The Magazine. In November's Issue: Venetian Velvet Ateliers & Florentine Perfumeries!
Last magazine for the year! Here's what I'm reading, writing, watching, buying and listening to. And links from across the internet that are worth reading, covering everything from AI to poetry.
Since the last edition of the Magazine in September, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ASTRID BRICARD has been published, I’ve been on book tour and done 20 events, and I’ve submitted my next manuscript to my publisher. Just an easy month, right?!
Ha! I’m exhausted. But that’s okay because I’m now in Europe, on holiday with my 17-year-old daughter and we’re enjoying every minute of having no routine, of wandering around cities, eating out, exploring new places, and approaching every day with more curiosity and expectation of surprise than usual.
I’ve included a rundown below on some of the fascinating and off-the-beaten track fashion and history tours we’re doing – not to make you jealous, I promise! As I’m travelling, I’m not writing anything right now, just playing around with a couple of ideas and seeing which one feels like the story I really want to write next year when I’m back at my desk. So in this month’s magazine, I talk a little about the process of “finding” an idea.
As well as that, there are the usual sections for you to enjoy: Bijoux Reads, Bijoux Listens, Bijoux Screen, Bijoux Links, Bijoux Buys, Bijoux Travels and Bijoux Protests.
Whatever you’re doing over the next month in the lead up to holiday season, enjoy! I’ll be back with one more post next week – a list of my favourite reads of the year, which I always love compiling. Then there’ll be a break until mid-Jan. I’ll be pausing paid subscriptions over that time for my paid subscribers so you won’t be charged for the month when I’m not posting.
Onto the magazine!
PS - this post is on the longish side, so your email system may cut it off. If that happens, just click on the headline to be taken to the website to read the full issue.
In September’s magazine, I was protesting the media’s treatment of Sophie Turner, and I spoke about how it connected to everything I felt when I wrote about Mizza Bricard in THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ASTRID BRICARD. This month, I added Britney Spears’s memoir to my reading stack because it sounds as if I’ll find another familiar and rage-inducing story of a woman torn apart by the press, a woman who then had to try to put herself back together in the face of unrelenting scrutiny.
is one of my favourite Substacks and Lyz’s post about Spears’s legacy is spot on and made me download the audiobook immediately. I’m listening to it on trains and planes as I travel around Europe and I’ll have more to say about it in a post next year. For now, I’ll leave you with a quote from Lyz’s article, which made me wince and then nod in hopeless agreement:Raised in a world of ‘90s girl power, we were taught we could be anything. But in reality, everything simply became our fault. Dressing proactively meant being too sexy. Not dressing provocatively meant being a prude. In this world, Spears was both aspirational and a warning.
And isn’t that so achingly true of so many women who’ve been cast into the role of “famous girl”? So many people want to be like them – but not too much. And so many people laugh when those women fall, or when we collectively decide it’s time for them to fall.
As a companion piece to the above,
wrote a post about Spears’s memoir that’s equally insightful. This quote she pulls from the book ties in devastatingly accurately to the points Lyz makes: