John Wick is so tired
Or, James Bond makes great eggs
Kyra Wilder’s “John Wick Is So Tired” - Spring 2023 The Paris Review.
It is January, and John Wick is so tired, and so am I. And cold. But mostly, I’m glad to be able to say hello again, wonderful friends and readers. I’ve missed you very much.
It has been a long time since I last logged into Substack*. Looking back at the dates of my last newsletters it seems that I’ve started almost every year since 2021 with great ambitions, only to have them fizzle away as the sun comes out, and I get stuck into the serious business of writing books, or hot glueing fringing onto leotards, or rediscovering aspic, or whatever comes next. I could, and have, given myself a hard time for this - but that didn’t get me any closer to having something to send to you - and so instead I’m going to say:
Hi! It’s nice to see you again! I’m going to try to stick around better this time, but It’s better if I don’t make any promises. Let’s keep things casual. Can you have a situationship with a newsletter? Let’s find out.
As always, I’m going to be dropping in to share my hot takes and slow burns, as well as recommendations for things that I’ve been enjoying recently, which you might also get a kick from.
*But when I did log in I was delighted to see this screenshot of the John Wick sitting in my drafts - it turns out not much has changed since we last spoke, because this feels as relevant, and I feel as tired, now as when I first grabbed it in, probably, 2023.
Slow Burn
Have I been wrong about success my whole life?
Spoiler alert - the answer is yes, and I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, yet.
In 2024, my third book The Glass Cliff was published. I’ve spoken a lot about how much I don’t like, and don’t gel with publishing as an industry - I had hoped that in switching publishers for this most recent book the story would be different. But I was sad, if not surprised, to learn that I was wrong.
For a lot of writers, it's the solitary act of sitting down and writing that they struggle with. I’m lucky not to share that problem - I could happily sit and write all day every day if that was an option. Instead, for me, (and, I’ve discovered for many authors whose identities are outside of the trad cis white male image of authorhood, and the publishing industry at large in the UK), the problem comes during the handover, once the writing is all but done. It’s the handover from me to them. From author to publisher. The moment of transition from project to product is what I find, to put it lightly, absolutely gut-wrenchingly unbearable. It’s not the editing, it’s the industry, and the way it functions, or rather - the way it doesn’t.
It’s hard to talk about in any great depth because, whilst my contract explicitly forbids me from discussing the details of what’s in it, I am able to say that many authors’ contracts with their publishers - the book deals that so many people write to me to ask for help and advice in getting - contain clauses about reputation and disrepute. Clauses designed to limit authors from saying anything publicly about their treatment during the book-writing process. I have personally felt pressured to remove public posts in which I talk about the reality of my experiences during the process of working with them, with comments about potential ‘reputational damage’, tips about ‘maintaining the relationship’, and concerns around making things harder, or perhaps even impossible for myself if I ever want to write, and be published, again.
Ever is a long time.
In those moments the small print becomes large: play ball, and play it our way - or your already limited chances of success will be diminished even further.
Because of this, the idea of success has been front and centre for me for the past couple of years. That third book I was working on, The Glass Cliff, was published on IWD last year, and is an in-depth look at women’s experiences in leadership positions (built out from my 2021 TED Talk), and more pointedly - their chances of being successful once they’re able to access those coveted spaces. I was writing about success, in a book that I hoped would be successful, and I had never felt less like the world applied to me.
Because I didn’t, and still don’t, have a strongly held, or well rounded internal measure of success and what it really means, I allowed other people’s ideas, and ideals, to become mine. Success, as I internalised it, was about sales figures, breaking into culture, winning awards, and getting notes from readers who had been transformed by their new found knowledge. It was about the title becoming a recognised phrase, like my first book Anti-Racist Ally done. It was, most importantly of all, about getting onto the Sunday Times bestsellers list.
None of those things happened.
Some were close. In a different week my week 1 sales could have just about scraped a top 10 chart placement. I did get messages from people who felt seen and heard in their experiences for the first time. The term The Glass Cliff went up in Google search rankings by 200%. The New York Times included it in their Shop Talk feature - a roundup of new and important terms in the business world. It got a Financial Times cover. And I cut myself a brand new fringe over the bathroom sink using a pair of nail scissors, whilst feeling like an absolute failure, and wondering where everything had gone so wrong. How I had allowed myself and my work to, despite my best efforts, once again fall short of the mark of success - and why I always felt that I was on the cusp of being successful - but never actually quite able to quite stick the dismount and make it all the way.
I can’t lie - we’re better friends than that - my fringe did look very good (you’ve got to celebrate your wins when you get them), but nothing else about that process was, or at least felt like, a success to me. I’d allowed other people's milestones to become my own, and when I didn’t hit them, I had no idea what should happen next, or how to get out of the funk I found myself very deeply in.
After several months of feeling really terrible, no matter how much I told myself that these things don’t really matter, I decided to find out if other people felt the same way. And it turned out, by and large, they did.
And so, I started a podcast about success. Not a wanky tech bro ‘here’s how you get successful at everyone else’s expense’ type of podcast about success. One that came from the starting point of curiosity - of wondering what success actually was, if anyone else had a measure of it, and if people who looked successful on the outside felt that way when they went to bed at night.
Over the course of 10 interviews, I spoke to CEOs, trailblazers, activists, influencers and authors. I spoke to people about their childhoods, their hopes and their dreams. I asked them about things that had worked, and things that hadn't. We talked about the things that they had achieved which, from the outside, looked like major wins - and I found out that for many of them, far from being the effortless results of natural charm, talent, and charisma, they were the second, third, or even tenth attempts at things that had seemed so trouble free by the time I had discovered them, fully formed in the world.
People were kind and open and honest with me, and I learned that when these wins, which were the results of months, years or even decades had finally come through, rather than feeling elated, people often felt flat. People had made it onto lists and onto some of the world’s biggest stages. They had won awards and even won tribunals and cried themselves to sleep because they, like me, had thought it would feel different in the end. They were left with the same feeling of ‘is that it?’ that I was experiencing. Many of them struggled to self identify as ‘successful’, and wondered if they were really going to be as interesting as the other guests on the lineup.
Success - or at least feeling successful - was much more elusive than I had expected. And that seemed to be a shared experience, although one that I hadn't really heard being discussed before.
Making Series 1 of Welcome to Successville was amazing for me. I have loved audio since that meant getting cassettes from the library and listening to them in bed through the headphones of my Sony Walkman (the audiophile’s equivalent to reading with a flashlight under the covers after bedtime). I had wanted to start my own podcast for a long time, but hadn’t been brave enough. I had felt too embarrassed to email people - especially such successful people - to ask for their time with nothing in return. I wasn’t sure if I had the skills to host (my natural state is more as the ‘hard to control guest’, rather than as someone with the responsibility of guiding the conversation, doing the research, and making a safe space for guests to tell me how they really feel). And even if all of that worked out, I had no idea how to make theme music, artwork, to edit, and to turn everything from a jumble of files that live on my laptop, into something that pops up on people’s podcast apps, for them to listen to, under the covers at night.
But I did it. After a lot of hard work, several tantrums, and patient help from my partner I figured it all out. I made a thing. My own thing, that I owned from end to end. Not a project that I then had to hand over to someone else to turn into a product for me, but my very own thing, on my own terms, from start to finish. And I absolutely loved it.
And then I almost called it a day. After all of that, I almost abandoned my new project after just one series. Not many people listened (of course, it’s brand new!). It was hard work, it was deeply time consuming. It was embarrassing to have that much of myself out in the open. It wasn’t an instant, effortless, overnight success.
But my conversations with people in the first series of Welcome to Successville taught me that those aren’t really the most important things. I learned that success can be keeping on going when it feels easier to give up. That making something you're proud of and putting it out into the world, on your own terms, is a success - even if no one finds it or it takes a minute to find its feet. I realised that I loved having hour-long conversations with people, putting them at ease, celebrating their wins and commiserating when our best efforts didn’t quite take us where we hoped for.
And so Welcome to Successville is back for a second series, starting today, and that feels like a success to me.
Hot Takes
Nostalgia is a toxic impulse. So, why am I so thrilled Gladiators is back?
Maybe it’s a predictable, or at least understandable, response to being alive in 2025, but it feels a lot easier to be excited about the past than the future at this moment, at least for me - and nothing really captures that feeling as well as the joy that I feel that Gladiators, a show that I loved to much as a child, is back on TV for series 2 of the remake.
If you had told me not long ago that I’d be watching, or even vaguely caring about anything on linear appointment to view TV I’d have thought you were very old, and tried to explain to you how Netflix worked. But now, somehow, the RadioTimes TV listings page is one of my most visited pages and my evenings are what time Gladiators, The Traitors, and Great British Menu are on.
I didn’t see it coming. But I kind of love it for myself.
As things continue to feel scary and out of our control, do we need to continue to be active, vigilant, and engaged with the world? Of course we do. But also, I’m learning, maybe there’s something to be said for the comforts of slipping back into something familiar. And maybe, there’s something to be said for shared experiences - of all of us sitting down to allow the same content to wash over all of us at the same time, even if we’re all doing it from the individual bubbles of our own homes.
“...normally I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn´t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can´t) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox news. At worst it leads to revisionist, extremist politics, fundamentalist terrorism, and the victory-in Appalachia in particular-of a narcissist Manhattan cartoon maybe-millionaire and cramped-up city creep who, if he ever did go up to Rocky Top in real life, would never come down again.”
― John Hodgman, Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches
Nothing is True and Everything is Possible
I’m writing this on Friday Jan 25th. I started writing it last week, I’ll finish writing and tidying it up next week. But here and now - this is where I am. I’m letting you know because at the moment, things move fast, which means that we miss potentially valuable social commentary because everything feels out of date before it’s even been printed. So, this is now - things might be different by time this comes out - but that doesn’t change the now.
Just a few days ago I got several messages from people letting me know I was following JD Vance on Instagram - the general gist of the messages being, for the most part - ‘this is some kind of accident, right?’. The messages weren’t about, or sent to, my personal Instagram, but to my more public facing account, where I talk about equality, race, justice, and community.
As I’m sure you know by now, it quickly became apparent that not long after Trump’s inauguration, many Instagram users unexpectedly found themselves following several accounts belonging to the new American presidential administration - without them having been the ones to hit follow. When I posted about it in my stories I received hundreds of messages from people who, like me, had found themselves following, and come to discover that the ‘unfollow’ and even ‘block’ buttons seemed to not be working. As the conversations carried on people speculated on the reasons that this was happening, and I said that it felt ominous to have seen the heads of the social media companies standing side by side with Trump's friends, family and administration members during the inauguration - a position that it would have been impossible to imagine they would occupy 10 years ago, and for this to be happening in very quick succession.
We talked about how, at least, they could have been discreet - didn’t they think we’d notice? Didn’t they think we’d find it weird? Didn’t they think we’d talk?
And where I’ve landed is, as we move further from facts and closer to *vibes*, there’s no need for them to be discreet any more, because Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. In a world where someone will stand at an official US Presidential inaugural event and do a Nazi gesture, multiple times - the quiet parts are being said out loud, into microphones, on a global stage. The culture has moved post truth, post shame, and I think they hope, post consequence.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that following someone is a huge deal. But to me, it feels like the tip of an iceberg. An ominous glimpse into a post truth space in which directly contradicting yourself, or even being caught outright lying, doesn’t matter. The old safeguards of being publicly shamed or losing credibility if you were caught in a lie are no longer the career ending, or even disrupting, threats that they used to be. Instead, the news cycle moves fast, things are brushed off, politicians Flood the Zone, and we all learn to navigate a post truth world.
Recommendations
As always, feel not only free, but actively encouraged to drop yours in a comment.
I’ve Been Listening To
Welcome to Successville - My very own podcast has just come back for a second season! I have been obsessed with audio as a format ever since I used to make my mom lend me her library card so I could get double the number of audio cassettes out each week, to listen to as I fell asleep. As I got older my love switched to podcasts, from the very earliest days of the format, when ‘podcast’ essentially meant Xfm show with the songs and news (mostly) cut out. Audio is probably my first love, and a strong preference over reading, which is something I should probably think more about as A Person Who Writes Books. Welcome to Successville is a one person passion project - I record and edit each episode myself, and whilst it turns out it’s so much harder and time consuming than I had ever anticipated, I absolutely love it, and the end product I get to share with you. The first guest of season 2 is the wonderful Pippa Vosper, who tells us about the hard work that goes into having an effortlessly glamorous life.
Trusty Hogs - Helen and Catherine are the main parasocial relationships in my life. I’ve almost finished working my way through their back catalogue, and then I’ll start on their Patreon.
I’ve Been Watching
Chloe Petts stand-up show - How You See Me, How You Don’t. I saw the opening night of Chloe’s show at Soho Theatre a week or so ago, and thought it was brilliant, funny, conversation about gender and visibility. She’s just released some more dates, and I recommend a trip to see her.
Ben Pechey’s weekly Queer History Lessons. Each Wednesday non-binary author, educator, and my personal best friend Ben Pechey shares a new Queer History lesson on their Instagram. They’re bite sized and brilliantly researched.
Korean reality and cooking shows - Korean reality and cooking shows - I’m not sure how they worked their way into my algorithm, I don’t thiiinnnkk it was via Squid Game because I haven’t seen the new series yet. But however it’s happened, recently a whole host of Korean shows have found their way into my life, and I couldn’t be happier. I especially recommend Culinary Class Wars, New World, and The Devil's Plan.
I’ve Been Making
Welcome to Successville Season 2 - I know you know, but I have to have it in the roundup!
Mango Creme Brulee - it’s so good. If it goes a bit scrambled eggy in texture, leave it in the fridge over night and it will sort itself out. I don’t know how, but it does!
Whilst I haven’t technically been making this, it’s been made in my flat, so I think it counts. My brilliant partner, and oil painter Lawrence Brand has been continuing his practice of painting modern, industrial scenes of London. Stunnin’. He’s just released his first batch of prints, and you should check them out.
I’ve Been Reading
The interview with Kyra Wilder, who wrote the poem that begins this newsletter John Wick is So Tired.
Finding out how people made things, how things come into the world, what gets selected and what’s left behind is endlessly fascinating for me, as someone who hates to leave anything behind - but is learning to be an editor as I work through getting all of the interviews for season 2 of Welcome to Successville ready for you. How do I take the words of the Successful Guests and decide what should stay, and what should go? I’m trying to be guided by this interview discussion between Mike Birbiglia and David Sedaris - which is not dissimilar to the Mark Twain quote
“I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.”
Brevity isn’t a skill that comes naturally to me, but for you, dear reader, I am trying to learn it.
Your Treat
I hope you appreciate my self-restraint
in not putting another link to Welcome to Successville here. I’m basically a hero.
Tim Curry talks to the puppet version of himself from Muppets Treasure Island
The original BBC Traitors - I presume this will be taken down soon for copyright reasons, but until then, enjoy this 2004 episode of a very different format of Traitors.
This song, which might have replaced Rhinestone Cowboy as my favourite horse based song. Maybe.
A clip from next week’s episode of Welcome to Successville - with brilliant and successful guest Ana Kirova - CEO of dating app Feeld. A special treat just for newsletter friends.
As always, I’ll leave you with Alex the parrot’s last words
‘You be good, see you tomorrow. I love you’
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