At his book launch for the brilliant Leading Man a few weeks ago, the equally brilliant
included a small pep talk for fellow writers in his (obviously, brilliant) speech.He explained that he used to send advance copies of his books out to fellow authors with squirmily self-deprecating notes that read something like “Here’s my silly book, sorry, if you don’t want to read it then it would make a good doorstop?”
I squirmed, because this is exactly what I do, when I’m brave enough to do the agonising DM slide at all. The downplaying, the apology, the little joke about how the book is probably terrible, no pressure haha, tick tick tick. It has been my habit, when kind people message to tell me that they or their mum or their hairdresser is reading my book, to reply with a cheerful “Sorry if it’s shit!”.
But, Justin went on, he isn’t doing that anymore. Because how can we expect someone to want to read something when we deliver it wrapped in snivelly self-doubt? Life is short, people’s TBR piles are often towering, and they’re going to pick up the books that they feel most excited about spending time with, not the ones they feel obliged to plough through as an act of charity.
It’s a cruel truth that publishing success these days – in cold, hard numerical terms, anyway – depends a lot on hype, and only a handful of books get most of the hype while the rest get very little. So it behooves us authors to be our own hype men. Justin ended his speech by announcing that Leading Man was really good and we should read it, which was not only true (it is and you should!) but truly inspiring for the rest of us. The authors, but also anyone with a tendency to laugh off their own potential.
I vowed then that when my time rolled round, I’d take a leaf out of his book and get better at tooting my own trumpet; banging my own drum. (Some think it’s noise – I think it’s pretty.) I decided to be a one-woman band for my own creative efforts, even if I’m squirming so wildly that I might crick a neck muscle. Even if I’m still not entirely confident I know what ‘behooves’ means.
Honestly, it’s rare that I respond well to motivational speaking. As a sufferer of what can only be described as chronic hereditary Britishness, I’ve been mostly impervious to the wave of hashtag inspiration that has rolled across culture and the discourse in recent years, like a warm front coming in from the Atlantic. Deep down, I think I still believe self-confidence to be a sin punishable by trips and falls and finding spinach in your teeth hours later. Too much sincerity makes my skin itch. And as you’ll see from the book extract I’m sharing below, I still find the whole industry of hashtag–empowerment to be at best ripe for satire, at worst a criminal con.
But that doesn’t mean some of it can’t still be useful. It doesn’t mean a tote bag slogan can’t genuinely stir our soul. And when you’ve written a book about a rampant people-pleaser who learns to have (some) strength in her own convictions, it’s inevitable a few things will rub off.
So I’m out there now, girding my loins, cranking the handle on the hype machine and retweeting praise like no one is watching. Because if I’m not prepared to drive my own bandwagon, then why should anyone else hop on?
All of which is to say… Probably Nothing is OUT TODAY. It’s really good and I think you should read it.
Toot toot!
x
Some context: Bryony has unfortunately signed up to a multi-level marketing scheme, ‘Gel Lyfe’, to please her dead date’s grieving sister. We meet them here about mid-way through the book, at the ‘Let’s Go Gels! Sell Your Way To Success Workshop’, in a business hotel off an A-road in Barking.
One weird trick
At that moment the lights dimmed and a hush descended over the Duchess Lounge. Lizzo’s ‘Good as Hell’ began playing over the speakers and Annie grabbed her arm with a squeak of anticipation. It looked like they were staying.
One of the green t-shirted acolytes tried to get a rhythmic clap going in time to the music, but before this gathered any momentum Tamara Mucklethwaite appeared, waving at the crowd like a congresswoman. She was wearing a pink velvet trouser suit, expensively cut, and platform heels that clonked audibly on the stage.
‘Who here wants to be her own boss?’ she cooed into the mic.
There were some whoops, a few polite cheers. Tamara cupped a hand behind her ear.
‘Not good enough! I said WHO HERE WANTS TO BE HER OWN BOSS?’
A roar erupted through the room.
Bryony had very little interest in being her own boss. Having line-managed a few junior employees during her time and finding the whole exercise intimidating and tedious in equal measure, she was under no illusion that managing herself would be any better. It would probably be worse. She couldn’t motivate herself to wash her bedsheets most weeks, what would make her think she could run a business? Running a business looked like far too much stress for not enough money, and besides, she was allergic to hustle. Needy ‘creators’ bemoaning the injustice of the Instagram algorithm. Ew.
And yet, it was hard to deny there was part of her that liked the idea of a secret back passage to success. This wasn’t specific to her but rather a generational weakness, the result of having grown up with the unshakeable belief that someone, somewhere, really was making a thousand dollars a day by posting links on Google.
Bryony was part of the ‘one weird trick’ generation, who graduated into an economic landscape so unrecognizable from the lush pastures their parents had enjoyed that it seemed only logical to look for trapdoors and loopholes. A world in which she could have a good education, a good degree and a ‘good’ job without even the faintest hope of buying a flat anywhere south of Sunderland seemed at times less rational than the idea that she might become a millionaire by selling bacteria on the internet. It was a difficulty setting so hard that there had to be, by rights, a cheat code.
Tamara kicked things off by inviting the attendees to raise a hand and share their ‘most intense’ dreams.
Bryony had a recurring nightmare in which she looked down halfway through her wedding vows to realize she was still wearing a hair bobble around her wrist. The husbands in these dreams were faceless or interchangeable, but the bobble always stayed the same.
She was on the verge of putting her hand up, until the first woman said, ‘I dream of having a pool!’ and the second woman said, ‘I dream of taking my kids to Disney World’, and Bryony realized she was not asking about that kind of dream.
‘My dream is to pay off my credit card debt,’ said one woman, who was wearing her own, badly cut, trouser suit for the occasion. ‘I’d love to own my own house one day, so I know that my kids and I will never have to move again.’
‘I want to make enough money so my husband can come home and stop working away on oil rigs,’ said another. ‘His health isn’t good, I just want him to be able to rest.’
For the most part the dreams were all like this – modest, even slightly depressing, not the lust for sports cars and luxury cruises she might have expected. Tamara answered all of them in the same way.
‘You can get there! You have the potential! I believe you can make it happen.’
When one woman explained in a timid voice that she’d already been selling Gel Lyfe for three years and dreamed of finally making it beyond ‘Flint level’, Tamara praised her stamina. ‘Sometimes, the scenic route is the most beautiful.’
She then launched into a thirty-five minute monologue on dreams and how to achieve them, which boiled down to three main actionables: 1) drinking Gel Lyfe, 2) selling Gel Lyfe and 3) roping in other people to sell Gel Lyfe, with a much heavier emphasis on the third. Tamara was a polished public speaker, fond of breathy affirmations and staccato sentence delivery, punctuating each word with a hand in an ‘okay’ formation, like a shadow puppet of a hare. Before she said anything self-deprecating she would pause and place a hooked finger on her lips, cutely, as though perhaps they were about to be denied this revelation (they were not!).
At some point in the recent past people had stopped making statements sound like questions, with an upward inflection on the end, and started saying questions like statements instead. ‘Do. You. Want. To. Realize. Your. Potential.’ Tamara asked (?), and it was physically impossible not to join in when the rest of the attendees chorused back, ‘yes!’
Every so often, she would set them up, asking if they wanted something – ‘A six-figure salary?’; ‘A white Mercedes?’ – then scolding them when they shouted back ‘yes’.
‘No!’ she would yell. ‘You want a seven figure salary! You want a white Maserati! Demand more for yourself!’
‘Demand more for yourself!’ was a favourite catchphrase, used variously to refer to money, ‘opportunities’ and friendly gut bacteria. Tamara painted an image of the world as a vast gifting suite that you only had to wink at a bouncer to access, or an all-you-can-eat buffet where men grazed freely, filling their plates, their pockets and their huge hiking rucksacks, while all the women waited patiently in a queue. ‘If they can have it, you can too!’
Bryony glanced over at Annie, who was taking notes. ‘Demand more for self,’ was heavily underlined.
Finally Tamara finished speaking and opened up the floor to questions.
The first two were lengthy enquiries about glitches within the Gelievers app, to which she nodded vigorously, replied ‘I hear you, I hear you’, then told the inquirer to email somebody called Malcolm. The third was a woman on the same row as Bryony and Annie.
‘Yes? You there, with the gorgeous hair!’ said Tamara. The whole room swung around to look at the woman and/or her hair, which was just ordinary.
‘Um. I was just wondering if the gel is safe for pregnancy?’ the woman asked quietly. ‘Because – well, I know it says so in the handbook, but I’ve read a few things on the message boards that have made me nervous. Have there been any . . . well, any studies?’
Tamara gasped, and clasped her hands to her chest cartoonishly. ‘You’re pregnant! How wonderful! Stand up, sweetie.’ The woman stood up looking terrified, as Tamara walked through the audience to stand beside her, placing one aloe–green manicured hand on her slightly convex stomach. Bryony inhaled on instinct.
‘Such a blessing! What’s your name, Mama?’
‘Heidi,’ the woman told her and Tamara bid the entire crowd to congratulate her and her unborn child. ‘Congratulations Heidi!’ they chanted. ‘Congratulations, Heidi’s baby!’
The woman smiled stiffly, her eyes falling nowhere in particular. Bryony felt for her. It looked worse than being sung Happy Birthday to in an open plan office.
‘So, um, has it been tested on—’ Heidi attempted to ask again, but Tamara interrupted.
‘Not only is Gel Lyfe perfectly safe for you and little one, but it’s actually an amazing supplement for this magical time, when new energy is flowing through you and it’s crucial to give your body some extra love and support when it’s working so hard and performing all that magic,’ she cooed.
‘In fact, when you think about it, you’re the ultimate entrepreneur right now, Mama! Look what you’re creating!’ She jiggled poor Heidi’s belly a little. ‘Look what you’re building, all by yourself! You’re a creative genius. Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel all that productivity and potential just flowing through your body?’
‘Mhmm,’ murmured the woman.
‘In fact, I’m going to tell you all a story,’ says Tamara, finally unhanding Heidi’s stomach and making her way back through the audience, sashaying a little as she went. Her home counties accent slipped into the rhythm of a country and western singer. ‘When I had my first baby – oh, a hundred years ago!’ – Tamara’s eldest child was eight, Bryony had read it in the Gelebration newsletter – ‘I decided something. I decided there was no way I was going to let society tell me what a mother had to look like. I was not about to let them tell me my power was diminished when I knew it was the most powerful I had ever been.’
A woman two rows behind them let out a solitary whoop, then looked embarrassed. Tamara waited a beat and continued.
‘I was not about to let them tell me I should hide myself away and sit on my arse all day, when I knew that I was filled with something incredible, something magical . . . . ’ by now she had adopted a cadence not unlike a Baptist preacher and Bryony half expected her to say: ‘the Holy Spirit.’
‘Potential,’ said Tamara. ‘I discovered the secret they don’t want you to know, and which you’re about to discover, Mama.’
She pointed in Heidi’s direction.
‘I discovered that now is the best time to start a new business and unleash all that potential. The BEST time!’ Tamara jabbed a triumphant fist in the air, and a few acolytes near the front let out a smatter of applause. ‘I filled those sleepless nights with ambition. I began building my business with a baby on my boob and a laptop on my knee. I took all that magical, incredible goddess power that my body had held for nine months and I said “Wow. What if I could make other women feel like goddesses too? What if I could pass on all that magic and build a community of amazing kick-ass women who all feel empowered to reach their true potential? What if we never let society define our roles or our ambition for us again?”’
She was building to a crescendo now, the tips of her blow dry quivering as she gripped the mic with force. ‘The answer . . .’ she half whispered, casting her gaze slowly around the room, as though daring someone to yell out and ruin the payoff, ‘. . . was this. Gel Lyfe. YOU are all the answer. You are your OWN answer.’
Applause broke out in earnest now. Cheers and whoops filled the conference hall. Bryony fished around in her bag for her water bottle, clapping one hand politely against her thigh as Annie stamped her feet and whistled through her fingers. Tamara smiled beatifically at the response, dipping her head in a small bow.
A green- t-shirted team member darted forward and grabbed the mic as Tamara was whisked off stage by her entourage.
‘And that’s lunch, everyone!’
*
It IS really good and EVERYONE should read it (and Leading Man is brilliant too)! Hooray for a day where nothing else of significance is happening xx
Is this being published outside the UK? The first book is readily available in Canada - I’m reading it right now! - but this one doesn’t seem to be listed anywhere.