The Bijoux List for January

Instead of scrolling away the day, read the The Bijoux List. It's Natasha Lester's monthly collection of muse-worthy moments: things to inspire, things to do, things to love and things to ponder.

Welcome to the very first Bijoux List! This monthly post will usually be for paid subscribers only but as we’re all starting out here at Bijoux together, I wanted to give all my subscribers a taste of the monthly list. If you’d like to continue receiving it each month, you can upgrade to a paid subscription.

What’s Bijoux for January?

1. Emily Blunt and The English

2. Notebooks

3. Chills Substack & when my Russian publisher asked me to censor my book

4. Re-reading

5. Poetry podcasts

6. Alexander McQueen

7. The origin of flowers

8. The quick list

Let’s get this out of the way …

Bijoux isn’t a place for me to promote my books and I promise to only rarely mention them. However, it seems a bit too faux-modest if I don’t even give one loud cheer for the fact that The Three Lives of Alix St Pierre will be published in North America in just a few hours. So – yay!!!!

Right, now that’s out of the way … onto the list!

1. Emily Blunt and The English

“It's the worst thing ever when you open a script and read the words, 'strong female lead.’ That makes me roll my eyes — I'm already out. I'm bored.”

Emily Blunt

Actress Emily Blunt is referring to the cliched strong female lead character who’s become something of a Hollywood fixture – she can shoot a gun or deliver a mean spin kick, all while wearing skin-tight leather and impeccable mascara. She’s as physically strong as a man – but looks better in a catsuit.

If you’ve read my books, you’ll know I love a sweeping saga with a “strong” heroine. I try to write my strong heroines with depth and complexity, very aware of the need to not add more confining stereotypes to the multitude already on offer for women. So I know exactly what Emily Blunt is saying here. She’s saying – let us be strong and …

It’s the “and” that’s important. What else is there about this strong woman that makes her both fascinating and real, inspiring and relatable, spirited and vulnerable? That’s the kind of woman I’m trying to write about in my books and I think that’s the kind of woman Emily Blunt wants to portray in film. And she’s achieved it as Lady Cornelia Locke – a woman who is most definitely strong and something more too – in The English, a Western-inspired drama now showing on Amazon Prime.

Let me start by saying I’ve never thought of myself as a Western fan. But to reduce this series to a single word is the same as reducing a female lead character to the phrase “strong woman”. From the moment Blunt’s voiceover drifts onto the screen in a tender lament about destiny and the brutal realities of life, I was hooked.

The cinematography is sublime, the plot at times convoluted, but the chemistry between Blunt and her co-star Chaske Spencer is magic. Their evolving relationship from strangers to kindred souls is portrayed with a perfect light touch, leaving you always wanting more of each of them, individually and together. Yes, the series is violent – but history was cruel and murderous. I highly recommend watching.

If you’ve already seen it, let me know what you thought in the comments.

2. Notebooks

After my last post about my inability to keep a diary, and the notebooks I keep instead for my post-running idea fragments, a few people asked me what kind of notebook I like to use. I’ve tried every kind over the years and my two current favourites are:

📓The Moleskine Cahier Journal in Kinetic Pink.

I use these for scribbling ideas that could be related to whichever book I’m writing, and I start a new notebook for each new novel. They aren’t glamorous, but they’re invitingly blank (lined pages feel too orderly for my nascent ideas!), with soft, easy to open covers in a range of colours. I prefer the large size as I usually fill them up by the time I’ve finished a novel.

📓Bespoke Letterpress Monkeys Notepad Jotter

I have another notebook on my desk for ideas about non-novel related things – like this Substack, for example. Or for a quick To Do list. Or a phone number I need to scribble down. I like a notepad rather than a notebook for this purpose and the Bespoke Letterpress ones have gorgeous creamy, heavyweight paper and pretty covers that make my desk look elegant, even when it’s an untidy mess!

3. Chills Substack & When My Russian Publisher Asked Me To Censor My Book

I'm paraphrasing here so please check it out for yourself, but Lauren Wolfe is an investigative journalist whose Substack

Chills

shows the world exactly what it's like to write about dangerous things, especially war zones where women and children are often victims, and often forgotten. One of her latest articles is about the "filtration camps" established by the Russian government, into which hundreds of thousands of people have disappeared.

If the notion of people disappearing into camps set up by a despot in a war zone sounds like history repeating itself, that’s because it is.

No matter how many times we say “lest we forget”, we do forget, or we’re overwhelmed by the seeming impossibility of action, or we turn away from the news about Russia and Ukraine because it’s dark and difficult and, understandably, our post-covid selves need light and joy.

What Lauren’s writing about in no way compares to the small but significant moment I’m about to relate, but the noxious censorship and deceit she alludes to reminded me of an email a Russian publisher sent to me about two years ago, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. My novels often highlight the treatment of women in wartime, and have called attention to the (often sanctioned) sexual assault of women during WWII by both the Allied and Axis powers – no nation is “good” when it comes to wartime rape.

The Russian publisher was about to publish my novel The Paris Secret, which includes many scenes set in Ravensbrück Concentration Camp. It details German atrocities that took place at that camp. It doesn’t let the Allies off the hook either when it comes to their knowingly sending women into compromised Resistance circuits in France, nor their attempts to cover up what happened to female Allied spies at Ravensbrück.

In my novel, there’s one line that reads:

Kat recalled what Elliott had told her: that the victorious, conquering Russians had raped the women left behind at the camp, over and over, no matter that what remained of each woman was no more than a skeleton.

This is documented fact. But the Russian publisher wanted that line deleted from the book. They were happy to let stand every other act of brutality committed by every other nation, but not that.

I dug in my heels. I pointed out they were asking me to be complicit in perpetuating a long, global history of concealing incidences of sexual abuse of women and that I had no interest in being a party to that. It took many, many emails and me calling in my foreign rights team before the publisher agreed to let the line stand as it was.

Looking back now, and after reading Lauren’s piece about the way in which Russia is continuing to cover up its evil acts, I wish I’d just withdrawn the book. I was so shocked at the time that I don’t think I fully thought through the fact that I didn't want to work with a company who would even ask that of me. I suppose that’s what life is partly about – making mistakes and trying to do better next time.

Life is also about past, present and future. We’ve seen genocide and filtration camps before. I didn’t know about these camps until I read Lauren’s article. But they are our present. Let’s not forget Ukraine, and let’s keep doing whatever we can to make sure there are no such camps in our future. Sometimes that seems like a hopeless wish – but may the future be built on optimism, rather than defeat.

4. Re-reading

Right now, I feel like the act of reading has been made into a competitive sport, partly due to all the new year challenges on Goodreads asking people to commit to reading a certain number of books in 2023. And obviously as a writer, I have a vested interest in people reading lots of books.

But I think reading is a sacred act where numbers don’t matter. What matters is the doing, not the finishing. What matters is that you live in the pages, rather than think about world that exists outside those pages.

We don’t get to re-live our own lives unless we write down, film, or photograph every act. But we can re-live a fictional character’s life – and isn’t that kind of nice? Watching someone we cared about be happy once more? Or weeping even more profusely the second time around? 😂

We don’t look at a painting just once. Or listen to a song one time only. There are many songs that, even after multiple listens, suddenly seem to land right in the solar plexus. Because we’ve changed. We understand the song differently. Art keeps unspooling its meaning for years – for longer than we get to be alive.

So this year, I’m going to do more re-reading. When you already know how a book ends, there’s no need to rush to that end. I’m going to enjoy the rhythms of sentences, the little motifs I missed the first time. And after mentioning Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem in last week’s post and remembering how much I loved that the first time, I’m going to start my re-reading there.

5. Poetry Podcasts

Poetry always makes me cherish how extraordinary words are. Each word on its own is a small thing, but assemble a string of them together in a particular way and you have magic. So, where others might use coffee to shake the cobwebs of sleep loose from their minds, I’m starting every day this year with the Poem of the Day podcast.

6. Alexander McQueen

Most fashion designers make nice clothes. Some of them make appalling decisions too (see Balenciaga). Few of them are as shockingly talented and have such a gift for narrative as Alexander McQueen.

There’s a brilliant exhibition of his work at the NGV right now and if you live in Melbourne or are planning to travel there, make sure you go and see it, even if you have no idea who Alexander McQueen is. It’s not just a showcase of pretty dresses; it’s a presentation about the way he used stories as inspiration for his designs and then, in turn, told stories with those designs.

I like to think about how stories told in mediums other than words on paper make me feel and what I can learn from them as a storyteller myself. Fashion is so often derided as frivolous and is often it’s own worst enemy in perpetuating that belief, but sometimes it can be both eloquent and divine too.

If you want to know more about Alexander McQueen, the documentary McQueen is excellent. Or take a look at one of his most exquisite runway moments, the Kate Moss hologram. I’m off to the exhibition next week, so I’ll definitely post about it here soon.

7. The Origin of Flowers

I’d never really thought about the fact that, once upon a time here on earth, there were no flowers. Can you imagine that? A flower-less world. I’m sure that’s a great idea for a book, if there isn’t one already out there.

This piece in the New Yorker about the fossils left behind when the world’s first flowers burned to ash, and the paleo-botanist who searches for their remains, is fascinating reading.

8. The Quick List

Greta Thunberg Rules Twitter

Greta Thunberg did that thing we all wish we could do – fired off the perfect comeback when a vile person tried to bully her on Twitter. It’s been written about in a few places, but I love the commentary in this article.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover - the Netflix Movie

Okay, it’s not entirely faithful to the book but I always see books and movies as two distinct works. I liked that Lady Chatterley had more agency in this iteration, and I gave the ending a thumbs-up – I think I was in the mood for closure. Maybe it makes me a romantic, but I’d like to believe that even at 80 years old, they’re still dancing naked together in the rain.

Quitting, or Refusing to Be Taken Advantage Of?

There was a lot of talk in late 2022 about “quiet quitting”. I prefer to think of it as thoughtfully choosing where to spend our precious and limited time, if we’re lucky enough to have that option. I guess that’s what drove me here to Substack in the first place – the realisation of how much of my life (and creativity) I was giving to Meta. Frankly, they don’t deserve it!

That’s a Wrap

That’s the list for January. If you were to make a list, what would be on it? And let me know your thoughts about anything here – are you a re-reader, have you watched The English, what notebooks do you prefer, did Lauren’s article open your eyes like it did mine, what are you choosing to spend your precious time on in 2023? Let’s discuss in the comments!