Let's Go, Barbie
Because I live on the Girl Internet
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.
📚 Written In The Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur. Some retellings of Pride & Prejudice follow the original story beat-for-beat - Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible is a great example of that - and others use the premise as a starting point to jump off from and write their own incredible stories. Alexandria Bellefleur’s Written In The Stars is the latter. It follows the fake-dating-turned-romance between high-strung Darcy Lowell and professional astrologer Elle Jones - with some delightful tropes ticked off along the way and fun call-outs to the original novel. I’d highly recommend this - it was great fun. I highlighted so many lines from the book, but here’s one I know you’ll enjoy. (Amazon | Bookshop affiliate links - ads).
“Quit trying to marry me off like I’m some Regency spinster in one of your favorite Austen novels.”
“Your name is Darcy.”
“And I might be a single woman in possession of a good fortune, but I’m not in want of a wife.”
💇♀️ Outline Hair. I’m pretty bad at getting regular haircuts - I go once every three or four months - but whenever I do, I’m reminded how much of a difference they make. I get my hair done by Kay at Outline Hair in Edinburgh, and it’s an all-round good experience. Unlike some of the big salons, it’s small enough not to be incredibly noisy, and it’s decorated in a way that’s just cool. As one of the many people who started learning how to look after my - it turns out - wavy/curly hair during lockdown, I was keen to start getting a curly-friendly cut, and Kay’s cuts are fantastic. Plus, they have a great online booking system set up through Fresha, which makes the whole thing easy. Check out their Instagram for an idea of the team offer.
🍟 McDonald’s McCrispy. The Chicken Legend is no more. In its place, McDonald’s new chicken burger, the McCrispy. I like a fancy meal as much as the next person, but I have to tell you this: the McCrispy is my ideal chicken burger. It’s like they took every individual element of the McChicken sandwich and upgraded it. I just like it, a lot. I don’t go to McDonald’s very often, but in the last month or two I’ve had quite a few ‘arrived in a city I don’t know very well in the evening and want a cheap and easy meal’ or ‘the canapes at this event weren’t substantial enough to soak up the Prosecco’ (la-di-dah over here, I know) type moments, which is where McDonald’s comes in handy.
A few weeks ago, I followed a chain of links from The Ladybird Purse to Diem, and from there to Rebecca Jennings’s fantastic post: The Girl Internet And The Boy Internet. I recommend reading the full essay, and subscribing to Beccacore, but here’s a flavour:
One day Luke walked into the living room and asked me who Caroline Calloway was, and I exhaled so deeply I felt life’s stalwart grasp exit my body. I simply did not have the mental, physical, or emotional energy to explain to a 30-year-old man why this particular woman had confounded and infuriated so many people, for he was not a citizen of the Girl Internet and could not possibly understand.
The Girl Internet is where all of the important things happen. It is where culture is born, where social norms are litigated, aesthetics are christened and slang terms defined. It is where unfathomably powerful fandoms collide and whose explosions have ricocheting consequences for the rest of the world. The Girl Internet is where people talk about that New York Magazine article on Fleishman or that New York Magazine article on etiquette or that New York Magazine article on nepo babies. Again, the Girl Internet is not just for women, rather it is simply one framework with which I view the vast landscape of two subsets of internet culture that rarely, if ever, bump into each other, except for on Twitter during like, the Oscars or the Super Bowl.
It’s not groundbreaking to point out that things that women and girls like are simultaneously driving the economy and much-mocked by male ‘thought-leaders’, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot. As a writer of romantic fiction (the current draft crossed the 40,000 word threshold this week!), I'm used to the idea that my work isn’t ‘high brow’.
After my debut novel (which I’m currently pitching to agents…) was longlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize a few years ago, I put it on my LinkedIn. The following week, I was on an external meeting with some investment managers for my day job (at the time, I worked in an investment office) and one of them had clearly looked me up. He asked what my novel was about.
“It’s chick-lit,” I said. “Think a millennial Bridget Jones in Edinburgh - lots of fun.”
You could have cut the silence with a knife. I got the impression that he had expected some highly literary climate fiction. Hey ho, we contain multitudes.
Last autumn, I was listening to the #AmWriting Podcast, and KJ Dell’Antonia, the host, recommended Tabitha Carvan’s book, This Is Not A Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, which is about the sheer joy and liberation that comes with joining a fandom and embracing your passions.
When you go to the extremely heteronormative Wikipedia page for the ‘thinking woman’s crumpet’, there’s a photo of one man and one man only and it’s Benedict Cumberbatch.
I put it straight on my shopping list and finally bought it after reading Jennings’s piece about the Girl Internet. What’s more Girl Internet, after all, than the Cumberbitches?
I made so many highlights on my way through the book - I’ll quote a couple, but really, you should read it for yourself, especially if you’ve ever identified as being part of a fandom, but even if you haven’t.
Women mature out of their pleasures. Men, on the other hand, get to hang on to theirs, turning them into lifelong passions or, even better, a career. Then they get to make cute jokes about how they never grew up.
Fandom is about reclaiming that play space for ‘productive selfishness’, she says, and ‘the assignment of your time according to whatever the fuck you feel like, instead of what would be most efficient, or most advantageous to others.
While I was ruminating on this, what should be released but the teaser trailer for the new Greta Gerwig Barbie? It feels like the ultimate celebration of ‘girl culture’, along with this week’s release of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, which I am dying to see.
In a twist of scheduling fate, Barbie will be released on the same day as Oppenheimer. If you haven’t heard of the latter (I hadn’t), it’s a biopic of Robert J Oppenheimer and the other developers of the atomic bomb. People are talking about it as the ultimate box office showdown, but for me, there’s no contest. Barbie all the way.
Get in, loser, we’re going to Barbieland.
Speak soon,
Lily
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