Sorry I'm Late - I was yearning

and being petty

Me, in Paris, remembering your face

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

Did you miss last week’s post?