A brilliant guest column this week for you. Paula Cocozza is an award-winning writer who works for The Guardian and holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Her first novel, How to be Human, was shortlisted for The Desmond Eliott Prize in 2018. Her second novel Speak To Me, published by Tinder Press, is out now. Here, she writ…

Read more

Subscribe now

Read more

Jade Angeles Fitton is a writer, journalist and an award-winning producer. Her first book Hermit came out last month (described as “piercingly lyrical” by The Times). I was lucky enough to have read an advance copy of Hermit earlier in the year and I was hooked. It is a compelling, engrossing memoir that beautifully encapsulates the human experience (both the misery and the magic) of suddenly finding yourself rebuilding life from the ground up, alone.

I absolutely loved her writing about going back to rural nature, the landscape around her, finding peace, being with herself after a traumatic few years. I am an absolute sucker for memoirs written by women on solo adventures, and this is now up there as one of my new favourites.

A chance encounter with Jade made me love her even more. In April when I was recording my audiobook (for The Success Myth) at the Penguin offices, so was she. We bumped into each other in the toilets while washing our hands (chic) and then we had lunch together in between our recording sprints. It was quite a magical experience as I’m such a fan of her writing.

In this guest column, she writes about the universal conundrum that plagues so many of us: how to actually log off social media and spend a chunk of time alone, as in, not alone with your phone — but really alone. (Something most of us find quite daunting.) As someone who is an expert on this (why not grab a copy of Hermit) she passionately believes that if we’re to benefit from our time alone — be that an hour, a day, or a week, we could consider logging out of everything that takes our attention elsewhere and see how it affects the passing of time, allowing curiosity to lead the way.

Over to Jade….

How we benefit from our time alone by Jade Angeles Fitton

Chances are, if you’ve had five or ten minutes by yourself today, you’ll have gone on social media. Hermit is about my time spent in solitude and how I came to love it— about more than loving it, as it felt like it loved me back: I rebuilt my life with the help of solitude. When I was left alone in a converted barn on Exmoor with no public transport or shops I was lucky in that I had no fear of solitude. I was at such a low ebb that I was functioning mostly on instinct, and I had two guiding instincts: that I wanted to write, and that I wanted to be alone. I quickly rediscovered the joy of being alone in nature. Jane Goodall, the primatologist, said that after the first week alone she didn’t feel lonely. Alone, she said, ‘You become a part of nature’. And soon, solitude became a state of being that I began to crave in other areas of life—my online life.

Previously, I’d always been posting — photos, updates, and (what I believed to be) witty anecdotes. Then I slowed down. I was so stunned by my new situation that I had nothing to say. I didn’t want to say anything. I began logging out of my accounts and suddenly felt what it was like to be truly alone, rather than being alone and scrolling through the glowing, spectral presence, emotions and opinions of hundreds, thousands, millions of others. Suddenly, all this attention I’d not realised was distracted poured back into my immediate experience. The important clarification to make is that I no longer wanted to be distracted from my situation. I was somewhere I wanted to be and ‘logging out’ became something I looked forward to. It was easier to concentrate on my work. I was less anxious because my anxieties typically came from other people, not my immediate surroundings, not the immediate moment. I saw and experienced things that I didn’t tell anyone else about. They were mine and I absorbed them fully and in totality. I had spent the previous decade giving. Now, I was filling myself back up.

‘Logging out’ is a practice I continue, eight years on. Logging out of social media is one thing I feel totally confident in saying, ‘I am good at this’. Unless I have to be online to post something I log out of social media after work every night and I log out at weekends. I wasted so much time that now it is precious, and if I don’t want the days to slip away I must bring myself back down to earth. I must ground myself. Be here, now. Experience this. Admittedly, part of the experience of being alive today includes social media. It’s never been more important that our opinions are informed by the experience of others as well as our own, but, equally, it’s never been more difficult to hear our own voice, our own beliefs and opinions. Studies frequently show that, although connection is important, the more online we are – typically (though not always) – the more unbalanced we become in real life. It’s finding a balance and not letting one world take over, not letting the online world prevent us from seeing and experiencing this one fully.

Some of Jade’s tips on logging out:

Read more

Read more

Farrah Storr is today’s guest writer for The Hyphen. Farrah works as Head of Writer Partnerships at Substack and runs Things Worth Knowing which is one of my favourite reads. (If you love The Hyphen, you’ll love hers, and she recently interviewed me too.) I first met Farrah in 2018 when I interviewed her for the first time for Ctrl Alt Delete about her …

Read more

Subscribe now

Every so often I run a guest post from a new writer. My aim for The Hyphen is to occasionally showcase writers from all different ages, backgrounds and life experiences, alongside my own writing. This week, we have a guest column by student and Gen Z writer Sofia Shch (25), who runs the Quarter-Life Crisis Substack about the chaos of navigating life in …

Read more

Subscribe now

Claire Maxwell is a writer, with bylines including Harper’s Bazaar, Telegraph and ELLE and she writes a monthly Substack newsletter Joy Is Not Made To Be A Crumb. She is also a book publicist and has worked with authors such as Matt Haig, Bear Grylls, Lynne Tillman and Nancy Campbell. Here, she writes a piece for The Hyphen on how social media is not all bad, and can in fact add a big dollop of delight to everyday life.

A coffee mug atop a desk—ring-stained by mugs past. To the left of the image a book is open, its spine cracked and its pages face down in prayer. We can almost feel the breeze coming through the window, lifting the steam from the hot liquid as a beam of sunlight hits it just right. It is gas, it is liquid, it is light.

Next: 15 seconds of waves. The sky grey. This time, we can hear the wind and the water as it surges to its pinnacle, cracks, and smashes itself to pieces. Only to surge once again.

Next: two glasses of red wine, a half empty bottle, tapered cream-coloured candles and greedy hands reaching towards bowls of pasta, salad, and bread.

We swipe. We scroll.

When an elderly relative suggests that all young people do these days is glue their hands and their eyes to smartphones and post ill-considered opinions to Twitter, I smile—I know that’s not what it is at all. Or at least, it needn’t be. There is still a pervasive assumption that if you enjoy social media then you are wasting your time. That to acknowledge the very real negative aspects of the internet means to eschew it entirely. That if you find yourself reaching for your phone during the ad breaks of Love Island you need to quit cold turkey.

This view ignores the fact that we, like most things, contain multitudes—that we can be at once sickened by the effects of filters and apps like Facetune on teenagers’ mental health, while also getting a lot from the community and inspiration social media can provide.

I spend time with friends and family in real life, I work hard at a job I enjoy, I read books and watch true crime documentaries on Netflix. But I also—regularly—post and scroll through pictures of bookshelves doused in sunlight, roaring fires and homemade cakes and piles of blankets and cushions. Stacks of beaten up books, Scottish hills and beaches in the dead of winter; writers’ desks so cluttered they could only belong to a genius, writers’ desks so neat they could inspire a generation. And they make me feel something good, something nebulous—a mixture of joy and calm contentedness.

I probably am addicted, in the same way that I am addicted to reading or that first cup of coffee in the morning. I crave how it makes me feel. I’ve been considering the particular state of mind that certain books, films and music put me in. And that some Instagram accounts do too. It’s a high, of sorts. But it’s also deep relaxation. At once galvanising and sedative. It moves me. In that state of mind, I could weep at how wonderful it feels to stand on the beach with the rain on my face. I could write an essay. I could sing.

I’ve only really begun to notice and consider it in the last few years, having finally unfollowed the YouTubers, influencers and Kardashians whose content made me want to buy £100 foundation so my skin would look as light reflecting as theirs. Instead, I started following people who did Instagram in a different way. Who took photos of their actual life—a newspaper article they were reading and wanted to share, artwork from an exhibition they found particularly moving, a croissant so perfectly flaky it deserved to be immortalised. They were sharing an image or a short video as an ode to that moment. And in doing so they were conveying the preciousness of those very normal, very special moments—saying: these are what make up a life.

When I think about the kind of books that put me in that state of mind, they are always by writers that centre their prose in realism. Tessa Hadley describing her character’s curtains. Sally Rooney’s on holiday grilling fish and drinking cold white wine you can all but taste. Deborah Levy in her sparse Paris apartment.

Realism in art, literature and online, centres me in my life. It makes me thankful for the small—huge!—pleasures I experience every day and when I take and post a picture of the book I’m reading or my cat so sweet and snuggly under a blanket, it’s because those moments are everything to me. They are a digital version of J.B. Priestley’s book Delight, a collection of essays in which he details his personal small pleasures: a G&T enjoyed alone; frying sausages outdoors.

Before I sat down at my laptop to write this, I made a cup of tea in my favourite mug — strong with a good glug of whole milk. I filled my hot water bottle from the kettle and settled down at my desk, the afternoon sun drenching my pink office walls in a warm glow.

And though my hands felt dry and my hair needed a wash, I was pre-menstrual and grumpy about life admin that needed doing, I also felt pure delight. Recognition not of what I lack but what I have. I snapped a photo of my mug on my desk, uploaded it to Instagram, and then began to write.

A note from Emma:

Following accounts (like Claire’s) gave me a warm and visceral feeling of cosiness and relaxation while recovering from burnout. During that time, I didn’t want to see pictures of people’s achievements, but instead photos of comfort, cosiness, slow-life and wintering from underneath a blanket. Here are some of my favourite accounts:

Read more

Subscribe now

This is a guest column by Selina Barker, life design coach, author of the book Burnt Out: The exhausted person's six-step guide to thriving in a fast-paced world and the Goodbye Hello journals. She is also the creator of the Audible series The Career Change Coach and co-host of the Project Love podcast.

In February I did something which from the outside might have seemed completely mad: I turned down a double book (or rather journal) deal with one of the UK’s biggest publishers and chose to self-publish instead.

I hadn’t won the lottery, I hadn’t got a better deal and I hadn’t gone mad… I don’t think. I did it because, after three years of being an author in the publishing industry, I was unhappy and disappointed with how it left me feeling. And frankly I was getting bored of hearing myself go on and on about how disappointed I was with my experience whilst simultaneously doing nothing about it. So, I did something about it. 

I decided to walk away.

So, what exactly led me to making this big decision?

Read more

Subscribe now

Read more

Writer and podcaster Daisy Buchanan has been called “Jilly Cooper for the Instagram generation” for her refreshingly bold novels Insatiable and Careering. Here, she writes…

Read more

Subscribe now

This is a guest column from writer Sophia Jennings, a TV writer and essayist whose words have appeared in Rolling Stone, MTV and more. Here, she writes about how she quit her job during the pandemic and how it was writing for celebrities that — surprisingly — ended up saving her.

How ghostwriting for celebrities helped me find my voice
by Sophia Jennings

The other day I was scrolling through Twitter when I clicked on a link posted by a Very Famous Actor. The link led to an emotional essay about social inequality, the movie industry, and the actor’s own journey towards self-empowerment.

It was smart, funny, and unexpectedly touching. I loved it.

Until I realised I wrote it.

Let me explain. Like so many of us, I spent most of 2020 in a constant panic. After quitting my full-time job to become a TV writer, I found myself unemployed, broke, and living in my mum’s basement for the third national lockdown in the UK. How was I supposed to get a job on a show when nobody was hiring? And how was I supposed to get an interview if I couldn’t go out and meet people?

“Just keep writing,” people said, “and wait for things to calm down.”

Well, things didn’t calm down. So eventually, I stopped asking the world for a job and started telling the world exactly who I wanted to be.

“Hi, I am Sophia, and I am a writer. What can I do for you?”

I practiced saying it, then emailed it to over fifty people, one of whom was a talent manager. Her answer was…a lot. Both in the UK and America, I found that celebrities needed writers. As one UK manager confessed to me, talent are now expected to “do it all”—newsletters, podcasts, social media, and products, on top of their own jobs and impact initiatives. They can’t do it all. So they hire people like me to write as them. Here’s how I did it.

Read more

Subscribe now

Read more

This is a guest column from Bruce Daisley, Sunday Times number 1 bestselling author of The Joy Of Work and podcast host of work culture podcast Eat Sleep Work Repeat. His second book, Fortitude, about how we …

Read more

Subscribe now

Today’s brilliant guest column is about the awful moment where you realise you’ve been unfollowed. When someone unfollows me I used to privately brainstorm all the probable reasons they might have gone off me. Am I too self-absorbed? Too opinionated? Too much self-promotion? Is it because I tweeted a First World Problem? There are so many reasons why we worry about how we are perceived publicly— and there are many ways we can learn to accept things without ruminating too much. I really enjoyed this (humorous) piece on how to deal when the moment arises.

Anna Lind Thomas is a bestselling author, humorist and USA Today’s short list of funniest women authors. You can subscribe to her weekly letters on her Substack, True Story(ish).

The ridiculous emotional turmoil of discovering you’ve been unfollowed
by Anna Lind Thomas

I’d just given birth when I discovered I’d been unfollowed. Lucy slept in my arms, I was delirious and too hyped to sleep. Naturally, I was eager to see how my birth announcement on social media was performing. Everyone knows fresh babies are social media jackpots—even Steve, the guy you haven’t spoken to since college, will slap a like on it. It’s all quite satisfying, really.

Yet, as I scrolled through all the hearts, something felt curious. Years ago, I became acquaintances with a group of women at a conference. They were the generous type one could rely on for social charity, like your one aunt who’ll tap a like on literally everything you post. Yet, only one of them, Sarah, gave me the classic “Congrats!” in the comments. Where were the others?

I had a weird interaction with one of them months prior and she, along with the rest, slowly stopped engaging with me. But wouldn’t a picture of a newborn baby soften even the hardest of hearts? I searched her name. Big mistake. Slap! Right across the face. I’d been unfriended.

Read more

What is a ‘real’ friend anyway? By Claire Cohen

Making friends online is something we’ve been dabbling with for years — whether AOL or MSN messenger was your original chat room of choice. 

But when I began interviewing women for my book, I was surprised at just how many had started to form new friendships over social media, or via apps, in the wake of the…

Read more

This is a guest column for The Hyphen newsletter, by writer Chloë Ashby, whose debut novel Wet Paint — a book about friendship, guilt, grief and art — is out now.

Read more

This is a guest column for The Hyphen newsletter, by writer Kate Leaver, whose book Good Dog — a book celebrating the dogs who change, and sometimes even save, our lives — is out now.

Just a reminder that you can support the work that goes into this newsletter by becoming a paying subscriber. You’ll receive all the things, including a monthly book club p…

Read more

I’m thrilled to say I’m now accepting guest columns for The Hyphen newsletter, starting with this brilliant piece by author Laura Price, whose debut novel Single Bald Female — a beautiful story of hope, friendship, career and a shock diagnosis of breast cancer — is out now.

Read more