. One of the books he referenced was The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

A long time ago, I went to an author event at the Savoy Hotel and there was a booth where a woman offered “bibliotherapy.” The idea is that you tell her your problems (like a therapist) and she writes down exactly what books to read to solve your problems. She writes it down on a little prescription pad and everything.

I told her things I hadn’t told even my parents: that I had just quit my job in advertising to write a book. She thought about this. She had short blond hair and a lot of shiny, sparkly green eyeshadow that covered her eyelid up to her eyebrow.

One of the books she recommended was “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron, an extremely woo woo book on creativity that is the perfect book to read if you feel insecure or vulnerable about your creativity. It’s like a warm hug saying, “It’s okay. You got this. You can do this. Maybe creativity is God or maybe it is a little ghost. Go take yourself on little dates and write in this journal and you can talk to your little ghost, too.”

It is kind of magical.

I had never heard of it, but I bought it, read it, highlighted it. That was the year I wrote my memoir “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come.”

A year later, when I was visiting my childhood home, I found The Artist’s Way on a shelf in my brother Adam’s bedroom. I couldn’t believe that a book that had been recommended to me at the Savoy Hotel in London was here, inside my brother’s room in our childhood home in the middle of nowhere Texas the entire time – likely sitting there for a decade, unread.

How?! How?!

I opened it up and inside my father had handwritten my brother Adam a note about how he bought it especially for him, the artist in the family.

I read the note and was furious. The book was clearly unread, and my father never once mentioned it to me. Did he think being an artist was only drawing (which my brother Adam is very talented at)?

I also immediately remembered how he personally tutored both of my brothers for the SAT college admissions test and didn’t bother with me at all when it was my turn, four years later.

I counted up more petty grudges, slammed the book shut and snuck it into my room instead.  

I am a March Aries and the youngest child.

However much I want to be Jo from Little Women and have tried to be Jo and have hair much more similar to that of Jo, I will always, always be Amy, who I cannot stand. Although Amy was an actual painter and talented artist, I bet her father, if he ever bothered to show up, would have given Jo The Artist’s Way instead.

I remember asking my dad about it – why didn’t he give me a copy when I was younger? Didn’t he think I had any artistic potential? – and he shrugged and said, “Well you found it anyway, didn’t you? You didn’t need my help.”

That’s such an annoying answer, and one that’s impossible to argue with.

My friend Vanessa has two older sisters, Sasha and Lauren and I have never wanted a sister more badly than when I went to Vanessa’s wedding. They are all best friends. They are warm and kind. They are funny. They are the best thing. They have endless inside jokes and they are all very beautiful with dark hair.

I asked Vanessa, “Were you competitive growing up?” and she said, no, they were all so different. I could not fathom this.

Perhaps it is because Vanessa is an Aries, but an April Aries, Rachel told me. (She has never met Vanessa, but does know her star sign.)

“But there had to have been some competition, right? Who was your dad’s favorite? Who was your mom nicer to?” Vanessa could not say.

“Who scored higher on their SATs?” I asked. (I had scored higher on the SATs than both of my brothers out of sheer spite at not being worthy of my father’s SAT lessons, which, by the way, looked like an absolute hellish way to spend an afternoon. But it was the spite that drove me – certainly not an aptitude for numbers or dates.)

Vanessa couldn’t remember. She also asked Lauren, who also couldn’t remember. They conjectured, “Maybe Sasha?” Maybe????

What kind of dream world were they living in?

But pettiness aside, maybe my dad was right. I found the The Artist’s Way on my own. Many people say that books find you when you are ready for them. If you work at a bookshop, you want to believe this deep in your soul. You want to hand a book to someone who feels sad or bored or lost and feel like you have changed the course of their life for the better. That they will walk out of the bookshop that day with something extraordinary waiting for them in the pages.

Rebecca turned 25 last month. She was still in love with Timothy, but he was being elusive. She had a small gathering at her apartment – Walter and Cara were there, too – she wore a long maroon prairie dress and talked about how she felt old to be turning 25. But I looked at her and saw so much potential: single, living in London with her best friend, wanting very badly to be in love.

At the end of the night, I gave Rebecca her birthday present: the hardback, gift edition of I Capture the Castle.

“For yearning,” I told her. She nodded, knowingly, having witnessed the bookshop interaction. Rebecca had previously been annoyed at me, because I had told her I thought Dominos pizza was disgusting and she said it was rude to be a food snob and that she loves Dominos pizza and garlic bread more than anything in the world and so the book was a gift but also a peace-maker.

It’s Rebecca’s time to yearn, but now that I’m out of Covid isolation and wandering the streets again, I want to do the opposite of yearning.” But what was that?

“The opposite of yearning is savoring the exquisite now,” writes psychologist Mary Pipher in her book, Letters to a Young Therapist: Stories of Hope and Healing.

I am out of isolation, and I vow to savor the exquisite now.

But as I sit in this London coffee shop writing this, the speakers start blasting Dido. It’s impossible to not yearn listening to music that was popular when you were in your peak yearning years, a figure I’m gonna put between the ages of 14 - 25. (But then again, I’m not good with numbers.)

With “White Flag” playing, a song I have not heard in possibly fifteen years, I suddenly remember an ex-boyfriend in California and feel very fragile. As the melancholy tune plays in this busy cafe on this extra cold day, and I decide I’ll savour the exquisite now tomorrow.

Today, there will be yearning.

You can read more of my writing by checking out my book, “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes.” (The UK version is “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously). It’s also been translated and published in the Netherlands, Korea, China, Russia, Germany, Taiwan, Poland and Hungary.

It’s about the year I spent: talking to strangers, performing stand-up comedy, travelling solo, trying out improv, going on friend dates and doing a bunch of extrovert-y things.  It’s about being an introvert and trying to extrovert for a full year. I interview brilliant people throughout the book who guide me through these nightmares.

Reviews for Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come

“I loved it! It’s such a wonderful title, and the book lives up to it’ Nigella Lawson 

‘In a world of self-care and nights in, this book will inspire and remind you to do some things that scare you every so often.’ Emma Gannon

‘Hilarious, unexpected and ultimately life-affirming.’ Will Storr

‘Funny, emotional and deeply inspiring, this is perfect for anyone wanting to break out of their comfort zone’  Heat

‘Beautifully written and so funny! I related to it A LOT’ – Emma Jane Unsworth

‘Relatable, moving and fantastically funny’ – Rhik Samadder

‘Tender, courageous and extremely funny, this book will make us all braver.’ Daisy Buchanan

‘A chronicle of Pan’s hilarious and painful year of being an extrovert.’ Stylist

‘Excellent, warm, hilarious.’ Nikesh Shukla

‘You WILL laugh and laugh while reading this.’ Sun

“Very funny, very smart” Liberty Hardy

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Did you miss last week’s post?

This week, a group of ten-year-olds came into the bookshop as part of a school field trip to pick a few books for their classroom. They touched all the books. They knocked over several books. They tried to convince their teacher that they should buy our shiny bars of chocolate that we stock for Christmas. They rummaged through magazines, one boy opening one and pointing to an editor’s name and saying to me, “That’s my dad.”

The same boy, in his high-vis vest, sauntered over to Rebecca, who stood behind the register at the wooden counter.

“How many books are in this shop?” he asked, looking up at her.

“Four thousand five hundred,” Rebecca said, without blinking.

Rebecca remains perpetually unfazed. You can throw her the oddest request and she’ll genuinely consider it, which is a character trait I greatly appreciate. She’s also the best in the bookshop at making book recommendations.

A man came in asking for advice on what book to buy for his 18-year-old niece. He hadn’t seen her in ten years, but they were reuniting at a big family reunion that evening.  

Rebecca walked over to our fiction shelf and handed him a book called How to Kill Your Family (by ).

The man read the title and laughed, in shock.

“It’s a dark, funny thriller,” I explained. “Not a guide.” He then bought it, which delighted us. 

Now that Lottie has left for Scotland, I’ve been working with Sadie, who is filling in until someone new starts next week (someone I haven’t even met yet!!). Sadie used to work here full-time but is now training to become a speech therapist and fills in when anyone is ill.

I don’t know Sadie well and remain somewhat intimidated by her. She’s very British and by this I mean she is enigmatic and I have no idea if she likes me or merely tolerates me.

She’s been going through a lot of heavy stuff, which I won’t write about here as it’s not mine to tell, but she’s understandably somber most days.

The bookshop is sort of a safe place where we don’t talk about sad things and instead we argue over what music to play. Sadie absolutely hates what she calls “music with words” which is what most people would call just “music.” Sadie says she has given a great deal of thought to what the perfect background bookshop music is and the answer is … Spanish guitar.

I once put on a Haim song and for a composed British woman, Sadie went absolutely ballistic, turning it off immediately. Apparently she has a personal vendetta against one of the singers for extremely niche reasons that I cannot reveal here without the threat of being sued (that’s how specific the grudge is). She refuses to let me play the Shins or Maggie Rogers or Nick Drake because, once again, “they have words.”

Two things lifted Sadie’s mood yesterday. First, a famous actress came into the bookshop. We didn’t realise it until after she had left – she was tall and hiding behind a baseball cap – and then we googled her loads and went over every single thing we said to her and what it would have sounded like to her and then we googled her boyfriend who was with her.

She was so extraordinarily beautiful while wearing no make-up, an oversized scarf and baseball cap. In fact, she looked far more beautiful than I thought she had ever looked on screen which is why I didn’t immediately recognise her.

The actress borrowed my pen to write messages in the book she bought, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, which is probably the book we have sold the most this year in the shop. The actress said the book will floor you if you read it – that every sentence is magic. She said it in this ethereal voice and at one point she and her boyfriend hugged for a solid 30 seconds in silence in front of Sadie and me, who stood very still as well, Spanish guitar playing in the background. The rain fell outside. The leaves blew. The actress swayed when she talked. Everything she did was theatrical.

I don’t know why so many celebrities and famous authors come into this tiny indie bookshop in London. I guess they have always lived in this neighbourhood, but I never saw them when I was wandering around. Now that I’m inside the bookshop several hours a week, they come to me.

The second thing that perked Sadie up was when I was telling her about how I was going to Paris soon to visit my college best friend Rachel, who lives there. I mentioned how I was scared of getting bed bugs in Paris.

Sadie was pouring coffee beans into the coffee machine when she stopped and put the bag down. 

“You’re scared of getting bed bugs?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. (Who isn’t scared of this?)

“You’re legitimately scared of getting bed bugs?” she asked again.

“Yes…” I said.

Sadie leaned back, her hands behind her, on the counter, staring at the ground. And she started shaking.

I stared at her, confused. And then I noticed, she was shaking with laughter. No, not just that. She was also crying with laughter.

“You’re. Scared. Of. Getting. Bed. Bugs,” she sputtered as tears filled her eyes. She repeated this two more times and then starting laughing silently with such force that she couldn’t say any more, just gripped the counter harder.

Okay, I see her point.

In light of everything that is going on right now, I am worried about…bugs. Tiny bugs following me home from France.

People were dead, people were dying, the world was burning and I was worried about what?

Sadie laughed and laughed and laughed. She took a deep breath and then wiped away her tears. She smiled for the first time that day.

And then the book deliveries came, and we got back to work.

This week, I went with Rebecca, Walter and Walter’s girlfriend (Beautiful Lucy) to see Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour film.

It was the kind of romantic theatre that has all the seats divided into rows of two, so Rebecca and I sat together. I’d heard rumours of fans singing and dancing and crying, but this theatre in London had about 8 people in it. Not one person stood up. In fact, we all reclined in our seats. The English are so unmoved sometimes – a focus group who had never heard of Taylor before would have behaved exactly as this audience did. Silence. Bewilderment. Silent bewilderment in darkness, quietly eating chocolate-covered malt balls. So in other words, my perfect Sunday evening.

Rebecca and I agree (know) that Taylor’s best song is the ten-minute version of “All Too Well.” Halfway through it, Rebecca leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Do you have to think about past relationships or old crushes to relate to her sad love songs?”

God, she is SO good at punching me in the heart and stomach at the same time. I guess I do???? Before I was married, I loved sad love song music. I was always in unrequited love with several people at once.

I’ve never understood the relevance of the question, “Did you fall in love with your partner at first sight?” I have fallen in love with hundreds of people at first sight. It’s all I did in college. No one reciprocated. In my early twenties, there is not a single dark-haired man with twinkly eyes I met that I didn’t imagine in a black peacoat holding my hand in the snow at Christmas (normal). And so the sadder the music, the better. Bright Eyes. Radiohead. Ryan Adams. My college roommate, a boarding school girl from Eastern Europe, called it, “Kill Me Now Music.”

Sad love songs don’t floor me the way they used to, and that makes me sad. Best case scenario in my life, I don’t get to fall in love again or get my heart stomped on again. But there was something deliciously rich about break-ups and unrequited love and a small part of me would love to be listening to Lana Del Rey while smoking a cigarette on stoop at 3am with silent tears running down my face.

Recently, Cara and I worked an evening book launch together. These are small parties to celebrate the publication of an author’s book, and we’re there to pour the wine and sell the books and then kick everyone out at 9pm.

That evening, I wore a very loose white and blue striped dress that could maybe, just maybe, on a good day be considered “business casual” and also I wore these horrible, vast sandals. By horrible I mean, they were extremely comfortable, Velcro-strappy, sandals, but I knew they did not look good.

After years of hiding away during peak Covid, I wore high heels to a wedding last year and I felt ridiculous, so about to topple over into the grass at any moment. Every step I took felt clunky and loud and off-balance. And hence, the flat sandals.

A drunk Irishman with dark hair and blue eyes asked me out at the book launch, and I think that is what is the most shocking aspect of this story – I wore these sandals, the size of small boats, and I got asked out. These sandals, the antithesis of sexy, the tired grandmother shoe of choice, got asked out. And I know the Irishman saw them because I remember thinking, “Why did I wear these God-awful ugly shoes in public?” when he did.

Did I flirt with him? I hadn’t thought so. He was friends with the author and in her speech she thanked him and she said that he had given her the idea for her book. Later, when I was pouring him a beer, I said, “I’m a writer. Do you have any book ideas for me?” which in retrospect, while writing that now, comes off as extremely flirty, and if my husband is reading this he will be rolling his eyes so hard, but it was a genuine question, not a romantic proposition. I don’t want an affair! Even with someone with an Irish accent! That sounds messy and complicated and life-ruining! I want something far more valuable – a red-hot book idea. Wouldn’t you have asked this man the exact same question?

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Rebecca was sitting at the table in the front of the shop, the display window behind her, sunlight streaming through her hair. She had the oddest expression on her face. She was holding her cheek in embarrassment, elbows on the table, staring into the ether.

“He came in today.”

Rebecca has a crush on a customer who is, apparently, very, very hot.

We have nicknames for all of our regular customers. We’ve decided to call this one Timothy, as he has the aura of Timothée Chalamet.

Walter had seen Timothy come in earlier, too.

“Verrry easy on the eyes,” Walter confirmed.

“I’m in love,” Rebecca said.

“He can’t be that handsome,” I said, though I have never spotted Timothy in the wild. I always seem to be walking out of the bookshop mere seconds before he appears.

“He’s SO handsome, Jess,” Rebecca said. She seemed genuinely stressed by the interaction she’d just had with him.

“Why didn’t I recommend him a book? Give him a reason to stay? Offer to make him a cup of tea?”

She has never once offered to make me a cup of tea.

“You don’t want to date someone that hot,” I tell Rebecca. “You don’t want to date someone everyone wants.”

I had recently texted Michelle, my ex-colleague in Beijing. I wanted to see if she remembered a mutual acquaintance of ours, Erica, who was now a good friend of mine in London. Michelle hadn’t seen her in over a decade, but did she remember her?

Michelle wrote back, “Yeah. Hot husband.”

What a legacy. Erica’s future gravestone epitaph: Beloved daughter, friend and wife of a hot husband.

I’ve met said “hot husband” several times and would consider him a good friend. But in these years of friendship, I’ve also seen how people hit on him constantly. Women adjust their hair and lean far too close to him, having lost their balance in his presence. Ostensibly straight men become flustered, pulling at their ties nervously and laughing too hard at his jokes.

Why would you ever want to be married to someone who caused that kind of destruction everywhere they went?!

Rebecca didn’t care about my anecdote. She was too obsessed with Timothy.

“Tell me the truth. Is he out of my league?”

“No! Of course not!” I say. “That’s not really a thing anymore once you’re out of school.”

I think I mean that.

I find my husband to be very handsome, but I also know that he’s definitely not everyone’s type. For one, he’s not tall, but also, neither am I (though I do swear that even if I were tall, I would absolutely date a man shorter than I am. This is the hypothetical hill I will die on. But would the shorter man date me? Unclear. See below).

Sam is handsome to me but women don’t whip their necks around to watch him walk by and follow him into a second location. I find this incredibly reassuring, which speaks to obvious hidden insecurities I have.

One time he mentioned a woman in the kitchen at work had told him he reminded her of a young Tom Cruise and I’d prickled and said, “Oh did she? Well, Sandra can back the fuck off.”

None of these revelations are particularly flattering for me.

A few months before my wedding, I asked my childhood best friend, Jori, who was more attractive: Sam or me. It’s the kind of conversation you can only have with someone you are incredibly close to, because otherwise you come off as stupid, shallow and stupidly shallow.

It was right before Sam and I were getting married, and I posited that I thought he and I were pretty equally matched looks-wise.

“Really? But Sam’s pretty good-looking.” Jori was buckling her seatbelt and adjusting the radio in her car and answering absentmindedly. I think I said nothing in response, because, I mean, I had asked her. I couldn’t then attack her for her answer by saying, “So you want to sleep with my future husband and you think I’m uglier than him? ”

I asked Jori this same question again last week, ten years later and she said, “You’re fairly even. Maybe you because you’re ageing well with the Asian genes and Sam’s not very tall.”

I let the word “ageing” slide and reminded her how ten years ago, she had said he was more attractive than I was.

“Really?!” she said, laughing. “I don’t remember saying that.” (She also didn’t deny that it was plausible…)

This is all to say, I know this is silly and stupid. Which is what I wish I could convey to Rebecca.

My friend Erica doesn’t even see her hot husband as hot anymore. She gets annoyed at him for all the things any other husband does or doesn’t do. A few years ago, I met up with her at a café in East London on a Saturday morning. Hot Husband was a few minutes behind but on his way to meet us. I asked her if we should order a coffee for him.

“If Hot Husband has a coffee, he’ll shit himself within five minutes.”

Never saw him the same way again.

So, no. Erica doesn’t run into his arms every evening passionately kissing him merely because his features are symmetrical and his shoulders are broad. I asked.

This whole, “Who is hot? And am I worthy?” conversation came to a head a few days ago.

A very handsome famous actor came into the bookshop this week, twice. I won’t say who it is because that would be wrong / immoral, but I’ll say this: very, very unequivocally attractive. It’s not Jake Gyllenhaal. It’s not Henry Cavill. It’s not Chris Hemsworth. Slightly less famous than these actors, but probably more handsome.

I’ll say no more. But if you’re thinking, “I bet it’s XXXX,” you would be right.

(When Lottie heard about this, literally on her train to Scotland to move in with her Irish boyfriend, she texted, “Please feel free to give him my number.”)

Anyway. Apparently he rode to the bookshop on a motorbike, dismounted, and according to Rebecca, “He took off his helmet in the sexiest way possible.”

I don’t know what that means, but I kind of do know what that means from that description?

A week ago, I spotted him in a café near the bookshop, so we sensed he was sort of…around. I had just ordered an iced matcha oat latte (apparently matcha is very good for you, look it up) and then - BAM - saw him and I was so distressed by his sheer hotness, that I just made myself stare at the ground. Like a peasant not allowed to look at the king. I didn’t want him to be uncomfortable! But he was making ME uncomfortable.

He got up to leave his table, and I’m not proud of this, but I immediately sat in his seat.

Yes, I did do that. Yes, I am admitting to it here, a public forum. Yes, I would do it again. No, I did not mention it to my husband. Yes, I did text it to Jori.

Hot people just make everyone around them a little bit crazy. I was relieved when he left.

While Rebecca was outwardly pining for Timothy, Walter was standing behind the counter. He chimed in, agreeing with me that “out of your league” is a concept that feels like gospel when we’re young and just plain stupid when we’re older. Also, it’s mind-boggling how hard it is to agree on who or what is actually “hot.”

By the time you’re 35, you will have met dozens of couples where you go, “Huh.” Or “Her?” Couples where you think: this one’s way smarter than that one, this one’s so much nicer than that one, this one is going to conquer the world but that one is going nowhere.

And you will not understand their connection at all. Only they do.

I don’t know if it’s the same in the US, but I do know that everyone in the UK has emerged from a drunken office Christmas party, reeling from shock. They will walk the streets questioning the very rules of nature after witnessing the most seemingly random and unforeseen hook-ups in dark corners.

(My friend Chantal told me that at one office Christmas party, an engaged woman became very inebriated and made out with a 19-year-old intern with buckteeth in front of her entire department. She called in sick the next day, secretly gathered her belongings after hours and quit remotely. She never came into work again. (This is exactly what I would do if I were in her situation, and I respect her deeply. I think of her fondly every Christmas.))

You may recall that Walter was recently single, after spending ten years dating someone he loved very much (the daughter of a famous author) who had just ended things with him.

Well, Walter has started dating again, and Walter is apparently an extremely hot commodity on dating apps because he’s a straight, nice man in his thirties who reads books and hasn’t been to prison. (The bar for men is so low.) Nearly every time he meets a new match, the woman wants to be exclusive with him by date three. It makes me think of the book Fleishman in Trouble (the book is better than the TV show).

Sometimes I want so badly to know what it’s like to be Walter. I know so many beautiful, smart single women in London who want to find partners or even just a nice cute guy who isn’t total trash and then I see Walter and every single woman he matches with is the smartest, funniest, most beautiful person in most rooms.

Are single women the most groomed subgroup of our species? Their nails are colourful and polished, their skin dry-brushed and moisturised, their lipstick immaculate, their legs toned from Pilates and cycling. They are reading fiction, non-fiction, and the New Yorker.

I would choose any of them to be stuck in an elevator with – these are delightful and incredibly resourceful women. We’d laugh, we’d cry, we’d laugh some more and they’d hand out a random packet of nuts in their purse to sustain us, a reusable water bottle and some hand sanitiser, before climbing out of the elevator using their impressive upper body strength from Crossfit and running at speed to get help.

The men? The men are fine.

I’ve sat by a twenty-something man in a movie theatre and his sweater smelled so strongly of mildew that I made my husband switch seats with me ten minutes through the film and I could still smell it and had to put my t-shirt over my nose for the entire film.

This man had a date.

Do you know how good these women smell just on their way to the grocery store? They smell amazing. A heady concoction of hairspray, deodorant, luxury perfume, essential oils, minty gum.

I know I’m generalizing but also, I am right. Why do kind, intelligent, funny, well-read, clean women outnumber their male counterparts so enormously?

A question for Malcolm Gladwell. Not for me. (Though tries to answer this here.)

Anyway. Walter already has a new girlfriend, who is, predictably, gorgeous (and sweet and smart and well-employed and funny). In fact, Rebecca and I have taken to calling her Beautiful Lucy.

Walter and his new girlfriend, Lucy, went to a fancy Italian restaurant recently. The waitress fawned over Lucy saying, “You are so GORGEOUS,” when she seated them. And then she glanced over at Walter and gave him a thin smile.

(To be clear, Walter is cute. But we don’t call him Beautiful Walter.)

“At least you’re in LOVE,” Rebecca shouted from across the bookshop. “And you just don’t understand, Jess. Timothy is. Just. So. Hot.”

I pulled a shot of coffee, and glanced over at Walter. He was cutting something with scissors. I looked closer. He was wrapping a copy of Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger in brown wrapping paper and tying it with green ribbon.

“It’s my favorite book. I’m going to mail it to Lucy as a surprise,” he said.

And I instantly knew.

In the immortal words of Paris Hilton: that’s hot.

You can read more of my writing by checking out my book, “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes.” (The UK version is “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously).

It’s about the year I spent: talking to strangers, performing stand-up comedy, travelling solo, trying out improv, going on friend dates and doing a bunch of extrovert-y things.  It’s about being an introvert and trying to extrovert for a full year. I interview brilliant people throughout the book who guide me through these nightmares.

It’s sold more than 140,000 copies, nearly entirely by word-of-mouth and I am so grateful to all of my readers.

Reviews for Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come

“I loved it! It’s such a wonderful title, and the book lives up to it’ Nigella Lawson 

‘In a world of self-care and nights in, this book will inspire and remind you to do some things that scare you every so often.’ Emma Gannon

‘Hilarious, unexpected and ultimately life-affirming.’ Will Storr

‘Funny, emotional and deeply inspiring, this is perfect for anyone wanting to break out of their comfort zone’  Heat

‘Beautifully written and so funny! I related to it A LOT’ – Emma Jane Unsworth

‘Relatable, moving and fantastically funny’ – Rhik Samadder

‘Tender, courageous and extremely funny, this book will make us all braver.’ Daisy Buchanan

‘A chronicle of Pan’s hilarious and painful year of being an extrovert.’ Stylist

‘Excellent, warm, hilarious.’ Nikesh Shukla

‘You WILL laugh and laugh while reading this.’ Sun

“Very funny, very smart” Liberty Hardy

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Did you miss last week’s post?

A group of Germans came into the bookshop last week. I was in the middle of photographing a pumpkin spice latte next to a book of autumn poems (for the bookstore’s Instagram – not for my own extraneous personal tweeness, though I mean, I would) when they came inside from the rain.

I had asked Lottie to make the coffee, because she’s the best at latte art, and she must’ve nailed it because the Germans ordered three pumpkin spice lattes, an espresso and a hot chocolate while they browsed the books.

One of the Germans, a guy in his twenties, slid a greeting card across the counter and said quietly, “Can I buy this quickly? So my girlfriend doesn’t see?” His head tilted towards a woman with dark hair and glasses in the back of the store.

This happens a lot – these secret purchases while a beloved browses. I love being part of the surprise.

I rang up his card and glanced down quickly, curious to see what romantic message it conveyed.

It was a birthday card with an elephant holding a balloon that says, “You’re 4!”

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………?

I cannot make this make sense, no matter how hard I try. She really likes elephants? This is how Germans celebrate anniversaries? Her pet elephant turned 4?

Or was he merely buying this birthday card for a love child he has with another woman, in which case that makes a lot of sense. He better hide this from his girlfriend forever.

Lottie, my fellow bookseller for the day, sat at the table in the front of the bookshop to take her lunch. Legs crossed and one elbow propped up on the table holding her book, Lottie always finishes lunch by eating an apple.

I sat at the register, talking to another person in the German group. Apparently, they’re from Munich but now live in Denmark. He told me how they much prefer Denmark to Germany. “Work-life balance. Better healthcare.” I told them about how I had just visited our Dutch friends in Germany and how our Dutch friends much prefer Germany to the Netherlands. “Beer garden culture, lots of great hiking spots.”

(So if the Dutch prefer Germany and the Germans prefer Denmark, where do the Danish prefer? Or is Denmark just peak life quality, as is declared yearly in every happiness survey? Can please advise?)

The German girlfriend bought Lessons in Chemistry and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – she asked me to pick one for her but I couldn’t choose, so she got both, which is the correct choice. Then the Germans left, but not before one declared the bookshop “super-cute” in his German accent, something that I cannot stop saying in the same tone.

“You’re very chatty today,” Lottie said, taking a big bite of her apple.

Lottie looks so much Audrey Hepburn and has long hazel-brown hair and bangs. With delicate features and slim limbs, she looks 19, but is 31. I can’t imagine a future where she doesn’t always look 19. Today she wore a white t-shirt tucked into a mid-length plaid skirt and Mary Jane shoes.

Her mother runs a different independent bookshop in London, and Lottie reads on average one book a day. She illustrates children’s books – her sketchbooks full of chubby adorable children with oversized red scarves, fuzzy baby seals, sleepy polar bears dreaming under the stars. I’ve seen her unfasten the navy blue ribbon around a box of fancy books and then tie it into her hair while humming, like she was actual Cinderella.

It sounds like I made her up, doesn’t it? But I can assure you I have not. Why? Because Lottie is mean! And I would not have thought to imagine her that way. I would have had her say things like, “Do you want to see the fairies that live in my garden?” or “Do you want to borrow my skirt and be best friends?”

I once brought a coffee into the bookshop and she said, “Isn’t it stupid to bring a coffee into a place where you can get coffee for free?” She continued stacking books in her magenta dungarees.

Did it sting more because she said it in a posh British accent?

It did.

Lottie has an Irish boyfriend, and I asked to see a photo of him.

“It doesn’t really matter what he looks like, because he’s Irish. I love his accent,” she said. She glanced up from her book, thoughtfully.

“I like all accents.” She looked at me.

“Except American.”

I mean, she didn’t have to tell me that American accents aren’t charming. Why do you think I live in the UK, Lottie? (I’ve written about this a lot over the years.)

It begs the question: if Americans like British accents, and the British like Irish accents, what accents do the Irish like?

“French,” says Lottie.

I text my college best friend, Rachel, who lives in Paris, “What accents do French people like?”

She replies, “I only know of all the accents they hate … if fact I can’t think of a single accent they like more than their own.”

On a sweltering hot day during the summer, we were trying to subtly usher customers out of the shop so we could close the bookshop. I asked Lottie if we should close the blinds on the large storefront window, because the sun was blazing down on them. She glanced at the customers and said, “Leave it. If they burn, they’ll leave faster.”

But then she laughed and closed the blinds.

Maybe calling Lottie “mean” isn’t correct, though Rebecca agrees that she can be "savage.” I now just think Lottie exerts strong “oldest sister” vibes, with her unwavering frankness, but is actually secretly nice. She’s always ordering in books for her boyfriend or her mom or her sister (everyone who works at the bookshop has the same love language: giving books). I’ve also noticed that when a small child comes into the shop, Lottie’s cold exterior melts. I hear her saying “Awww,” an awful lot to crying babies.

And she can lose her cool sometimes: one time the actress Elizabeth Debicki came into the bookshop, and Lottie was so flustered helping her that she smacked her head on a shelf.

Anyway, sometimes I wonder if Lottie is only “savage” on Mondays, the day we work together. Maybe she’s a delight the rest of the week.

Even here at the bookshop, the good place, Mondays are still worse than other days. Customers are slightly grumpier, we’re tired, deliveries are messed up, things just go wrong. We also have to haul the big recycling bin down the cobblestone alley, a task Lottie and I both hate and are constantly trying to talk the other one into doing.

On this particular Monday, I was re-arranging the cookbooks and found myself saying, “I HATE YOU!” over and over again to a book about fancy toast that kept falling over.

A bunch of bookmarks and key chains arrived. They were all very sweet designs, like labradors or owls and then there was this one in the mix:

Why would even the biggest phallus enthusiast want this on their keychain? And who is this nude man waving at? Where is he off to? And yet…and yet, they sell.

Maybe you read last week’s dispatch from the bookshop, and I’m here to tell you that if I feel like I’m the accidental mother to twenty-somethings Cara and Rebecca even though I’m only in my thirties, then Lottie is my aloof eldest daughter, who still needs me but doesn’t want to hang out with me.  

One day she comes into the bookshop and is wincing every time she leans over, so I ask her what’s wrong. She tells me she feels a weird pain in the left side of her hip.

“Like your liver hurts, if that’s where your liver actually was?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Like someone’s stabbing you with a dull butter knife every fifteen minutes, but only on your left side?”

“Yes.”

“Like your ovaries are sporadically crying out?”

“Yes.”

I tell her I think it’s probably ovulation pain, something called Mittleschmerz, and that it should go away in a few days, and it does. On another day, I see her studying her phone and it turns out to be results from a recent blood test. She finally relents and lets me see the results.

“Omigod, your folate levels are abysmal!”

“What even is folate?!”

“I don’t know but yours is LOW. And your iron."

Lottie always drank out of the same single-use plastic bottle from Itsu, and it slowly drove me crazy. I couldn’t help ranting about chemicals leaching out of flimsy plastic until I realise that by becoming the mother at the bookshop, I have actually become my own father.

And then one day, Lottie sends me a photo. It’s of her grimacing but posing with the stainless steel water bottle that I’ve been trying to get her to buy for months. The exact same one I have. I think, “If I die tomorrow, at least I’ll have achieved this.”

When I was 23, I was a writer at an expat magazine in Beijing. I’m half-Chinese, but it’s my father who is Chinese (my mother is American with roots in Eastern Europe). The closest I’ve ever come to having a Chinese mother is when two Chinese-American women in the office, Michelle and Lilly, acted as my surrogate mothers at work. Michelle said things like, “I’m going to teach you what compound interest is,” and, as a journalist who had worked at Slate and the Wall Street Journal, she would glance around our chaotic office and say, “This isn’t a job – this is summer camp.”

She was my editor and sometimes she’d send things back to me where she had written, “I don’t think you meant to send this to me, as it’s clearly not ready.” Which is probably the best training a journalist can have. I still feel like I have Michelle over my shoulder, judging everything I do.

Lilly, my other substitute mother, also changed my life. One night late in the office, she explained the concept of introverts versus extroverts. There was no reason to do this, but I think she just knew I was an introvert - that she had noticed that I preferred to work alone, that I never spoke in big meetings and needed a break from the constant socialising in our expat life. If Lilly and I hadn’t had that conversation, I would never have written my book about my introvert/extrovert adventures.

It makes me wonder what my legacy will be with these women I work with at the bookshop.

A few months ago, Lottie says out of the blue, “Do you want to know a secret?” I feel giddy. The beautiful, mean girl is confiding in me.

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A famous author came into the bookshop today and we all had to pretend we didn’t know who he was. He lives nearby and we have several of his books on our shelves, some with his actual face on them, and yet when he wants to order a book in to buy, we have to ask, completely straight-faced, “What’s your last name? Uh huh. And first name?” and then remain blank-faced. It is the best acting I have ever done in my life.

Apparently, a long time ago, a former bookseller here asked for a selfie with him and he (politely) refused and then he didn’t come into the bookshop for years, so now we must be extra careful around him.

This is in contrast to another famous author who came in recently. He wanted to autograph his books and a customer on her way out overheard and said, “Oh, you wrote a book! Good for you!” and then she left, the door shutting behind her.

It was like someone saying “Oh, you wrote a little song! Adorable!” to Paul Simon and then slamming the door, leaving Paul Simon fuming inside. With me. I did not know what to do, but I needed to make sure that he knew that I knew who he was. I panicked and said, “Oh, it’s YOU! YOU! You wrote that…thing!!! That thing that I love!!”

Anyway, it’s hard to get it right when it comes to the famous.

It is my first autumn working at the bookshop (I started working here in January). We have a coffee machine here, so we have ordered in fancy pumpkin spice syrup and we have cursive orange lettering on the black A-board sign out front. I wore an oversized navy cardigan and jeans to work last week because leaves were blowing everywhere and there was finally a chill in the London air. The cinnamon candles are out.

Cara was working today. Cara is 22 and looks like Alexa Chung, if Alexa Chung only wore cargo pants and baggy black t-shirts. She has that cool haircut and her cat-like eyes and Cara’s also tall, so when she sits, she can cross her legs over about seven times. She only wears mascara and that’s all she needs because, let me reiterate, she is 22.

Sometimes I can’t believe Cara is only 22. A baby. A child. A baby-child. I find myself exclaiming, “You are SO YOUNG! You are a baby!!!” and she laughs and pretends to fake cry “wah” with exaggerated wringing hands.

Rebecca was also working today. She has long dark wavy hair and loves books so much that on her off days, she visits other indie bookshops. She is crafty, she writes poems, and she cuddles every single dog who comes into our shop.

The most shocking discovery I made about them, these twenty-somethings, is that Rebecca and Cara have never seen a single episode of GIRLS. I am in my 30s and I have never felt older in my life.

I find myself mothering them. Not because I want to, but when you are left with stray kittens about to scurry across a busy road, you scoop them into your arms before you know what you’re doing. You give them water and brush them and suddenly say out loud, realising, “Wait, so I have to be the adult here?!”

I say to them, “What do you mean you don’t wash your fruit?” and text them late at night, “Did you remember to take your B12 and iron?” (Cara is a vegan and Rebecca a vegetarian.)

When Cara forgets to drink water, yet makes a cup of coffee that is FOUR espresso shots and no milk, I want to cup her face in my hands and say, “No. No no no no no no no.” I pester Cara and Rebecca to make appointments at the GP and to go to the dentist. To confront their rude flatmates. I beg them not to text their exes. I give them my password to a streaming service and say, “Please watch GIRLS. Go. Now.”

Cara and I often work together. We try to find common ground and fail. She says “slay” often and non-ironically and when I tell her I need a break to pee and can she cover the till, she yells, “Go piss, girl!!!” which is apparently a meme from the Gossip Girl opening montage, something I did not know for months of her yelling this at me. I just thought all twenty-somethings encouraged each other with, “Go piss, girl!”

Even so, it was easy to bond with my younger colleagues, because we all love reading books and while the bookshop doesn’t have a policy per se about their hiring process, it is telling that there are five of us and we are all very much introvert brunettes who know the names of at least two types of antidepressants off the top of our heads.

I remember that I had only met Rebecca, the 24-year-old, a handful of times but she was open with me immediately. We were sitting at the table in the café part of our bookshop and she was crying, angrily. She had just been broken up with by a guy she really liked but had only gone on three dates with.

“You’re so lucky you’re married!!” Rebecca wailed. “I am so sick of this! I just want my PERSON to spend the rest of my life with and just be done!”

I nodded.

“Tell me! How old were you before you met your husband? I need to know that I still have time!!” she said.

I paused.

“It doesn’t work like that!”

“How old were you?”

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“Did you like any of the food?”

“No,” she said.

“Did you eat any sushi?”

“The raw fish? No. I liked…the Japanese salad dressing.”

“What was wrong with the rest of the food?”

“So many things were the most disgusting texture.”

I knew my dad felt the opposite – the more “disgusting” something was, the more he wanted to try it. He loved to eat jellyfish tentacles in Chinese restaurants and the eyeballs of the whole fish during family banquets to try to impress and disgust us, his children and wife, in equal measure. My mother refuses to eat beans in chilli or cheese on a salad – I knew she’d struggle with the new flavours of Japan.

“But wasn’t the ramen good?” I asked.

“It was,” she conceded.

She also talked about how clean Japan was, how beautiful it was, how kind everyone was. She also mentioned how many rules there were, everywhere.

“I found myself bowing all over the place.”

My mother also mentioned that their tour guide, Miko, told them that Japanese people rarely say, “I love you,” to each other or to their family because “it’s too embarrassing.”

***

I used to have such intense social anxiety that I could not talk to a stranger on the street, even if I desperately wanted to. Even if they, say, had walked by and half their backpack was unzipped, and I wanted to shout, “hey! Your backpack is unzipped!” and they would surely want to have this information and be grateful to me – I felt that it would be too embarrassing for me to initiate this interaction.

Maybe you read my book, Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes and you know that I spent a year doing insane, hard, and wonderful experiments to overcome my introversion. The book came out a few years ago and I wanted a place to write some updates about what happened after that year.

Well…Covid happened. So after essentially being out most nights – doing improv, going to networking events, talking to strangers ­– I was suddenly in lockdown, with everyone else. In London, where I live, there were entire months where it was illegal to leave our houses other than to get food, medicine or go for our one allotted daily walk.

While cooped up at home in London, I thought so much about my interviews with the psychologist Nicholas Epley during this time. He’s one of the “extrovert mentors” I interview in the book and it is no exaggeration to say that my conversation with him, documented in the book, completely changed my life, even to this day.

He had told me that introverts and extroverts alike BOTH actually enjoy encounters with strangers – like exchanging pleasantries in line for coffee or stopping to talk to someone next to us on the train – even though that actually sounds so painfully awkward for many people. But after a year of forcing myself to do this, I had to say that Epley’s research made sense to me. As he explains it, these small encounters give us a hit of dopamine and they are also the connections that can help us form a community.

During the worst parts of the pandemic, I would leave my house once a day to go get coffee at my local café – because they sold bread, they were allowed to stay open as they were considered “essential.” Even while wearing a mask, going into that café and ordering a coffee and a pastry and a loaf of bread on very cold days, was the highlight of my day. Why? Because I loved chatting to the baristas there. They were funny and warm and they always remembered me. It was exactly the kind of interactions Nicholas Epley studied.

Later, when things were mostly back to normal, I kept walking past a small gorgeous bookshop every day. I always peered through the windows and would see a woman with dark hair sitting by the till and lots of customers browsing the bookshelves. I rarely went in, but for months, I would walk by and think, “I wish I worked there.”

I wanted to be surrounded by books and book-y people and candles and coffee and soft music. I wanted to chat with people who lived in our area. I wanted to be part of a community.

Basically, I wanted to live inside Stars Hollow and this seemed like the closest way. (There’s even a diner right next door with a rude barista! More Michelle vibes than Luke, though. This man who serves me coffee seems to actively hate me but the coffee there is the best in the neighbourhood, so I keep coming back.)

This is all to say that…I work in that bookshop in London now. It’s two days a week and I love it. The biggest part of my job is talking to strangers all day: customers coming in looking for the perfect book to buy their girlfriend or for the next read that’s going to change their life or the right novel that will transform their holiday into something magical. Everyone who comes in lives nearby so it feels very cosy.

During my interview, I asked the owner what it was really like to work in a bookshop. She paused and I thought she was going to say something cynical or practical but…instead she said, “It’s enchanting.”

I am Kathleen Kelly in You Got Mail now.

Anyway. This is my first newsletter. I’m going to write about the joys of working in a bookshop, and I’m also going to share updates from my latest extrovert-ing adventures here.

I am also working on a new book – think of it as a sequel to Sorry I’m Late – and I will be sharing a few snippets from it here, too. Please subscribe for free (or paid!) if you would like to keep in touch (most posts will originally be free but they will be paywalled a month after publication).

Oh! And I love you even though it’s embarrassing.

And it really is embarrassing.

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And find the next installment from the Little London Bookshop here:

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