I went to a gig this week. In the horrible new sense of the word “went”, but still.

I watched The Divine Comedy play an hour’s set at the Barbican in London via my slightly greasy laptop screen. I sat in bed drinking a cooling cup of tea. I cried twice.

I bought the ticket for the livestream only the day before; I had known about it for a while but didn’t like the idea of watching something online that, in another timeline, I would have been experiencing in person. The band was going to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary this year by playing several albums live in their entirety and I was going to be there.

I changed my tune on livestreams when at the start of this week the part of the UK where I live was placed in the highest level of lockdown restrictions permitted under a newly introduced tiered system. I entered a rapid and almost comically accurate emotional rundown of those stages of grief, you know:

Shock — This isn’t really happening, is it? They can’t take their own incompetence out on the north west and also not give people proper compensation for the businesses they now can’t run?

Denial — But I can still go away to Yorkshire for the weekend, right? The travel ban doesn’t apply to us, a household that has not broken any rules up to now? (Spoiler, it does, and we will not be visiting our dog’s extended family — and their humans — as planned.)

Guilt — So many others have this so much worse. I can work from home and I have a house with multiple rooms and a yard. It’s ridiculous and selfish of me to even feel sad about this.

Anger — Well, obviously, I’m furious about everything. All the time. I’m surprised I have any molars left.

Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance — I can only assume that these are still to come.

All of which is to say: watching Neil Hannon sing about A Lady of a Certain Age suddenly seemed like a very acceptable distraction. And so it was. I just wasn’t prepared for the feelings that would come with it.

I decided I would write about this gig today because of those feelings, but now that doesn’t feel right. I wrote a whole book that is at least partially a memoir without being at all troubled about what to put in and what to leave out, because the right stories just appeared in my head as I reached the parts where they slotted in.

The sensation that something isn’t to be written about or shared is a relatively new one for me. The new writing project I’m working on will involve a lot of more of this issue and I’m still gearing up for it. Jami Attenberg wrote recently about how to write about other people in a memoir and her advice is always worth taking, I think.

The songs of The Divine Comedy contain my memories, whatever else they may be about. There’s one that is about the novel I tried and failed to write when I was 17, for instance, and another that’s about walking to school while arguing about music theory. When the band played “Tonight We Fly” — the number that has ended nearly all of The Divine Comedy gigs I’ve ever been to — I cried again because my friend Dan used to complain all the time when we were 17 about how much he hated its galloping drum beat. Oh, and the tears were a bit because of the way that song ends on a hopeful note — “this life is the best we’ve ever had…”.

The music that worms its way inside you during your formative years stays there forever, tangled up with what makes you yourself. This isn’t a particularly original thought, but I don’t think I really knew what it means until I watched this performance.

When I was a child I once walked into the sitting room on Christmas Day to find my dad listening to a Cat Stevens record and quietly weeping because he missed the city thousands of miles away where he had grown up but would never live again. Now I know that the back catalogue of The Divine Comedy is to me what that album is to him, and someday an inquisitive young person will probably want to know why the silly song about the bus makes me so sad.

Twelve things I’m reading, watching and listening to:

• Are You Easily Distracted? Well, duh.
• All the biographies to read.
• I loved this food diary so much because the writer actually eats.
• What heathcare workers around the world keep on their phones.
• Obviously I don’t do these dances but I love watching them.
• Sohla! Can’t get enough of her cooking.
• Getting ready for this Christmas.
• I hate this stuff yet watch it compulsively, help.
• I’m very into this historical and nautical podcast drama.
• Bless Simon Armitage and his owl.
• Give us all the money.
• I think I might get into quilting.

If you enjoy the podcasts I recommend in this newsletter, consider taking out a subscription to The Listener, the daily podcast recommendation newsletter I write. I promise, it’s really good, and it’s a great way to show your support of my work.

Apart from that, there are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes on Twitter and Instagram. My book is now out in paperback, find the links to purchase a copy here.

Until next time,

Caroline

I am not writing a novel. I feel like the wave of “lockdown is the perfect time to realise your grand creative vision!!” takes has crested now, but for the avoidance of doubt: I am barely able to concentrate for long enough spans to do the writing I’m already contracted to do. Taking on extra, unpaid, speculative work right now feels completely out of reach.

I am doing a lot of crochet. I am not good at crochet, nor do I particularly need a large and lumpy blanket made out of the wool I found in a basket I got from a friend’s “take our stuff, we’re leaving town” party four years ago. But doing something with your hands while you watch television is reassuring, and seeing it grow by a few squares every evening is pleasing. Maybe I’ll just unravel it all and start again when it gets too unwieldy.

I am not cleaning any more than I usually do. I’m excluding the necessary disinfection of stuff acquired from The Outside in this, of course, but I haven’t suddenly become someone who wants to vacuum every day or organise the kitchen junk drawer. I probably never will.

I am wearing this skirt a lot. I recommend something similar if you can get hold of it: long, voluminous, soft and with deep pockets, it’s really the perfect quarantine garment. It swishes as you walk in a pleasing fashion, it’s loose and comfortable for all the time spent sitting down, it’s smart enough for if you stand up during a video call, and it also makes me feel slightly like I might leave the house to join an early twentieth century suffragette march any time.

I am not looking at Twitter very much. I’m probably an ambient part of the reason why it’s not a very nice platform to be on anymore, because I just log in when I have something to promote or a snarky comment I want to make, hit send and then log out again. It’s very antisocial of me, but in my defence every time I do any scrolling at all in the first five seconds I see about eight tweets that are inaccurate or enraging or both and I just can’t be doing with that.

I am making sourdough. I have been doing that fairly regularly since 2018 — Simon the starter has not been killed off my by appalling neglect yet — and I’m not terrible at it. The shortage of flour is starting to make me feel anxious, though. What am I going to feed Simon if I can’t get any more?? These are the thoughts I spend a lot of time on these days.

I am not catching up on great television boxsets I missed the first time round. I have scrolled through a lot of lists suggesting that I should watch The Sopranos from the start or reappraise Mad Men or something, and all I can think while I do this is: where would I find the time? Like most people lucky enough to be able to work from home, my husband and I are finding that everything about our jobs is more time consuming during quarantine. We’ve been managing to squeeze in one or two 30 minute episodes of Yes, Minister a night while we eat dinner, and that’s it.

I am rereading Wolf Hall. Two aspects have struck me especially hard this time round. Firstly, Thomas Cromwell is really an extremely productive person and I did not appreciate this enough the first time. How does he run a country, coddle a king, reform a church, bring up a family and grow a personal fortune at the same time, all without access to much more than quills, parchment and messengers? I’m sure there’s an academic monograph I could read about this. Secondly, Thomas More is the absolute worst and I don’t know what Erasmus ever saw in him.

I am not maintaining a strict routine. I get up early or late depending on what I have on, we eat meals at variable yet convenient times, I try and do yoga most days but don’t berate myself if I can’t manage it. The one thing I am doing without fail is the shoulder exercises my physiotherapist gave me to correct my terrible posture when I saw him on what I think of as The Last Friday. Pleasingly, that was Friday 13 March — the last time I left the peninsula we live on and the last time I had non virtual contact with someone who wasn’t my husband, my dog, or a delivery person. Doing the stretches feels like a small pledge toward a possible future, a superstitious ritual that will mean we can one day travel to appointments for reasons as frivolous as slouching again.

I am mostly cheerful. I have moments where I feel glum or angry, but it mostly goes away when I remember why I’m trapped in the house and how I can’t control when I get to leave anyway. Failing that, I eat something delicious and look out the window at the oak tree opposite our house for a while. That usually does it.

You can still find me working in all my usual places on the internet. I do daily podcast recommendations at The Listener, I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast about detective fiction called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes (but not often) on Twitter. My book, The Way to the Sea, came out in paperback on 5 March. If you’d like to read it you can get a copy here or through your nearest independent bookshop that is doing mail orders.

What is my job? This is something I’ve been asking myself a lot recently. I have work enough to fill my days and the last year has been my most positive to date in purely financial terms. But when asked by a friendly, curious stranger what I do, I get stuck. I usually mumble something about podcasts and use that as a conversational escape route into a new subject — people either want to know what a podcast is, or they want recommendations of new ones to listen to — and thus I avoid answering the question properly.

It’s not a real problem, this lingering lack of definition, especially compared to everything else happening in the world. It doesn’t stop me sending in invoices or buying food. I feel awkward even articulating this, because 2019 has been a good year for me. My first book came out and received good reviews. My podcast won an award. I get asked to be on Radio 4 more regularly now.

Yet it has been niggling away at me, the feeling growing stronger in the months after the book was published. I kept having to provide my bio for events I was doing, and every time I proofread what I had written before I sent it I thought: this doesn’t make any sense. In these short summations of myself for festivals and museums I instinctively don’t include any reference to most of the work that pays my bills (that is, writing about podcasts for an industry focused newsletter and editing audio). If I only did the stuff listed — book reviewing, freelance journalism, occasional broadcasting — I would be going hungry. But my other work just doesn’t seem literary enough to mention.

A very wise friend of mine who I consulted before leaving my magazine staff job in 2017 to go freelance warned me about this. When you have a full time position at a publication people have heard of, she said, it’s so easy to explain what you do that you don’t even think about it. But once you become self-employed and put together the work you want to do from lots of different disciplines and outlets, you have to come up with your own job title. In one way it’s incredibly freeing, but it can also feel like a chunk is missing from your sense of identity. If you’re someone who gives work an important place in your life (and I am, to a fault) not being able to easily say what you are can feel like you’ve failed.

For the first two years of my freelance existence, I think I was so busy writing a book and learning how to earn money that I had no time to think about what I might call myself if anyone were to ask. Now, things have slowed down a bit, in a good way, meaning that there’s suddenly time for these doubts to float to the surface.

There are plenty of books, podcasts and other media out there aimed at freelancers. A lot of it puts a positive spin on my question. Choice is freedom! Embrace the many hyphens in your job title! I don’t begrudge any of these things their cheeriness. Self-employment is at its highest since records began; it’s a label that now applies to nearly 5 million people in the UK. There’s no need to treat it like some shameful fallback option. It’s right that commentators are pushing towards a new and positive way of thinking about work.

Exploring this topic further made me realise that I was asking myself the wrong question. When I say “what is my job?” I think what I really mean is “am I a writer?”. That’s a title with fluid and shifting boundaries. Is it a label a person can choose, or does it have to be awarded externally? In a general sense, I really don’t think there should be any objective criteria for saying that you are one; deciding what is and isn’t “writing” feels like an impending horror show of elitism and tone policing. And yet I still feel like it’s not something I can say about myself.

I’ve got my own internal idea of who a writer is, which I’m constantly measuring myself against. A writer is someone who makes their living from publishing books that are critically acclaimed and/or bestselling as well as clever articles that a lot of people read. The writer publicly performs the role of “writer”, whether that’s by deliberate reclusiveness or by publicly sharing iterative details of their work online.

For this reason, this article about “the journalist as influencer” and the image management now necessary to be considered a successful writer in the age of the internet really spoke to me. I realised just how many of my own assumptions come from years of consuming the carefully curated writerly personas of people who are better than me at social media.

“One must have a persona on the persona-based internet, but the persona must be honest, or at least maintain the appearance of honesty,” the author of the article, Allegra Hobbs, says. She admits that she lacks the “effortless knack at existing online” that makes this possible; I do too. I’m not temperamentally suited to condensing anecdotes about my writing work into clever gobbets for other people to enjoy. I have far too much self doubt for that.

Later in that piece, Hobbs points out how gendered this feeling is, and how the question mark never seems to appear after the word writer when it’s being applied to a man. “The question of how to optimally present oneself online feels distinctly feminine, and this feels unfair even as the skill is somewhat advantageous, but mostly it feels inevitable. We are socialized to be highly attuned to making ourselves palatable for an audience, to be pleasing to the eye and the ear,” she says.

This made me think of all the years I spent as an editor, making other people’s work sing and ensuring that it got the widest possible readership online. During that time, I saw a lot of confident, mostly young, men sail straight past me and into the officially-sanctioned role of writer. Remembering that now, I don’t think they were worrying about whether or not to post a screenshot of their work in progress on Instagram.

Hobbs concludes by pointing out that it’s delusional to think that one can opt out of this structure. The self-appointed gurus who advocate leaving social media and swapping your laptop for a typewriter don’t exist in the same reality as me. I can no more escape the writing on the internet publicity machine than I can the more material inequalities that come with being a woman. Writing is not just writing anymore, if it ever was. The way writers are remunerated is set up to reward those who are good at inhabiting the role of writer as well as at doing the work.

Research repeatedly shows that that the average author in the UK makes less than the minimum wage from their books. Unless you have a private income (and let’s not ignore the fact that some of the extremely self confident writers out there do) then doing other work, whether it’s the kind of more commercial writing and editing that I do, or something completely different, is a necessity. Yet author bios and social media profiles suggest otherwise; it’s a rare person who advertises that they are an author but also a receptionist, or a teacher, or a barista.

Whenever I do see a Twitter bio that encompasses the full range of what that person does for a living, my heart lifts a little. I love reading about authors from the past who were open about their other jobs, like Dorothy L. Sayers with her decade as an advertising executive, or Anthony Trollope at the Post Office. Knowing this feels like a small way of resisting the fantasy construct of literary writing as a lucrative profession.

This week, I’ve written about 5,000 words in exchange for money, but the proposal for a new book that I’m supposed to be working on has remained untouched. That’s why I’m sending this to you now, because these corrosive questions have started to get in the way of me exploring what I might do next.

I still don’t know if I’ll ever say “yes, I am a writer” when someone asks what I do, but I can at least get better at feeling comfortable in the cracks in between all the different things I might be.

I’m well aware that this kind of self regarding essay is not what you subscribed to this newsletter for. Therefore, I won’t mind (much) if you make use of the unsubscribe option at the bottom of this email.

To explain what’s happened: I stopped doing the original No Complaints earlier this year because that kind of curation no longer fit easily into the pattern of my days. When I was an editor at a magazine, I read the internet voraciously and found plenty of choice nuggets to send to you. These days I do more writing and listening than I do editing, and it became a struggle to fill that template. What had been a fun thing to send out for free became a worry and a chore.

Now that I’m exploring a different path, I want to do more writing and less linking in this newsletter. I really enjoy the way people like Anne Helen Peterson, Ann Friedman, Helen Lewis and others do their emails, and I’m going to try moving more in that direction myself.

My first book was partially a memoir, but as one reviewer pointed out it was “intriguingly light on [my] own biography”. What I’m considering writing next will be more straightforwardly about me, and I think I need to practise putting myself on the page in order to get better at it.

So, in the future you can expect some chunky pars of my thoughts at the top and then some links down below. I hope you find at least some part of this useful or enjoyable.

Things to read and listen to:

—On Iceland, authenticity and “overtourism”.

—How to only eat the good fruit.

—Legacy wealth in the African-American community.

—The joy of Janet Ahlberg.

—What happened with the Booker Prize.

—Taylor at the tiny desk.

—This audio essay about line dancing.

—Is there such a thing as a “feminist” private members’ club?

There are a few other places on the internet where you can find me: I do daily podcast recommendations at The Listener, I write weekly podcast industry reports for Hot Pod, I make a fortnightly podcast called Shedunnit and I’m sometimes on Twitter.