The Best Launch Week!
Updates, thank you's & thoughts on the mainstream media...
Ah I feel so lucky. The UK launch of GIRLS® has been amazing! I don’t usually post updates here but it’s been such a surreal week that I didn’t want to miss marking the milestone. So a few highlights:
The Free Press also kindly published an exclusive excerpt of the book, adapted from the chapter Detached. Here I talk about divorce, dating influencers, and how my generation was ultimately raised to doubt love:
There are a lot of other things I’d like to say about the last few weeks. Talking to the mainstream media has been an interesting experience…and seeing the wildly different interpretations of the book (and interpretations of me!) Of course the irony is I am turned into a product, a personal brand, which is new, and weird, and something I try to resist but seems to be part of trying to get a book out now. Maybe that’s something I’ll write more about someday, that tension. I have many thoughts…
Something very interesting to me is that journalists seem desperate to stick me in a category. People complain that we are all so tribal these days but my God, you try to say something real and complex and so few want to hear it, they just want to package you up for an audience. Ironically this is something I write about in the book, that it’s very hard to figure yourself out and work through things when people insist on labelling you. Nothing can be complicated; all must be clickable. I write about consumerism so can’t possibly sell a book, I write about conservatism so must be far-right, I write about girls so must hate men (“makes men rich”??) I try to explain carefully that I don’t personally use Instagram or Facebook or TikTok but am on Substack and Twitter to share my writing (Which becomes FREYA HAS LOGGED OFF FOR GOOD). I explain that I’m curious about Christianity not because I grew up with it but mostly because I watched my family fall apart and think something important is being lost there, but I’m wary of making it part of my personal brand (Translation: FREYA THINKS GOD IS THE ANSWER.) I guess I just wanted to get across here that this is all very unlike me, and it’s all a bit weird.
The strange part is that I am barely asked anything about the book. Often it’s an interrogation of me—the hypocrite, the extremist, the bimbo, anything, anything other than a writer who could actually care about these issues. All I am is an influencer trying to make it. My book has hundreds of footnotes because I take the topic very seriously, and then I have journalists asking me questions like if I’ve had Botox (no) and if I know who the prime minister is (yes). (Somehow I am a dumb bimbo and also a dangerous extremist with an evil political agenda at the same time??)
I think ultimately it’s all been a reminder of something I say in the book, over and over, which is that all these simulations and substitutes, all of this online noise, none of it is real. Don’t believe everything you read about someone; everything is entertainment. This is something I need to remember too.
Anyway! All this to say: I feel more grateful than ever for this Substack and my readers here. I’ve also had so many great conversations and lovely reviews and heartfelt responses from fathers to teenage girls to young men, which makes it all so worth it, and to be a published author has been my dream since I can remember. So I can’t thank you all enough.
Back to writing and more soon!
- Freya x
Humans love simplistic narratives, heroes to root for, villains to boo, a neat story tied up in bow.
Well done, what an achievement. Good observation that the very people telling us to be less tribal and more authentic can’t help themselves but cram you into a pigeon hole.
Congratulations again on the book!