Land, Dink, Billionaire Vagina's Club

Like Daniel Mason’s North Woods, Maggie O’Farrell’s Land features a patch of earth as a central character, but unlike Mason, O’Farrell shifts her attention to one particular family and follow their fates as individuals who (nearly all) eventually leave that land. While Mason just shows us the various families who live on the same piece of land through the centuries, O’Farrell follows one family’s members in their journeys through time and across the world and spend hundreds of pages helping us get to know and love them, to grieve their losses and root for their triumphs, modest as they are. O’Farrell’s story, which begins in the decades after the Great Hunger had killed or driven off hundreds of thousands of Irish peasants, also has touches of magical realism in it, but the touch of them is so light as not to distract from all the brutal realism in the rest of the story.

I’ve seen a couple of critical reviews of this book, but honestly that must just be someone trying to make a name for themselves by criticizing this writer at the top of her game. She writes a mesmerizing story, draws beautiful, unique characters we grow to love, and lets us enjoy her sprawling, luxuriating writing for 400 pages. I listened to the audiobook, which said it was 17 hours, though they flew by. (And also they flew by because I can listen at 1.5 speed.) The Irish accent of the reader makes listening to the audiobook a special pleasure; I highly recommend consuming it this way if you can.

Last night Renee and I watched a comedy that made us laugh a lot. While this movie won’t win any Oscars, it cracked me up on a night when I needed a laugh—and the humor was often really dark, just like I like it. (I laughed hardest at a scene where characters are describing someone’s death, which happened in ridiculous stages, one unfortunate mishap after another.)

The story follows a one-time young tennis star whose career was sidelined by an injury when he was a kid. He now works for his terribly tyrannical father, played by a shockingly aged Ed Harris. The father is so mean he’s like a cartoon villain, which makes it impossible not to feel sympathy for the protagonist, even though he’s a bit of an asshole. Then the main character makes a new friend and does something really nice and we can’t help but like him even more. The whole pickleball fans vs. tennis purists schtick is funny, too. My one critique, which I feel bitchy even mentioning, is that Mary Steenburgen, whom I adore and who has the best lines in this movie, often sounds like she is reading her lines from a teleprompter, and like maybe she had a lot of dry-mouth. But I feel bad I even noticed that. Summary: it’s an entertaining, little movie that features lots of talented stars. Enjoy yourself; even if it did go straight to DVD, it’s funny.

Finally, I want to talk about this amazing article, The Billionaire Vagina’s Club, from the New Yorker, which I apologize does not allow subscribers to share gift versions of their articles. Renee and I read this aloud to one another over the weekend. This is a fantastic article to read aloud with your partner, I promise. Just go in blind and read it to one another. Here’s the article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/07/06/the-billionaires-vagina-club

But in case you’re not going to read it aloud with your partner (or at all), I will summarize for you: the article is about a savvy mother of four ob-gyn who was being ground to dust by working in regular medical practices where she had too many patients to really give any of them personal attention, so she started a concierge doctor’s office for the wealthiest clients in Northern California (and sometimes from all over the world, as she has clients who fly in by private jet). She believes sexual health is health (well, duh, right?) and she is all about giving loads of hormones (including testosterone) to her perimenopausal, menopausal, and post-menopausal women clients. (She doesn’t deliver babies in her practice; it’s all for older women.) If I understood correctly, clients now have to pay $30,000 just to become her patient. She obviously doesn’t take insurance. And she makes her clients very, very happy, helping them with libido issues as a means of helping them feel better in every way.

This article definitely made me want to get some hormones, even though my period stopped 10 years ago (it went away as soon as my son died, like my body knew I couldn’t take any more PMS once I was grieving), and I never felt I needed them. But this article made them sound like a good time! Anyone want to weigh in?

I tried something different the last couple of days, writing my Substack as I consumed things. This is what I always meant to do, and if I kept up with my own consumption this way, I’d have to consume less! But for now, ta da! I did it for a few days.

What have you been consuming and/or creating? Please, tell me in the comments, I really want to know!