Sorry I'm Late, I cannot lift heavy things

and my uterus is over-heating

I used to be obsessed with the name Clementine, but was saddened to meet some real life ones in England and find out this name was inevitably shortened to Clem or Clemmie, which is just far too close to “phlegm” for me. My imaginary daughter shall sadly not be named this and will remain my favorite name from when I was 8: Ariel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was no speech that evening.

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

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

“Yes,” he said.

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

“Yes,” he said.

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

“What? No,” he said.

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

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

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

I think these hipsters are asking too much of us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I didn’t ask,” he said.

“How big was he?”

“Big but not like … gigantic.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See, we all need friends like this. I would not be writing at all anymore if it weren’t for

Emma Gannon

and

Leyla Kazim

telling me I should during one fateful lunch in September a few years ago. I was very, very ready to quit writing forever, and I am so thankful that I have these two particular forthright friends tell me that this simply would not do.**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bookstore and the café were decorated in dark wood.

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

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

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

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

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

And Kevin? Kevin can lift heavy shit.

**

Emma Gannon

’s book Table For One, a modern romance story about finding happiness within yourself, is out now and I adore it.

Leyla Kazim

has just released her book, Pathways, about how she decided to leave London and create the life she always wanted by buying land and moving to Portugal. Two thumbs up for both of these books!

***If you’re in London and you’d like to hear me and

Emma Gannon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Relatable, moving and fantastically funny’ – Rhik Samadder

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

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

‘Excellent, warm, hilarious.’ Nikesh Shukla

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

“Very funny, very smart” Liberty Hardy

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