Lessons from Grandmere
Because a princess never schlumps
Pull Up A Chair is a weekly newsletter containing all the things I’d like to be chatting about if we could hang out together in real life.
📕 Nora Goes Off Script by Annabel Monaghan. Once again, I waited months to read the book that everyone on my Twitter and Instagram feeds has been raving about… and of course I loved it. The premise: a writer of Hallmark-esque romantic films just can’t find her love for love stories after her husband has walked out on her and their two young kids. So far, so Beach Read. So instead, she’s written a film all about their breakup, and Hollywood heart-throb Leo Vance is living in her garden to film it. Of course, shenanigans ensue, along with a beautiful love story. It is a great example of a book which is steamy without ever once being explicitly detailed, and the prose is beautiful. “We are in the middle of a days-long conversation that winds around the most inconsequential and most monumental details of our lives,” says the protagonist at one stage; followed up swiftly with the funny insight, “My desire to put on an apron and roast this man a chicken is profound. I don’t even own an apron. I just want him to be close enough to me that I can hand him a plate with chicken on it.” (Affiliate links to Bookshop.org and Amazon - ad).
🔮 Modern Witch tarot deck. There is a school of thought that says you shouldn’t buy yourself your first tarot deck, but this deck jumped out at me at the lovely Rare Birds bookshop last Spring and I knew it had to be (I had had tarot on the mind since reading Caroline O’Donoghue’s fantastic All Our Hidden Gifts). The art is consciously inclusive, with people of all races, genders, sizes, and abilities represented among the deck. It’s easy to be sceptical about tarot, but at the most basic I see the cards as a prompt for thought; what’s going on in my brain that I need a little nudge to think deeply about? I did a simple reading earlier this week, and found the cards incredibly insightful about something that I was already considering in my journal. (More on that as it develops…)
🍴Sausage and potato roast with arugula (rocket). As always, I continue to be a Smitten Kitchen fan girl. I had a friend round last night for dinner and cocktails, and this was the perfect meal. A little bit of veg prep, and then shove in the oven for long enough to make a round of drinks. Add the sausages (I used Heck’s 97% pork, gluten-free, sausages, which due to the low fat content didn’t brown particularly well, but they were delicious), then have a good chat for half an hour or so. And then an entire bag of lovely peppery rocket. All the micronutrients!
Full disclosure: I started this week without any idea what I was going to write about. And then I read last weekend’s Consume-Her Reports, a Substack newsletter I highly recommend for honest and open reviews of what Emily has read/ watched/ bought and whether it’s worth your time (she’s taking March, off but do sign up ready for her return!).
She links to a wonderful profile of Meg Cabot in that newsletter, and that set me off on a trail of memories and reflections. Like many schools, my primary school had a visiting book fair every year; ours was timed to coincide with parents’ evening. My brother and I could browse for books while our parents spoke to our teachers, and then we’d get a book or two each to take home. The year I turned ten, I ignored all the fiction on offer in favour of a small paperback, maybe 4 inches by 5 in dimensions: The Princess Diaries Guide To Life (Ad - Amazon affiliate link). A companion to the series, designed to make the most of the audience who had discovered Mia, Lilly, Michael and the gang thanks to the 2001 Disney film, it was full of advice, tips, and wisdom for life. I am still learning from the lessons in this book, almost 20 years after I got my copy. It portrayed a future in which I would be an independent woman who, although not a princess, could stand to live my life according to the lessons that Mia learns in her own journey.
A potted sample of the things I still remember (and to clarify, I don’t still have a copy of the book in my possession):
A Principessa’s hair can be straight. A Principessa’s hair can be curly. But most importantly, a Principessa’s hair should never take her more than 15 minutes to style in the morning. Growing up into a world in which a going-over with GHDs was almost essential, I had no idea how important this mantra would be. In one go, it encapsulates for me why Meg Cabot and her work was so important as I grew up: her message was that you could be your best, just as you were. It’s not something that was necessarily reflected in the film, where Mia is primped and preened to within an inch of her life, but in the books, the fact that she was a little bit messy, and wore combat boots, and would only wriggle into ‘pantyhose’ just before meeting her grandmother for princess lessons, carried right through the series.
At a crowded dinner table, make your hands into a ‘b’ and a ‘d’ - hey presto, you’ve remembered which side plate and which drinking glasses are yours. (Diagram here, if you’re struggling to visualise this) This in particular is a tip I’ve shared with countless friends, and every one of them has thought it was genius (that, and I have very patient friends!)
If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then the eyebrows are the curtains to the windows of the soul, and who wants their soul looking like they dressed it at JC Penney’s? I didn’t need to have heard of JC Penney’s to get the message meant here, in another of the beauty tips that purported to come from Carlo: look after your eyebrows.
And, of course, a princess always stands up straight and sits in such a way that you can’t look up her skirt. I just looked down at my legs, and even though I’m in jeans and a sweatshirt with wet hair in Pret, I’m sitting with my knees together and my legs crossed at the ankle, just like Grandmere taught me. (Good thing too, I just bumped into someone I haven’t seen from university - it’s a small world!)
Allure magazine has a fun roundup of beauty lessons we learnt from Princess Diaries, if this has awakened your nostalgia too. I am planning a trip to New York City, Boston, and the Hudson Valley, for next Spring, and I will absolutely be working my way through the locations mentioned in this summary of the New York places in the book series. Along with the idea of New York as a place where glamorous fun things could happen (was Princess Mia the Carrie Bradshaw for my generation?), Meg Cabot’s books taught me other vocabulary for things I’d never have encountered: baked ziti, public-access TV, and self-actualisation for instance.
Let me tell you though, it’s pretty hard to imagine yourself into the main character role when the best friend has the same name (Mia’s best friend is named Lilly Moscovitz, and although her first name was clearly spelt incorrectly, it’s close enough, and our surnames have some of the same letters too). So when I found Meg Cabot’s other teen novels, we were off to the races! There was Avalon High (2008), which introduced me to showchoir just before Glee started airing, and the fantastic duology All-American Girl (2008) and its sequel All-American Girl: Ready or Not (2009). (Ad - all book links in this paragraph are Amazon affiliate links). Through the protagonist Sam Madison and her relationship with the President’s son (was this a gateway drug for Red, White & Royal Blue??), I learnt about the ‘religious right’ in the US and their propensity to prevent young women having full control of their bodies, the existence of the board game Parcheesi, and the fact that taking a creative hobby (in Sam’s case, art) seriously enough to fit your life around it was a completely valid choice.
What’s more, the central conflict of the second book is about whether Sam wants to have sex with her boyfriend, the First Son. Her older sister discusses with her, frankly and more openly than in any Sex Ed class, the pros and cons of the different forms of contraception available, and then advises her to find her own pleasure with the assistance of running water from the bathtub ‘faucet’ (another Americanism I learnt from Cabot’s books). I can’t remember whether Samantha and David do, in the end, take their relationship to the next level in the book, but I remember feeling reassured that teenagers having real discussions and debates about this stuff was normal.
It’s because of this frankness that Cabot’s books are being taken off shelves in libraries and schools around the US, especially in her home state of Florida. Luckily, they’ve been in print so long, with so many millions of copies printed, that they will still be floating around second-hand regardless of what legislators try to do, but the fight against book-banners will continue for as long as it needs to.
In lighter news, Princess Diaries 3 is confirmed to be on the way! So far, that’s all we know about the film. What’s more, over the last few years, Cabot has been working on the ‘Little Bridge Island’ series of adult romances, set on the Florida Keys. They’re fantastic - and no, they’re nothing to do with the legal system, which is how I misinterpreted the titles! In order: No Judgments (2019), No Offense (2020), No Words (2021). (Ad - affiliate links to bookshop.org)
Speak soon,
Lily
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This is so nice! Thanks so much for reading and sharing my newsletter. Loved reading your reflections on Meg Cabot. Her books were truly fundamental in my young adulthood. I will have to read her new ones!