The Pleasure Of... Moving On

Time for a change of (digital) scene

Dear readers,

Perhaps the pleasure was always the problem?

While I still believe deeply in the subversive power of pursuing our pleasure, especially as women, and especially in the face of so many assaults on our bodies and liberties, it has felt harder and harder, over the years, to keep this notion front of mind. To lead with it in this newsletter, without caveats or asterisks or parentheticals (three of my many, many writerly tics*)

*as you (of course) know.

So, I’m shaking it up. Leaving Substack in favor of Ghost, a pleasantly mysterious alternative that operates more like a tool than an engine of distraction. A tool I don’t fully understand, to be sure - but I am increasingly convinced that unthinking ease of use, that frictionlessness that tech businesses love to promote, is the entire problem with all of this online whatnot-tery. Perhaps it should be a little harder and a little slower to put our thoughts out into the world. Or perhaps I simply don’t want to understand Chats and Lives and Notes and Followers and this whole ecosystem. Or to look at so much orange. Whatever it is - I still read many, many wonderful writers on here, so I’ll be around. But not here here.

And so, to that end, THE PLEASURE OF… is becoming LIFE + WORK.

This new name, and frame, speaks to my professional interest in literary biography, often shorthanded as life and work, and to my personal quest to figure out how those supposedly separate spheres clash, combine, and feed each other, both historically and in our lives today. Now that I am at work on a book about women in Paris, and my daily life is to be a woman in Paris, this has the added bonus, I hope, of being fun to read about. So, here we go.

If you are currently subscribed, I’ll bring you along with me to the new site. If you aren’t, I hope you’ll join us!