Sorry I'm Late - I was ruining a man's day

several men's days, actually

Summertime in Britain

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

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

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

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

I will never know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which frankly haunts me to this day.

So. Did you marry your mother or your father?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I actually am,” the dad said.

“Oh?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think so,” he says.

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

“So…how old is Lucy?” I ask.

“31,” he says.

“Do you think she wants kids?” I ask.

“She definitely does.”

“More than one?”

“Maybe.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

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

“Why?” he asks.

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

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

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

“Errrrrr,” Walter says, his eyebrows furrowed.

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

And yet I don’t stop here. No.

“How old is Lucy again?”

“31.”

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

“I think, so yes.”

“And does she want more than one baby?”

Walter isn’t sure.

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

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

Walter paled.

“She turns 32 next month.”

Right.

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

“Are you okay?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re fine. Don’t worry.”

It’s the best advice I’ve ever had.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Relatable, moving and fantastically funny’ – Rhik Samadder

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

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

‘Excellent, warm, hilarious.’ Nikesh Shukla

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

“Very funny, very smart” Liberty Hardy

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