Thanks for reading gotham girl! This is a free post, so please share it on social media; just be sure to include a link. Sincerest thanks to every single paid subscriber. You are keeping the lights on around here, and I can’t thank you enough for it.
Hello Lovelies, how the hell are you?
Hanging on by a bee’s dick? A very cold dick? It’s FREEZING out, people!
Yesterday, I’m running (well, sauntering really) on the treadmill, and I look out in the garden, and we have all these wild bunnies here in Cambridge. Oddly, they haven’t been eaten (yet) because we also have coyotes. But they’re out there, standing on their hind legs, nibbling at the bare hydrangea twigs, and just shivering! And I’m like, holy cats, BUNNIES?! Aren’t you supposed to be hibernating? I thought that was your WHOLE JOB IN WINTER.
They look so cold and hungry. They might as well be little Charles Dickens-orphan-bunnies. At the very least, I want to bring them out a salad kit, but I’m like, What if they don’t like my Whole Foods sweet kale salad mix with lemon poppy seed dressing? What if they’re sloppy eaters? And the gardener is like, “Hey, lady! You’re littering! With Salad!” I don’t need that this week, I’m in enough trouble…
And I keep having these crazy equine apocalypse dreams.
In them, I’m atop my horse, galloping through my happy place: Bergdorf Goodman (because, of course). And we’re just passing the Maison Margiela rack with their weird split-toe shoes that always make me feel like a Dr. Seuss character, when I look down and see that my horse and I are on FIRE!
His legs. My legs. Fully engulfed. In flames! Of course, I can’t feel anything through my dream jodhpurs. But suddenly, there we are, racing for the exit, so we don’t incinerate the Chanel.
Next thing I know, William Powell (that’s my horse) and I are outdoors, tearing through a Kmart parking lot in the middle of nowhere.
Remember Kmart? Remember Blue Light Specials? And Cherry Icees? It’s about as 2025-Year-of-the-Snake as it gets! And, I’m thinking, Good God. What’s become of us, William Powell?!
And that’s when I wake up in a cold sweat. It all feels so on brand.
The Year of the Horse begins February 17th, and not a moment too soon! I’m ready for galloping success, for all our authors to find communities of readers who adore them, because everyone needs this right now. IRL books and togetherness.
From ICE and Minneapolis to the Epstein Files to the daily assault on basic human rights, not to mention the bloodbath at WaPo, it feels we’re clinging to the very end of the whip-tail of this feral Snake-year, and it is shaking us something fierce.
Oh, and then there’s Chad:
It’s too much.
But Then… More Crazy.
Good grief! I was reading ’s remarkable piece, "We all live in Jeffrey Epstein’s world," and I was expecting her to do what so many are trying to do: dissect how he really is the Kevin Bacon of all evil, but she had something else far more extraordinary up her sleeve!
Nothing like a data dump to remind you how low the bar is—and how seductive “access” can be before it curdles into complicity. The “Inner Rings” of C.S. Lewis, as so adroitly reflected upon, are hell with better catering
But Epstein wasn’t just corresponding with a handful of men. He was in conversation with hundreds—across countries, across power structures, across the familiar boys’ clubs of money and highly interdependent favor networks of influence: U.S. finance, petrodollar royalty, Russian oligarchy, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, New York, Washington, Westminster. This wasn’t a glitch in the system. It was the system talking to itself on an infinite loop.
There are people I know who are tangentially named in the files. Bystanders. Witnesses. And so the other takeaway that haunts me is that very few people think they’re doing evil—most think they’re just attending dinner.
It seems C.S. Lewis’s Inner Ring works precisely because it feels banal before it ever feels corrupt.
This banality is especially brought home by Carole’s sharing of an open source team’s recreation of Epstein’s Gmail dashboard—Jmail. You can check his email exactly as he might:
It is as surreal as it gets.
Suddenly, you are inside Epstein’s most mundane world—not the mythic one, not the monstrous headlines about the NINE-year-old victim, but the inbox. You’re operating from his POV, inhabiting the banality of his days, positioned—however unwillingly—as a complicit participant in the narrative he was actively shaping.
It does something unsettling to your sense of the story.
The scale becomes impossible to metabolize. You’re dropped into a web where power, access, and moral vacancy intersect so densely it feels like becoming the Kevin Bacon of evil—on so many steroids and black-market Chinese peptides that Silicon Valley biohackers would be chartreuse with envy.
It was too much for my nervous system.
I had to flee to an episode of Father Brown (Season 13, for those keeping score)—something gentle, procedural, morally legible—to calm myself down.
And in that contrast, it struck me again: how much character shapes destiny. Not branding. Not power. Not access. Character.
Which is what I want to talk about today…
CHARACTER IS DESTINY (AND COMEDY)
Or: Funny People Aren’t Funny—They’re Consistent
Core Principle
Jokes land because of who is saying them—not because the joke itself is clever.
1. Funny Is a Worldview, Not a Punchline
Nora Ephron’s characters are funny ordering lunch.
Not because lunch is funny—but because values colliding with reality are funny.
Comedy happens when a person’s deeply entrenched beliefs—about themselves, the world, how things should be—are forced to operate inside how things actually are. Escalate that friction, and you get humor. Escalate it further, and you get truth.
A few years ago, was interviewing me for a Huffington Post piece on perimenopause parties as a rite of passage. I was TERRIFIED of her. I’d somehow convinced myself in our early conversations that she didn’t like me at all.
Partly because I had nothing remotely newsworthy to say.
All I could talk about was my girlfriends and our menopausal shenanigans—how miserable we were while aggressively pretending otherwise. We dressed up in Bridgerton costumes sourced from an old theater sale. We bought a fainting couch on eBay. We gathered to mourn our cultural invisibility, catastrophic healthcare, and sleepless nights—while laughing hysterically, because what else was there to do?
I was unserious. The full-scale consequences of menopause hadn’t hit me yet.
Margie, in my mind, was Serious: a journalist from Fortune and other Very Serious Publications.
Then I learned about her novel.
It was born from a promise to her mother, Rona: to finish the book her mother had always dreamed of publishing. After Rona died, Margie—grieving, exhausted—kept her word. She finished it. It already had a publisher. When it launched, I read it and thought it was genuinely wonderful.
I also thought: With a few strategic moves, this could be the Golden Girls reboot the world desperately needs.
The characters were already there—robust, consistent, living by every rule we’re about to discuss. And we shared a belief that the world needed a new generation of comedic Florida storytelling that bridged cultural divides the way Carl Hiaasen’s work does—only from a female point of view.
The book just needed… Molly.
Not a Class A drug—though if I could bottle Molly Zakoor as an editorial tonic, we’d be as rich as the broligarchs. Her past projects include People We Hate at the Wedding and Let’s Not Do That Again—millions of copies sold. Her résumé also includes Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and The Burgess Boys.
I thought: If anyone can bring tenderness and comedy into the same sentence without one cheapening the other, it’s her.
Molly has a rare gift. She inhabits each narrator’s worldview so completely that every voice is distinct, consistent, and immovable. And when those worldviews collide—when characters refuse to budge—the comedy writes itself.
That’s the secret sauce.
Comedy isn’t about flexibility.
It’s about stubbornness under pressure.
Which is why a classic example of this kind of comedy is Absolutely Fabulous—specifically the irreconcilable worldviews of Eddie and Saffy. Neither is wrong (in their own minds). Neither will yield. And that collision is endlessly, exquisitely funny.
Because character doesn’t just drive plot.
Character is destiny.
And when destiny refuses to compromise?
That’s comedy.
(Can you imagine Eddie and Saffie writing a novel together? Ha!)
So, we paired Molly with Margie. Prayed they loved each other. (No secret, they did.) And they undertook a character-driven comedic punch-up.
Meanwhile, we got with a member of our team who has 21 years in mass market book sales to weigh in on the cover for the exact level of escapist dopamine. Thank you !
And it worked!
The Cabernet Club landed a Publishers Weekly Editor’s Pick, and it launches tomorrow—everywhere!
This Thursday, 2/12 at & pm EST—Margie is going LIVE on Facebook for Galentine’s Prelude Party to uncork and pop the Bolly with me… because you have to go where your readers are, and they may not all be on Substack (yet).
Pop the champagne. Raise a glass. Come celebrate with Margie, her friends, family, and our little Empress coven. We’ll be giving away signed books, merch, and vino.
And if you want to order the EBook before the party, you can do so here:
It seems, due to demand, we are already backordered on the gorgeous new print edition, but hold tight, MORE are coming!
Now, back to difficult characters and an exercise:
Write a character who is wrong about one thing and will not budge.
When have you been one?
I have a story about our Vermont house renovation and a contractor who would not budge, but then he met me. Chaos and a car chase with a baby soon followed.
Remember, “Everything is copy.” The best material ferments in life.
Oh, I did a thing with … I am so grateful to her for having me!
Snake year, you’ve had your moment.
Horse year—saddle up. 🐎🍷 - xoxo, Gotham Girl 🖤
PS - I am a human typo. Amnesty appreciated.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.