Slutty new year

Writing, between-ness, and pleasure in 2025

Next year I want to be more slutty, I tell my friend M over drinks and cheese gougères at Bar Américain, meaning it a few ways, but overall as a state of mind – of energy, expansiveness, curiosity. I’d like to reconnect with things that give me pleasure, after a period of time where pleasure has felt more elusive.

In the in-between part of Christmas, I make time for this. I eat crackers spread with oozing, creamy cheese, and drink cognac in the bath at 4pm, long baths where I kick up bubbles. I read for hours on the sofa under a blanket, three types of chocolate to hand, books stacked precariously on the floor. Finding myself unexpectedly drawn to the colour baby blue, to the tactile and soft, I buy myself a cashmere jumper and a tight ribbed top in the exact same shade.

Between-ness. The new year flickers up ahead. I’m impatient for it to come, while at the same time not wanting to leave this place of permission, of empty house and afternoon candlelight and milky sky. I’m perfectly content one hour, then hungry for more, thinking about change, about what the year could hold.

Reading over old NYE resolutions, they feel ruthless and a little punishing. Finish this. Publish this. Learn this. I’ve always been so fixated on the next thing.

Write a lot, and try to do the things that make you feel happy and safe and good, I write down instead. Give over control. What else, really, can I do?

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“Promiscuity—an eagerness for mixture, excitement at the new things arrived at through unexpected encounters—is one of the virtues I most admire in thinking, in art-making, in life,” writes Garth Greenwell in an interview in the Paris Review that has stuck with me.

Perhaps commitment to this kind of promiscuity, this year, means following a feeling or an idea wherever it goes, reading and seeing everything I can, and coming to things in a spirit of openness. Being hungry for the new, and writing in different ways – less analytically, more intuitively. To try, maybe, new ways of making art altogether.

“I’m drawn to art that expands and multiplies complexity, art that seeks ever finer gradations of feeling and thought,” he says in the same interview. “When do we ever feel a single feeling, or for long? When are we ever wholehearted? How long can we stay in a single place, or stay there happily? Between-ness is the human condition, it seems to me.”

Drawn to writing about desire as I am, it’s easy to slip into writing about the abject – about prostrating yourself for love, about dogged obsession, unhappy endings. And it’s true that in abjection you can achieve transformation, that desire slips between pleasure and pain. It’s true that you can find self-knowledge this way. But I’m finding myself more interested in writing about pleasure’s potential, about desire’s radiance instead. About a place with no shame. There’s room for both, there’s room to move between them. Between-ness.

A comment from my editor: Make it sexier! Let’s stay in the excitement of their world for a while longer.

Okay, I say. We can stay there.

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I worry sometimes that I pin too much importance on concrete achievement as a way to measure my self-worth, and that this kind of pressure is not conducive to artistic sluttiness, to discursive modes of experimentation and fun. In 2024’s bleaker moments I found myself thinking if I can just finish my new book everything will be okay, I’ll have something to show for all of this. But sometimes weeks, even months, would go by without me writing anything of note. It was during late spring, summer, that the right words finally came.

I gave myself a loose plan, and I woke early, and I was fairly monastic, but the days were full of pleasure small and large, because I was finally writing consistently – which I remembered, re-remembered, was my biggest pleasure – but also because I didn’t punish myself, or keep telling myself I was a failure, that I’d ruined everything.

I remember the calm I felt, sitting down at the start of January three years ago to the desk space below, one established in a time of uncertainty and change. Waking into dawn and writing by candlelight, surrounded by beautiful objects. Making myself coffee in the quiet kitchen. Pleasure doesn’t have to be loud, or messy. It was there in everything, in the stillness and even in the uncertainty itself. I was remaking my life. I was writing my way through it.

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Hopes for 2025, not resolutions. I’d like to spend time in other places, to house-swap or sublet, discover new neighbourhoods and new dailinesses. I’d like to write more stories, to start another book, to be absorbed deeply in new projects. I’d like to do more kinds of writing, generally – more journalism, to write about food and art, to edit and mentor and collaborate. I’d like to eat everything I want, get enough sleep, move and ache and dance and desire and get, to swim in seawater, to look after myself, to look after those I love, to meet new people, to love more people. It’s okay if I don’t manage it all. It’s enough to hope – tentatively, but with purpose.

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I hope too for an end to the genocide in Gaza. I hope for a better world. For less violence, for stability, for an end to senseless killing.

To think about pleasure at such times can feel frivolous, pointless. I’ve felt that a lot in 2024 – focussing on my base desires, my puny sensations and hurts, when there are unspeakable things happening in the world. But I would argue that it’s still important to seek pleasure, to find it, where we can.

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A Christmas of pleasure, an indulgent Christmas of two people. We go to the theatre on Christmas Eve, and everyone is so happy. On the day itself we cook and we eat and we drink good wine, and I play carols on the piano, badly, and we do only exactly what we want to do, following each whim, the day’s rhythm dictated mainly by hunger and cooking times. It feels like we’re getting away with something.

On New Year’s Eve I throw a party and overdress wilfully in a tiny sequinned dress, matching heels. All evening people keep asking me where my boyfriend is. I realise I don’t actually know! He’s prepped a dish of dauphinoise potatoes that goes uncooked, in the fridge. I continue not really knowing, noticing or minding, until it’s almost midnight, and then we are shouting the seconds down to the countdown, and I’m standing in the crowd of people, alone in my sequinned sluttiness, and everyone else is kissing. Only for a moment, and then someone else is kissing me anyway. I kiss them back, text him Happy new year x passive-aggressively, but then he comes in, wheeling his bike, and everyone falls upon him before I can. Only a minute late, distracted by the fireworks. And besides, I was never really alone.

We eat the dauphinoise the next day, when we really need it. Garlicky, creamy, the top slightly burnt. I’m sleepy, warm, in clean pyjamas. We spoon it from the dish until we’ve had our fill.