'We both know that it's not fashionable to love me'

1. Sex work

2. Religion

I wasn’t setting out to shock anyone, the story was a natural culmination of my own upbringing, experiences and imagination. I have always been interested in the roles available to women, the performance of womanhood. The binary offering of Madonna versus Whore. Having been raised by a devoutly religious mother and then later exposed to the amoral world of image-modelling, sugar-babies and the casual kind of quasi-sex-work employed by students and twenty-somethings in the city, it was inevitable that my writing would come to explore these topics.

Critically, ‘SUGAR, BABY’ has received great responses from the kinds of outlets I only could have dreamed of being covered by. See here. Publisher’s Weekly called me ‘one to watch'. Shondaland said ‘To describe Sugar, Baby as a book ahead of its time feels almost unfairly reductive’. I made VOGUE’s best books of 2024 list and I’ve received praise from a myriad of extremely talented authors whose work I admire tremendously.

I am, however, always curious about the opinion of the general public. If you look up ‘SUGAR, BABY’ on Goodreads (a cardinal sin for writers, I know), you will find just about every possible opinion under the sun. The people who love the book love it and the people who hate it really fucking hate it and then there are the people who just didn’t connect with it or my writing at all.

There are those who find it down right offensive. I get it. The novel is a mirror to our society and the reflection is pretty ugly and also contains some uncomfortable truths. In fact, the only response I really take issue with is the reviews that claim the story is unrealistic, full of stereotypes, that I didn’t do my research or that I know nothing about sex work. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that all the scenarios in the book are plausible and the many DMs and messages I receive from real-life sugar-babies, and sex workers of all kinds will attest to that. In that aspect, the story is founded on truth I just think it’s a lot more comfortable for some people to tell themselves that it can’t be.

Sorry, it is. These things are happening everywhere, every day.

Then there are the positive reviews. There are a couple of essay-like reviews from readers the novel struck a chord with, complete with quotes from the book and interviews about it, that connect the dots and read between the lines and get it. When I wrote my second novel I had some of these reviewers in mind, I was speaking to them and writing for them. Only partially though, my first and most influential reader is the younger version of myself. The brattiest, most voracious, most exacting version of myself who at about eighteen years of age, consumed novels, films and short stories at the same staggering, inhuman rate as a just-born vampire. She wanted glamour, escapism, sex, drama, characters that felt so real they became like friends or guardian angels, their voices whispering advice when they were most needed, appearing suddenly and undeniably like the Voice of God. I write what she would want to read and I fret constantly about falling short of her standards. I am trying always to appeal to her tastes.

And then there’s quite an interesting phenomenon, there are the reviews from people who clearly liked the book, or think that maybe they liked the book but feel like they probably shouldn’t have. It usually starts like ‘I know it’s not (insert here)’ or ‘Yeah, it could have been more (insert here)’ and then goes on to say BUT ‘I couldn’t stop reading it’ or it was ‘strangely addictive’ or ‘I devoured it’. These reviews are fascinating to me. Who are these people explaining themselves to? One even says ‘I would never recommend this book to anyone or ever admit to reading it but personally, I LOVED it’ Am I (gulp) a guilty pleasure? Maybe I quite like the idea of being a guilty pleasure, something you enjoy secretly in the dark. A dirty, little secret, that seems to be a running theme.

After all, ‘SUGAR, BABY’ is about everything we’re not supposed to talk about: female desire, sex work, race, beauty standards, infidelity, pretty privilege, Jesus. It’s an A-Z of uncomfortable topics. It’s brash and vulgar and descriptive, it has whole passages dedicated to such ‘superficial, silly topics’ as a type of ponytail, a Gucci handbag, a designer perfume, a type of eyeliner. It’s an undeniably ‘girly’ book and perhaps that inspires a level of condescension from some readers. Who knows.

It’s probably unfashionable of me to be writing this at all but I’ve been thinking about it for some time now. The sheer variety of responses to my work is fascinating to me. I embrace every reaction quite honestly. I’m glad there are people who feel passionately about it, I’m glad there’s debate and differing opinion. I tell myself I won’t read any reviews of my second novel but I know I will. I’m curious. I’m waiting patiently for my readers to discover me one-by-one. What a parasocial mess I know, but such is the experience of being a novelist in the modern age. It’s all a bit contaminated.