Daisy Buchanan

gets sent to rehab after a cocaine overdose and thinks, you know, well, everybody is a little bit wild and this is just what life is like in Manhattan.

They've made a mistake and I shouldn't be in rehab at all.

I'll just treat it like a lovely luxury spa holiday, as is the holiday of the title.

And the really stunning reveal, I mean, it's Marion Keys.

Every time I read her and reread her, I find something new and she blows me

my mind because she's so deliciously and addictively readable and she really really carries you every step of the way with her but she's doing something so quietly profound and unlike any other book I've read we know more about Rachel before she does and it's this really funny and moving exploration of addiction moving along and I can see um all of Armistead Mopan's books I think I've got this is um a shelf of the big hardbacks Harrisonbury

tattered paperbacks elsewhere but as a teenager I just loved those Tales of the City books so much and I couldn't believe I'd never seen anything as thrilling as San Francisco in the 70s and it's so smart because it starts with this main character Marianne who is quite naive she's come from Cleveland she doesn't really know what's going on she's quite sort of she's got a real midwestern sensibility and suddenly she is in this sort of thrilling queer subculture and

Everything about those books is just so inclusive and warm and filled with empathy.

And, you know, I think you should read them in schools.

You know, they're quite shocking, quite wild, but they just really, really encourage this sort of essential culture of kindness.

A few years ago, I discovered Eve Babbitts, who it's very much in Daisy Jane's territory.

It's 70s Los Angeles.

Eve Babbitts was kind of an it girl who wrote these beautiful, beautiful essays.

And I suppose she was a little bit like a West Coast Dorothy Parker, but

that's not quite it and she is still alive she's still with us she was she has been remembered as famously the lover and sort of muse of Jim Morrison but there's so much more to her than that and Eve's Hollywood is her sort of her book of essays about her her wild times and being you know associating with all sorts of fabulous people and it's very glamorous and very squalid but then

her book Black Swans is about her sober life and how she becomes addicted to learning how to tango and when I think about all of those sort of you know the William Burroughs-y writers I've never really got on with the beats and how I think Eve Babbitt writes hedonism better than anyone I know but also she writes about negotiating that sober landscape so well I think I'd

There are a couple of novels that she wrote.

I'm just having a look.

There's L.A.

Woman.