Peak Notions is Two and I wrote a Book. It's All Your Fault
I finally (finally) wrote that book on our relationship with identity labels...
I’ve been quiet here over the last couple of weeks. A strange combination of utter terror and sheer gratitude will do that to you. It’s a confusing combination. Thank you for being here at Peak Notions for any part of its two year lifespan. And thank you to every subscriber for supporting me in changing my life so I could write a book. This week’s news — I wrote the book. It’s finally happening and I wanted to share some details with you first — it truly wouldn’t exist without you.
Some of Our Parts, out September 19th
Almost ten months ago, I threw a stick of dynamite into the life I had spent a decade creating. I had been working as a freelance journalist and a beauty editor, and had moved from Dublin to London six years before. I did this while balancing my work at home in Ireland and finishing my doctorate. In London, as in Dublin, I made excellent friends, had wonderful colleagues, and felt absolutely and utterly wrong, as though I couldn’t quite reconcile the work I was doing with what I actually wanted to be doing.
Sometimes, your life takes what can seem like a direction of its own and gathers a momentum that carries you away from yourself. This wasn’t the case with me, though it might be comforting to pretend. I made choices that took me to the upper echelons of a career in beauty journalism because I loved beauty, was good at the work, dedicated myself to it and figured out how to create opportunities which gave me a comfortable life that felt difficult to leave behind. I can’t even say that the pandemic was my epiphany, though that lie would be comforting too. Before the world ever stopped, I complained endlessly to family and close friends that I had fallen out of love with my life.
The day my husband told me, after five years of sympathetically listening to me gripe, that I didn’t want to change my life because actions reflect what a person truly values, I couldn’t quite tell which impulse was greater — the urge to thank him or to find a nearby pool and push him into it fully clothed. He was right. I had been having my cake and eating it by declaring an intention to change while doing absolutely nothing about it.
To change direction, I would need to make frightening choices that would take me away from almost everything I had created for myself. I would need to move away from what was familiar and take a truly anxiety-inducing financial hit. I would need to shut my mouth and write the book I had sworn, all those years, that I would write.
A frightening choice presented itself and almost ten months ago, I moved to Australia. I’d never visited, didn’t know anyone here and to be frank I am not one of those Irish people who fetishises Australian culture or ever carried a deep longing to live here. I wear SPF50 in Dublin in December. Christmas in summer is impossible to compute. Last week I saw a kangaroo behind IKEA. It’s all quite a lot. But I suddenly had an opportunity to move over seventeen thousand kilometres from home, where the financial demands of living and commuting in London would lessen, and where I would have nothing to do but write exactly what I wanted to write. It was a big red eject button from the life I had been too afraid to leave behind, and I pushed it. With a considerable amount of terror, but still.
I said I would move to Australia to focus on writing. That meant my work here on Substack, and that meant writing those two books I had been wittering on about for years. With the high time preferences and constant financial stress of freelance life, I’d claimed I could never find the time, the energy or the mental space to focus on a book. I was too distracted, too insecure and too fretful.
I’m celebrating the second anniversary of Peak Notions on Substack this week and, for me, that is a major achievement. There are bigger and more established platforms here. There are more popular writers and as Substack becomes more mainstream (a sure sign that it is changing our media landscape for the better), it can feel more challenging to grow. And yet, I remind myself what I wanted to achieve when I stumbled in here two years ago as a chronically overworked freelancer with an email list containing fewer than four hundred names. At that time, I also carried the sense from many legacy media colleagues that I was ‘going over’ to disappear into a niche, ‘alternative’ website that they considered a form of ‘career suicide’. Two of the people who told me this are on Substack themselves now (*waves* - I truly do hope your experience here is as positive as mine has been).
What I wanted was to write what was meaningful to me for anyone who wanted to read it, in the hope that enough people would support my work financially to keep me fed and out of serious financial strain which, despite the romantic stories of down-and-out writers, is not great creative fodder unless it has a finishing point. Two years later, I have everything I longed for as well as several things I never anticipated (like being a part of Substack’s Substack Grow series and having work I publish here paid for by legacy editors who want to republish it). Two years ago, I would have considered all of that impossible.
Hopefully, if things continue as they’ve been going, by the end of this year there will be ten thousand people electing to read Peak Notions every week. Not because they’re subscribed to a newspaper or magazine I work for. Not because they happened to pick up a magazine I wrote an article for at the dentist’s office. Because they saw something they valued here, and in a world of limitless choice, decided to subscribe to Peak Notions. Ten thousand. It’s a gigantic, and a tiny number. An astonishing number. More than enough to give a writer who still kind of feels like they just landed in Australia a community to feel part of.
Me, writing the book
I came here — both to Australia and to Substack — to write. To live a better, slower, more considered life. To eke out the space, both financial and intellectual, to write two books. So I’m proud to tell you that — thanks to the space and support you have given me — I have written that first book. It’s called Some of Our Parts: Why We Are More Than the Labels We Live By. It will be released on September 19th and if you’d like to support it, the best possible way to help the book get out into the world is pre-ordering it. Publishers and retailers who see that there is substantial interest in a book early on through preorders will give more time, energy and resources to that title. They’ll work harder to spread awareness of it and give it their focus. Also, if you can’t preorder the book but would like to support it, requesting it from your local library won’t cost you anything and makes a big difference!
You can preorder Some of Our Parts here to receive a copy when it comes out on September 19th
When I look back over my writing here at Peak Notions, and much of my writing in media over the last decade, it hinges around one primary subject: identity. Figuring out who and what the hell we are in a world that is always so very eager to tell us. More specifically, I’ve been interested in the labels we carry — the ones that are tacked onto us without our consent as well as the ones we embrace or try on for a while and then set down when we change, as we all should. I shared this column entitled ‘The Label Trap’ back in 2022. Some of the themes which appear in the book can be found there as seedling ideas. In a world obsessed by categorisation and group membership, I spend a lot of time thinking about where the individual ends and the group begins, and about how much of any of us can be captured and communicated by the labels we carry.
While labels always link us to a group, they’re also deeply personal, so Some of Our Parts is in part a memoir. In it, I look through the labels I’ve carried throughout my life, including a new one that landed on me about a year ago, and I consider what they mean in light of the culture we live in. I consider the political, national, mental health, class and other labels that we carry, and I go looking for who we are both in relation to and beyond them.
If I’ve been a little quieter than usual lately, this is why. I’ve been hunkering down in Australia, fretting about this book and the next one, which is something entirely different, and which is now underway. I’ve also been feeling slightly emptied-out by the writing process. It’s certainly the most personal thing I’ve ever written and it looks at some aspects of my own life and labels with a level of honesty that really is dreadfully embarrassing. But then, what’s the point in writing about your own life if the account you share is flattering?
If you’re a Peak Notions subscriber, then Some of Our Parts is your creation as well as mine. You have genuinely created a market for it through engaging with my work here on Substack. You have made me a writer that a publisher decided to take a chance on. Your engagement and comments, our weekly paid subscriber chat and our Peak Notions Book Club meetings have helped distill my thoughts on the subject of identity and helped me consider my own relationship to labels as well as the wider cultural conversation.
It’s been two years of Peak Notions here on Substack and just now, it feels like there’s a lot to show for it. Selfishly, for me, that decision to throw dynamite into my life is feeling a lot like one of the best I’ve ever made. Here we have a growing community of warm, curious, clever people with a sense of humour that could blast barnacles off the hull of a ship, and now, we have a book. In true Peak Notions fashion, it’s a book about why we are — all of us, and always — more than our component parts.
I’ll have more news and details on Some of Our Parts in the coming weeks, and I’ll be coming home to Dublin — and also to London — in September when the book is published (so if we’re in-real-life friends, expect me on your doorstep with a big suitcase). For now, I wanted to share the news that it’s coming here first, and to thank you for helping me to create the freedom to write it. You’ve changed my life and this book is incontrovertible evidence of that.
Congrats Laura...always great to be able celebrate the success of others
"To change direction, I would need to make frightening choices that would take me away from almost everything I had created for myself."
This sentence resonated. Sometimes starting over somewhere else, leaving behind the cold comfort of miserable familiarity, is the only thing to do. On a smaller scale, I did something similar last year, walking away from something I'd spent 20 years building because the current senior management where I worked weren't interested. I work somewhere better now. It's not as high profile, but it connects better with who I am and provides a connection with a real community of people.
All power to you, Laura. I'm looking forward to reading the new book.