Hello friends,

I’m writing to you today after quite the day at my job at the bookshop. It involved a very cute dog in a person’s handbag, a customer bringing my colleague flowers to soothe her from a recent loss, and a person who was desperate to get a copy of Bel Canto. When I finally found it she said, ‘Oh. I hate that cover. You don’t have one with another cover?’ My feet are sore. My head is full. I’m worried I didn’t turn the heater off. Should I go back and check? I say halfheartedly to myself as I get into my PJs and deadbolt my front door.

All that to say, I freaking love this job. Sure, I’d like to get paid more, and there was that time a kid went to the toilet on the carpet. But I love when customers explain their reasons for needing a bag (‘I want to keep it separate from the meat I just bought at the supermarket’). I love when someone picks up Toilets of the World at the counter and I have to say, ‘Yes, isn’t that so funny!’ for the billionth time. And I love the job of connecting a person to words that might lift them out of something, or push them towards something, or just feel a kind of home. Words that might astonish, comfort, hold, excite, thrill, inspire. Yes, a bookshop exists to sell things and employ people, but there is a magic that happens in a place that is a conduit for storytelling, a place that takes what an author does, what a publisher does, and works out how to connect it to their customers. To be a translator between industry and community.

I say all this out of appreciation for what you do, as well as from a place of understanding as to the tsunami of books you must be across every single month. I too have a teetering TBR pile that casts a shameful shadow on my life and my lounge room.

Which brings me to this new thing I’ve done, a book called No One’s Looking. If I wrote my first book Lost & Found because my mum had died and I was looking for a way to make sense of it, I wrote No One’s Looking because I started thinking more about Mum’s life than her death. Thinking about the ways in which our lives were both parallel and diverted. The feeling that I could’ve been her, and she could’ve been me.

I turned forty. I didn’t have a partner, or a child, or any aspirations for either. I didn’t really know anyone who was also choosing a life like that. What did that look like? It felt uncharted territory.

Also, I was forty, but I wasn’t dead. I wondered, is it possible to have a sex life if you’re a single person? Without having a partner? What would that look like?

So I did what I always do when I have big questions - I started reading. When I tell you I went down some unspeakable rabbit holes (if we meet I’ll tell you everything). One book was Girls & Sex by Peggy Orenstein (it’s gone out of favour a little bit these days but there’s a really fascinating reply-book in The Second Coming by Carter Sherman). In it was a line about how women from a really early age are taught to be desired but not how to desire. We all know about the male gaze, but to have it put like that really electrified my brain. Because it felt like it was about more than sex. Do women get taught how to WANT at all? Did Mum know how to want for herself? Do I?

And then: What does it do to us to be born into a culture like this? That forces us to constantly look at ourselves from the outside in, to the point of hypervigilance? What does that hypervigilance do to our lives, our bodies, our relationships? Our nervous systems, our inner voices?

Two characters appeared for me, sisters in their 40s. Susan - the oldest, passive, agreeable - and Vicki - the youngest, ambitious and forthright. They lived just down the road from each other in an unnamed Australian suburb and had always been close, but had become a little distant as they grew up.

I set the book over the month of January, so it’s loose, sweaty days, encroaching bushfires and tennis and cricket on the telly. At the beginning of the book, Vicki spirals when she overhears her 17 year-old daughter talking about her own sex life with her best friend. Also at the beginning, Susan is shocked when her husband tells her he’s unhappy and wants an open marriage. She is frantically cleaning the house as a way of processing, and finds a large purple dildo at the back of her cupboard, a gift from her sister a decade ago. As Vicki starts to obsess about the safety of her daughter, and Susan develops a relationship with this (quite talkative) dildo, the two sisters don’t realise that through these separate journeys - separate journeys that involve a true crime podcast, tennis porn, a highly inappropriate nipple flash, a shaved head, amongst many other things - they’re actually finding their way back to each other.

If I were to put my bookseller hat on, I would put it in the Miranda July All Fours Universe, not that (very brilliant!!) book, but adjacent to it. A perimenopausal novel, or a second puberty/coming-of-age book for women in their 40s.

If you get a chance to read it - thank you. If you don’t - hopefully this spiel helps. And hope to see you on the road sometime.

Brooke x