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 we…

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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

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At the bookshop, we hoste…

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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.

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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 sayin…

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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 concer…

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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 sh…

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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

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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

Subscribe now

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

Subscribe now

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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