Oh, it’s Sunday morning, and sunny without being stifling, and the Essie Gel Couture manicure I gave myself last Wednesday has not one single chip in it, can you believe it? I’m going to buy this one next: it’s a little too olive for the book (my book, obviously), but I think it’s good anyway. I can’t believe it hasn’t chipped: I’m hard on nail polish. It’s so pretty, too: butter-coloured, goes with everything. I put on the newish Mitski album, my favourite for a while (and I’ll do anything for Mitski), and hung the laundry out to dry in the sun.
I just made a pot of coffee: the moka pot makes me so happy, the coffee makes me so happy. I just reintroduced caffeine into my life. They say this one tastes like poached plums, and I drank it black in a little mug from Porty Books which I think is so beautiful. It’s like an enamel camping cup, but china. I wish I had more exactly like it in different greens, different stags and unicorns, different strange designs.
Someone who lived here before us planted a hazelnut in a pot and now it is a hazel tree, roots bursting through the plastic and deep into the ground, and it’s probably a problem but it’s so beautiful too. I put the red blanket on the bricks and cut the mouldy part off a peach with a sharp little knife and ate the rest, and the cat was standing on the wall.
At four this morning I saw a fox standing on the roof opposite and the fox saw me and we stood there both for what felt like a long time, just seeing each other.
I keep looking at the little picture my publishers sent me that says Instant Sunday Times Bestseller across my book. I keep looking at it and the Waterstones Non-Fiction list, on which my book is outselling, e.g., Voice Of A Generation Lena Dunham, and feeling so strange, so electric and so happy and so strange.
If you missed it, The Kitchen Book is an instant Sunday Times bestseller. I don’t know what to say about it except that we did it; I made it for you, with you. I made it because I wanted to make art in my own way. I wanted to do it in a way that felt alive and real and that was alive and real, no artifice, no trying to game the system, no algorithmic tricks.
I got sent a book this week, a proof, with much ceremony and beautiful wrapping, and I am quite certain there are at minimum passages in it that are AI. It’s a memoir sort of book, and I think there are things in there no living being would construct: the feeling I get when I read it is the feeling that there is something between me and the author, something inhuman. It’s been done expensively and well. I won’t name the book, in case I’m wrong, but I think I’m right. I see it more and more on here; more and more on Instagram I see “And honestly?” or “perfectly captures” or whatever, and I feel this bleak sick feeling in my throat and before I know it I know it, if you know what I mean. I know I’m looking at something that isn’t real.
It happens more and more lately and I suppose in this book, my book, I wanted to make the opposite of that: a book no robot could replicate, a book that was from me and of me and for you. I didn’t want anything artificial anywhere in the text or the pictures, and though of course I would never usually cook six to ten meals in a single day, we did eat absolutely all of it through the simple mechanic of “having friends round”. No tricks, no robots. I was just making a thing I wanted to make, and it is a Sunday Times bestseller.
I wrote directly to you, and I hope that you know me, and I know so many of you. Signing books at Porty last Saturday I thought I know these people and it was like it was Christmas, you know, writing cards for your friends: this is in my hands, soon it will be in your hands. We made it. We did it. I made a book that was the work of my heart and I did it because you gave me the space and the money and the time to do it. It blows me away. I cannot process it: my book is a Sunday Times bestseller, and I made no compromises to make it. I made a book that was everything of my heart and people like it and I am verklempt.
Which is spooky timing, because what happened just after I sat down to write that was that I heard the letterbox go, and I went upstairs, and it was a proof of the sequel to The Time Traveler’s Wife, a book from which I learned the word “verklempt”, as well as so many other things. I just read the first three pages, in between writing that sentence and this one, being as careful with the spine as if someone might want it back, and I felt this lift inside me that there is more of the thing: more of the thing I have loved for literally twenty years.
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