Company

Hello loves!

In the words of a Kaveh Akbar poem, it's been January for months in both directions. I've just returned from Cardiff, where I was workshopping a feature film idea with an extremely lovely indie animation studio and trying valiantly to resist buying every single Lucy & Yak jumpsuit. I also attempted to climb a mountain in the Brecon Beacons, but Storm Eowyn blew me right back down again. Britain remains cold and grey and dreary, and the wider world feels insane right now, and I'm counting the minutes until February 13th when I'm going on holiday to a place with actual SUN.

In the meantime, here are three things that are injecting some much-needed colour to my life.

All Fours - Miranda July

When I'm writing a novel, I avoid reading anything too similar in genre or concept lest I commit subconscious plagiarism. But now that I'm almost (?) done with Femme Ferale, I'm finally catching up on all the brilliant women-in-a-midlife-crisis novels that have come out recently. All Fours by Miranda July? Oh my word. A revelation. It feels like a tome of secrets handed down by a woman a decade older about what happens in your forties.

There are lines in this book so uncomfortably honest it feels like they must be illegal to say. Also - sjoe - it's obscenely hot. I felt like I needed to read it under a blanket in the dead of night lest a stranger on the train peek over my shoulder and call the authorities (I see people reading A Court of Thorns and Roses on the Tube all the time, and I always think, Ma'am! We are in public! Keep your smut at home!).

Basically, it's a story about a 45-year-old who embarks on a roadtrip across America. She only makes it to a motel 30-minutes from her home, but this turns out to be far enough away for her to blow up her entire life. It's a meditation on desire and ageing and the costs of living authentically, and I've heard there's a secret online community of women who read the book and are now making dramatic life-changes, if that's not intriguing enough.

“If birth was being thrown energetically up into the air, we aged as we rose. At the height of our ascent we were middle-aged and then we fell for the rest of our lives, the whole second half. Falling might take just as long, but it was nothing like rising. The whole time you were rising you could not imagine what came next in your particular, unique journey; you could not see around the corner. Whereas falling ended the same way for everyone.”

Company

On an appropriately almost-February note, I've been obsessively replaying various recordings of Stephen Sondheim's musical Company recently. The plot's simple: it's the 35th birthday of perpetual singleton Bobby, and all his friends are harassing him about why he hasn't gotten married yet. Bobby interrogates his friends on their experiences about love and relationships, and that's the whole story! But Sondheim, being Sondheim, turns this into one of the most profound explorations of love and commitment ever written.

Here are, objectively, the best recordings of the iconic songs (fellow musicals nerds, I await your rebuttals):

• Patti LuPone's version of "Ladies Who Lunch", a scornful rant about rich women who idle their lives away, is untouchable.
• Raul Esparza, I feel, does the perfect version of the exquisite finale "Being Alive" (although Adam Driver's performance in Marriage Story is also delicious).
• "Sorry-Grateful" is the wisest song anyone's ever written about long-term relationships, and Stephen Colbert's rendition is perfect.
• Madeline Kahn's rendition of a bride with cold feet ("Not Getting Married Today" is delightfully unhinged (Jonathan Bailey of Wicked megafame did my favourite version in the gender-flipped 2018 London version, but there aren't any good recordings online).

A Manage Your Money update

Somehow it's been EIGHT YEARS since I finished the South African version of Manage Your Money Like A F-cking Grownup, so we're working on an update! It won't be out until next year, but I'm excited to expand the sections about home ownership, budgeting for kids and ageing parents, and adjusting for the horrific inflation of the past five years. I'll also be tackling changes in the financial world like crypto and two-tier retirement savings. More than anything, I'm looking forward to weaving in the wisdom I've gathered from the hundreds of hours of conversations with real people I've had since the book came out - and from eight more years of surviving capitalism myself.

If you've read the book recently, I'd love your help. What are the sections in the book that you wish were expanded? Was anything confusing? Are there burning money questions the book doesn't answer? Hit reply and let me know!

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Wishing you good company in the final hours of this endless January,

Sam