Truly Madly Deeply.

Un Déjeuner à la Campagne

From “Un Déjeuner à la Campagne”, Hachette Cuisine. Photography: Joann Pai. Styling: Trish Deseine

Welcome to all new subscribers and followers!

After a lot of meandering, from now on this blog will take a more personal direction. In an online world dominated by the murky rules and filters of influence, last year, weary of the awkwardness and expense of “producing content” that simply did not fit my life, I simply stopped producing it. Financially, it was a risk to rely solely on my exhausting house-flipping. But the content gigs all felt too contrived, too invasive, too much part of money-spinning agendas which did not fairly share the spoils, and had nothing to do with me, or, at a pinch, perhaps some version of me from twenty years ago.  It was no coincidence, either, that I was at last emerging from a long  relationship which had sucked all sense of self from my bones. But precisely because I’d been there before, I knew what to do. I hunkered down, forgave myself for falling in love (duh), and got to work. I quickly renovated my latest French country house (on the market here and here), finished my new French book (out this week!) built up stock for my little brocante store and made myself stronger again with the love and help of a multitude of amazing women. Thank you, girlfriends. You, (and of course, hair) are everything.

Substack is a virtual room of one’s own,  and I feel I should honour the freedom of that. I want to make it mine - as I do all my spaces - to live and write in it the way I see fit, with as few outside influences as possible. Freedom, I have decided, will be my new luxury. I’ll do regular, chitchatty posts with a recipe or two and a new experiment. It’s sort of memoir with recipes, written around my books as I enter my fourth decade of writing and publish my thirtieth book - with more to come. I think I’ll call it, “Eras”? No, only joking, probably, “Cooking my Books”. More on that soon.

For now, I’m dreaming of my next new place to live. I’ve just signed a promesse de vente for a small farm (below) with two acres, badly needing love, back in my much-loved Perche region in Normandy, for which I have high hopes and a million ideas - all involving daily sniffing of retired ponies’/horses’ warm necks.

And so starts another slightly nerve-wracking summer of baking banana bread for visits, pompous notaires, slippery estate agents and simultaneous sale and purchase coordination. I really hope this will be the last one for quite a few years.  

Most importantly, in a few months’ time, I will turn sixty. My third act starts this summer, and as Jodie Foster so eloquently explains, it’s utterly wonderful. I’m also now a grandmother. And seeing the father of my children with our son and our grandson together for the first time a few weeks ago, was a deeply moving moment. I haven’t fully unpacked it all yet, but it very much felt like a chapter was finally closing, peacefully. As if I’d done my job - far from perfectly - but nonetheless, it was done.  As if some kind of permission had been given to leave the heaviest parts of my roles of daughter,  wife and mother in the past. As if at last this life was truly, madly, deeply, my own. À bientôt, je vous embrasse. T