Love Lives - Writer Emma Forrest: ‘Trump’s election made me want to be celibate’

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

Our guest this week is film director, screenwriter and novelist Emma Forrest.Emma joins us to discuss her second memoir, Busy Being Free, which follows the breakdown of her marriage, her move from the glitz and glamour of LA to a tiny flat in north London, and her commitment to a period of celibacy (at least partially inspired by the election of Donald Trump).We chat about what it means to start again, life outside of marriage and the male gaze, and the “existential crisis” faced by a generation who grew up in the age of internet porn.Catch Love Lives on Independent TV and YouTube, as well as all major social and podcast platforms.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/millenniallove. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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I was getting divorced right when Trump was elected. I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that the malignant presence of Trump beyond all the horrifying political things he did. A weak romantic damage. Hello and welcome to Love Lives, a podcast from The Independent where I, Olivia Petter, will be asking guests about the different loves of their lives. Today I am delighted to be joined by the brilliant memoirist and writer Emma Forrest. Emma is the loves of their lives. Today I am delighted to be joined by the brilliant memoirist and writer Emma Forrest. Emma is the author of four novels. She has developed numerous film and TV projects. Her latest book, Busy Being Free, charts how Emma traded her Hollywood marriage

and LA mansion for an attic flat in North London. I absolutely adored it and I'm so excited to be able to speak to Emma about it today in a little bit more depth, in addition to hearing all about the loves of her life. So let's get started. Hi, Emma, how are you? I'm muggy, but optimistic. That's a very good description. So as I said in the intro, I absolutely loved Busy Being Free. Can you tell us a bit more about it and what led you to writing it? loved Busy Being Free. Can you tell us a bit more about it and what led you to writing it? Ooh, okay. So I guess to some people it will be considered a sequel to Your Voice in My Head, which was my first memoir. And there's a decade between them, actually. I kind of like the idea of allowing yourself as a novelist, one memoir per decade, um, seems like a good ratio. Uh, and,

per decade um seems like a good ratio uh and uh it's uh you know what my publisher was saying all the time they get submitted books that say in the vein of fleabag in the vein of fleabag and that just means it's a book by or about a confused romantically jumbled young woman and i guess what isn't so far off is what happens to Fleabag next? You know, what happens when you hit middle age and romantic obsession and being guided by romantic obsession and the cities you choose to live in and the clothes you buy and the air tickets you buy or being led by love how does that look on a middle-aged person and uh for me I thought a lot about the Elizabeth Taylor retort when she was asked why she'd never done it's not a retort it's her response when she was explaining why she's never done a nude scene was once you've taken all your clothes off there's nothing left to do but put them back on.

So for me, it made sense, given that I'd been sexually active since I was 16, to hit 40 and walk away from it all and not engage in sex, in romance, in dating. I held no hand except my child's for five years um I didn't really feel comfortable accepting invitations to dinner parties because I didn't want to be around it got very addictive actually being alone um once that shuts down you draw a power from it and it's really scary the idea of relinquishing it and going back into the world of romance that's so interesting to frame it that way because it's like we talk about love addiction and sex addiction but I can imagine when you get so far along in the process of the inverse of it it then becomes its own kind of addiction like you said and it's very hard to bring yourself back into yeah and find a balance because the idea you know the archetype of the

woman hitting their stride in their 14th and being at the peak of their sexual power i found absolutely to be true so if you don't share it with anyone then you're hoarding it and that feels kind of great yeah that is interesting i want to ask you about that actually because everyone i talk to always tells me you know when you turn 35 that's when women really get their most sexually confident and you know because you feel more confident in your skin more confident about your body you just don't overthink things as much why where do you think that comes from is it is it about just giving less of a shit or is it about being more kind of I hate the word empowered but I guess more kind of sure of yourself and who you are. I think it's about being too tired to perform. Like life does get literally more tiring,

especially when you have responsibilities, you know, like the itemized bills and the child care and the working with great joy when you're able to work rather than procrastinating that happens when you have a kid um and so I think you're just too tired to perform and when I look back so much of my early sexual history was what I would give in exchange for being told, for being chosen, for being told I was pretty, for being told I was attractive and being so attuned to the shapes, physical and emotional that I should should be making um and just I think becoming middle-aged you just you're too tired to fake to fake it you know in in all the ways that that means and and what was it that led you to that decision to have a period of celibacy following your divorce was it something that was kind of very intentional that you you know you got divorced and you thought right this is something that I need to do for a fixed amount of time or was it more just something that kind of happened organically and then you're like this feels really good I'm going to keep going I think

I wanted to go back to my factory setting that's one way of looking at it I think another is the idea of Alice coming back to her real size after being, you know, on her adventures. But what's your real size? Like you just need silence and space to remember what shape and size you were before. Because I know I was in really good shape when I met my husband. I mean, actually, it's interesting because I was in insane physical shape and good mental shape. I lived in Los Angeles right before Uber and Lyft became a thing. And I didn't know how to drive. So I would walk up and down unwalkable, like literal mountains.

You know, everyone in my life at one point, I'd go to the doctors and they'd say, I think I saw you walking the hard shoulder of the motorway, you know, the freeway. I was like, yeah, that was me. And so I was insane physical shape. Um, and, uh, I think it was a big deal that I was getting divorced right when Trump was elected because he became, especially given that I was living in Los Angeles, an emblem of, you know, the man who's openly repulsed by middle-aged women as I was living in Los Angeles, an emblem of, you know, the man who's openly repulsed by middle-aged women as I was turning 40. And a man who is physically repulsive, who was hovering everywhere. Just you could see how much his wife didn't want to be around him. And I think that probably had a trickle.

I swear to God, I think it had a trickle down effect on relationships that were hanging in the balance that may otherwise have survived. Like you look at Michelle and Barack and how much, you know, the documentary pictures where it's like he's put his coat on her shoulders. They're into each other, like they're hot for each other. And I also imagine that there were relationships in the balance that had the trickle down reward of the turn on bright light from them. You know, like I know that sounds kind of crazy, but I don't think it's beyond the realm of possibility that the malignant presence of Trump beyond all the horrifying political things he did wreak romantic damage on people um on couples and um I ended up moving to London and that was a very different thing where it also remember I'd been married so I had not experienced apps at all like that was the whole period that I was in one relationship and I think I probably stayed in the relationship longer than I would have otherwise because I was in one relationship. And I think I probably stayed in the relationship longer than

I would have otherwise, because I was so aware that were the only way people meet. But in America, in the tail end of my marriage, I would be approached by men at the gym or in cafes or at Pilates. People there still had conversation. Um, and I I got to London it was a completely different culture it was like I exited the plane and any level of attraction I had had was like gone like left at customs as I walked through Heathrow and I even experimented because a couple of months after I got back in London and no man had spoken to me or looked at me I had to go for work to Atlanta in America and I got off the plane it was like attention may all the time it was so crazy so um it is like that though I noticed that too my dad lives in the states and whenever I'm there I mean I don't actually get touched up there either but but you notice there's

much more of a an openness like a social openness there than there is here. And I think with dating, it's just not that much of a big deal to approach someone you think is attractive and start talking to them. Whereas here, someone does that to you, you look at them like they're completely bonkers. And it is a shame because like you said,

apps are the only option and they come with so many hurdles. And it's such a complicated game because you're dealing with these like cyborgs of humans trying to humanize people. And it's impossible. I don't know if you remember I say in the book, I think the next vanguard of apps will be, I need to smell someone before I can agree to meet up with them. Like I want to know what their scent is. That's really important.

I can't deal with that part yeah it's incredibly difficult and so when you when you came out of this kind of period of celibacy how did you feel like you had returned to your factory settings I did I felt good um and again I timed it there was the invasion of the Capitol. And that felt like, you know, I had gotten through Trump's term. I told myself that I wouldn't date for that. Once I realized I hadn't been dating, I was like, oh, I feel good. And I'm going to stick with this. And this is the amount of time I've set myself. It's I'll wait till he's gone, which I did. There was the invasion of the Capitol. And I think I started dating and met a really lovely guy

that I dated for a year and a half, like pretty soon after that, like weeks after the invasion of the Capitol felt like the drawbridge has come down. Yeah. And I mean, because it's something that I think lots of people are now kind of experimenting with themselves. Like I remember at the start of 2023, there were loads of tweets about like Gen Z people as well saying

I'm gonna try celibacy yeah for this year this is my year of celibacy and it's an interesting thing that I think women in particular are being drawn to and I wonder what it is emotionally and psychologically that is kind of telling us to to stop and like you know kind of withdraw from it is it is it a form of like control over over trying to get control over an uncontrollable situation it's peace as well and it's I look I really like being but when I say by myself I mean like even if I'm in a relationship I like time in a day to be by myself. And I'm really lucky because I have a kid who's temperamentally similar in a lot of ways that, you know, she'll like to go off and play Lego for an hour and a half and I can read a book for an hour and a half

in a different room and know we're both safe, sort of like satellites orbiting each other. And I guess that's my dream as well for a romantic relationship is that um but I think it was also really lovely not having to feel like I needed I talk about it in the book the things you have to do to keep being picked for the team after a certain age and to just throw down the ball and say i'm not playing you know and the fear is instilled in women as well about fertility and about time you know time and being put on the shelf and all of that but a year goes really fast yeah and it's really useful

yeah i yeah i know a lot of people that are doing it and i think it's actually a really really beneficial thing to do particularly now like the games that you mentioned like you know with dating apps the games have never been more they've never been more complicated um you write in the book that it's men you desire sexually but women that occupy your romantic fascinations i'm really interested by what you mean by that and why do you think that is um i've always been that way i've always found it incredibly hard to sit through a film that doesn't have women in it and i can't judge the level of its art if it died like i can't well i know i had to walk out of the revenant because there's no women in it yeah um i know that the idea of the remake of Dead Ringers with two Rachel Weisz's is like

pure heaven relaxation to me to get to look at her face double every week for I hope it's an hour-long show yeah is just a real source of calm um for me and when I met when I wrote and directed on together I cast Jemima Kirk it was that same feeling of like here's a face that I can dream into I can dream into women's faces in a way that I can't with men I don't get the same um this is gonna sound really strange but there are particular female faces and no I'm saying I'm noting for myself I'm saying faces not bodies and that is actually what I mean that feels like getting into a hot bath at the end of a day and just being like oh my god just immersing yourself in them as a way like it's very simple I can't dream into men the way I can with

women I know what you mean about Jemima Kirk is that I can actually really she has that very striking yeah it's a very distinctive look you don't it doesn't kind of conjure up the same feelings all right can I give you a good example so I remember when I was living in Los Angeles I think I am more um uh compelled by female beauty than any men I've ever known so when I was living in LA I remember for a period at the chateau maman jodie turner smith the actress who if you don't know her it it's not normal how beautiful she is and she was working as a hostess really yeah like the maitre d who would show you to your table at the restaurant. This is years ago. And I remember just seeing her and being like, this isn't, something's not right. I obviously didn't know who she was, but I knew that I was meant to be looking into her face

and that she wasn't meant to be leading me to my table. That's so interesting. Yeah. And I think I've had several quite startling experiences like that in my life two weeks before I got married I was chosen in LA for jury duty on a case that was about a wife who murdered her husband during a domestic argument like that's a play isn't it too right before you get married that is such a good thing for a writer and it was it was incredibly grueling and gnarly and disturbing and you had to look at horrific autopsy pitch it was really nasty and it went on and on and on like it was going right up days before my marriage and there was a moment where

they called to the witness stand a woman who happened to be beautiful and I remembered it just gave me and I was looking around to see if other jurors had the same response just a moment to get back on my feet like just to catch my breath am I broken I think I know it's weird I know what you mean it's like there's something comforting about it and like is it is it because that's what we've all been conditioned to want for ourselves and then feel therefore like totally enchanted when we see it in the flesh because we want to be that or do we want to or we just have like admiration for that or respect i don't know what it is but it's like that i feel like that's what we've been sold as

like the paragon of our existence is to be beautiful so when you see it yeah yeah yeah it's personal isn't it i mean for me a lot of it like again to go back to jemima or rachel vice they're very extreme features like the eyes are extreme the eyebrows are extreme the lips the map all of it it's not like it's the opposite of a barbie where everything which is i think in a maybe my perception is that in brit pop culture, the bobby look is considered on a wide scale the most desired, where everything's in the right place. Maybe I'm not being fair, but that's how it feels just like reading the paper. Everything's the right size and unobtrusive and petite. And there's an order to it that does nothing for me.

You know, it's the thing, it's the Sophia Loren thing of like, when you take it all apart, it's too much, you know, and you put it all together and it's like, just take me away. The world is overwhelming. Just let me look at you for two hours. At one point in the book book you write that you spent the years between 16 and 26 feeling a debt of gratitude to the men who wanted you that is i think such a common experience i know from the listeners of this podcast that's a really common experience because they tell me i've experienced that it's you know it goes into what we're talking about how you know we're conditioned to a female beauty is this kind of social professional currency. And I wonder what travels during the era of internet porn because a hundred million percent um girls younger than me a generation younger than me um are really confused about what they're into, what they want, and what their boundaries are.

And that, I think, is from talking to them about things being replicated that have been seen on a screen, on a small screen, even worse, you know. So I think I would be in a lot more trouble. I don't, that is unfathomable to me navigating that it reminds me of did you see there was this big debate on twitter recently about choking yeah and about like that it's so it's been so interesting reading the dialogue around it because there was like an older man who wrote a column being outraged that this was something that women would do it that men were doing to women and then there are some women who say they really enjoy it and then there are so many other women who say that it's the most normal thing in the world and

men and they don't like it but they kind of deal with it because it's so normalized and men often do it without asking and that's the difficult yeah there's no consent it's it's so it's so wild and that's obviously something that must come from porn well i think um well there's a brilliant book actually called female chauvinist pigs by ariel levy that came out probably 20 years ago now but it talks about so if you're my age if you're in your 40s the influence of growing up under madonna is really important because it it was essentially you can do whatever you want with whoever you want to do it with, which is a really different message from you should appear sexually available

to whoever is interested in you. Really different. So that by the time you get to, do you remember Girls Gone Wild, which is like turn of the, is that like 2000, something like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. She did, Ariel Levy did a chapter where she went on tour with girls gone wild and you know you get like sorority girls drunk at parties who agree to masturbate on camera for girls gone wild and this girl beating herself up she felt really bad that she couldn't come on camera and and the author being like well were you turned

on yeah and that had not crossed her mind and I think you were now looking at potentially a generation of of girls going through that existential crisis yeah and speaking of power dynamics your first memoir your voice in my head it examines this relationship with this kind of powerful person in the public eye and in this book you obviously write about your divorce from ben who is a famous actor i want to ask you a bit about being with someone who has that ostensible power of celebrity and the power that we grant celebrities and just how that affects you in in terms of your relationship and having that like added level of external scrutiny and observation let me think about that um i mean i remember yeah with your voice in my head it's definitely feels like a kind of magical realist uh test when your heartbreak is writ large on you know posters

on the underground and then it's sort of amazing when it goes away eventually and like you run into each other in real life and everything's fine and um you see the movies with it no longer being the person that you know you were so entwined with entranced by mesmerized by but it's all sort of an i think that book really connected because by dint of um the guy that i felt heartbroken by being a movie star um it's just a writ large version of how people feel when they're heartbroken and um how big it feels and how haunting it feels those were all just symbolic to the readers who yeah grasped that book you know the idea of like that when you are on your daily travels to work they are there on the walls haunting you I've always thought that that's why that book hit because it's obviously like not relatable at all to be with a movie star so that's not what it

was about it was about um the the haunting I think but that's what I find so interesting about it because it's like you said it's it's a very real experience but it's it's so magnifying these feelings that everyone has because to anyone in love with someone yeah that person is a movie star yeah that person is someone's movie star and like you know even if they're not on a billboard somewhere they're always in a place in your head and and yeah to that point what if their gaze falls on you that means something and if their gaze is no longer on you who are you then well exactly but that's what i think is dangerous because then that you give that person this power that is just like because again it magnifies everything it's

like you've been chosen not just by a regular person by someone who really matters yeah yeah and that's kind of psychologically yeah no but i do understand with the with the fullness of time with 10 years from the publication of that book, that that's what was affecting people was that just by writing about a breakup with a huge star, you're writing in a very accessible way, counterintuitively, about just how it feels to navigate heartbreak. as it happens. Hundreds of wildfires are burning. Be the first to know what's going on and what that means for you and for Canadians. This situation has changed very quickly. Helping make sense of the world when it matters most. Stay in the know. CBC News.

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launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com. Now let's move on to discuss the loves of your life. So you are wearing the first one i'm wearing a fifi shashnil um angora sweater i have do you know what when i went to pick it out today i was kind of mortified by how many i have um i have colors that i didn't remember really it's really it taps into a lot of things for me what you'll see when I go today I will leave Angora on your studio chair I like the idea that you a person leaves a mark good or bad like when you leave a man in the morning that they could be like oh that that was from her or like fuck say you know like I kind of don't care if I leave an irritating or pleasing mark. I just like something being residual.

I'm very, very tactile. I've always grown up with cats. I've always had them. And so in the person I'm attracted to and in myself, touch and softness and furriness and all of that is really important to me like I remember having a boyfriend who I was crazy attracted to and then one day he showed up to pick me up and he'd put gel in his hair and it was so distressing to me that I could barely speak because the idea of having to touch that and not touching the texture yeah that I was used

to and that I when I'm into a guy I know how their hair feels from like three different angles I know how it feels at the nape of their neck I know how it feels above their ears all of that stuff is really important to me I visually love the sweater girl look um Twin Pe peaks was on tv first run when i was i think 12 i think around 12 or 13 so like a really pivotal age and um the big sex symbol from that show was audrey horn who was uh a uh wicked uh school girl slash femmeale who, I think they were all meant to be about 17, you know, American high schools from Greece to Twin Peaks. It's like, who is this 37 year old divorcee playing a 17 year old? But you know what I mean? Like she, she was amazing. She was so beautiful, that Sherilyn Fenn. Um, and what David Lynch was doing and what he pretty much always does

is his take on the golden age of Hollywood look you know that's also what he was doing with the sweaters he put um Naomi Watson in uh Mulholland Drive um so Twin Peaks was very very sweater girl heavy direct callback to 50 to 40s and 50s movies that I then fell down a rabbit hole and got very, very into. Yeah, the Sweater Girl was a real classic pin-up look that works if you're, I'm pretty much anyone, but I was curvy as a teenager before I was ready to be.

And it was a way, I think, of transitioning into embracing that. And simultaneously in pop culture, you had Riot Grr, you had Courtney Love, you had a band I really love, The Breeders, where Kim and Kelly Deal would wear probably, now I'm thinking about it um for economic reasons all those emergent um riot girl singers were thrifting um we were wearing fantastic 1950s thrift store sweater beaded sweaters um real sort of grandma sweaters and the look that Courtney Love did that was similar um and the rat girl was doing with with the like the the slips and that was also all 50s but less

um conducive to English weather so sweaters ideal perfect became sort of a signature for me I never left it behind and then I realized once I was married and marriage my marriage didn't feel like a good fit to me that I was still collecting various sweaters whenever I could and that maybe they were a weird attempt to cling to a kind of 50s housewife domesticity look like I started to question why I was so attached to them and tell us about the second love of your life the film that you chose I chose Paper Moon the Peter Bogdanovich movie starring Ryan O'Neill and Tatum O'Neill um she won I believe she remains the youngest ever Oscar winner she was 10 when she won the best supporting actress Oscar for Paper Moon um it's a father-daughter road hijinks road movie um in depression era middle america mainly through kansas and it's in black and white it's visually

absolutely beautiful but the emotional layers of her meeting this man at her mother's funeral wondering if he's her father you know because they really are father and daughter, that he is her father, him refusing to accept it, but in his way, by the end, accepting it, even though he's still in denial. You know, the cinematic classic of the wise beyond their years child, with her purity and her heartbreak under her wisecracks. In terms of the humor, the dialogue, and the visuals and the supporting characters and the way they're shot, it's a massive influence on the Coen brothers,

because I am a human with a beating heart I love. And it's a film that is really really funny um really charming you can't really walk away from because it's so much fun but it is also sort of quietly devastating and in real life it did devastate Tate Monial's life um her memoir is one of the most like it really felt very unwell after reading her memoir um how much she wanted to have a relationship with her father how she did that film thinking that it would give her the relationship she dreamt of with her father and how the acclaim she won for it um he's dead so who gives a fuck about you know even mincing words now it enraged him and he was horrific to her horrible to her um never forgave her um absolutely brutal you wrote in in your email

when you get when you sent that to us that you know the film of as a memoirist made you you know you've thought a lot about what of your personal life is worth sacrificing in the name of great art how do you make that decision and in terms of what to sacrifice and do you think it's always a sacrifice okay so what I always do the great thing well no the the difficult thing but also kind of the great thing with writing books is that there is as you know a minimum of a year between turning in and it coming out um there's a nice through line for me in having written and directed a movie the time that i took in the edit room and how much i enjoy I always feel like write it and see if a year later it feels worthy of any blowback it could cause. And if I am writing about people in my life and I care about those people and they've been good to me, of course, I always, well, not of course, a lot of people don't do this. I always give it to them to see if they want changes. And the reactions over the years have been really interesting.

I even had a friend who I adored, who I gave it to, and he's like, that's not how it went down. And I was like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. What happened? I'll correct it. He's like, no, that's not how it went down, but don't change it. You're a writer. Interesting. Keep it the way it is um which was really fascinating um and um i think it has to be a balance between stuff that will be useful for other people to read and stuff that's actually useful for yourself to unpick on the page and make safe stuff that if you don't write it down and write it down well is just pain whereas once it's safe

on the page it's pain that's been burned as an offering to the gods that's what I'm aiming for how do you feel about the difference because you've written novels as well and obviously a film how do you feel about the difference between writing memoir and writing fiction well I guess incorporating because I mean I'm writing my first novel now a lot of it is fictionalized experiences that I've had and it's a very different way of writing about like your life directly and then also and then taking something that's happened to you and turning it into a story but it still comes from you well so my favorite novel I've written is Royals which is the novel that came before this memoir and I wrote it because there was stuff in my personal life that I was really wrestling with really really troubled by, but I couldn't write it as memoir. That was not something I was able to do. And so I reversed genders. I changed decades. I completely,

through the stuff that was bothering me, through the lens of total imagination, and it gave me the power back that i needed and the healing that i needed um and then pragmatically it was sort of interesting to have written for the first time ever as a man instead of as a woman um and to see that it got the best reviews of any of my novels. Interesting. It may just be that it was better writing. Like I'm not discounting that at all, but I was also interested in doing that experiment. And tell us about your third and final.

I bought it for you. I'm so pleased you did. Okay, so I have a facialist in, when I was living in Los Angeles called Terry Lawton, who is a very fancy A-list, facialist of the stars waiting list to get in, who I have not seen in the flesh probably, I want to say, in eight years. Oh, really? want to say in eight years oh really but she remembers my skin and she makes me my own personal she makes all of her clients who want it their own personal face cream now this is very cool

because if you see it says face cream which is like wearing a t-shirt that says sport yeah you know like a shirt that says rock um and it works now that this cream is alluring and freakish to me because when i run out of it when i don't have it i look older um and you have incredible skin i have really damn good skin yeah i really know i'm 46 i have really good skin apart from when the face cream runs out um and with and i don't know the content i know from another client so this is a very magical this is the closest i have to an elixir a potion in my life um i know from another client of hers she says oh yeah those those creams that it's stem cell cream and it has um baby's foreskins in it that's what she told me and have not investigated it but i'm fine with that that's fine who gives a shit

completely fine with it one it's reusing which as we all know is good for the planet um two I think it's really kind of awesome that I moved from Los Angeles to England carrying foreskins potentially knowing I was moving back to the country where they don't circumcise um every time I go to LA I pick up another pot of it and anytime a friend is coming from LA I have them bring me one and then you know the incredible selfishness of borders shutting down with the pandemic and being like how am I gonna get my fucking face clean um and I remember being really amazed to read in Dita Von Teese's Beauty Guide, a book I highly recommend. She's an intelligent woman and a beautiful woman. Is that you should never be, you should only be buying your face creams from your facialist or the dermatologist. because when you're buying from Dior or Estee Lauder or Chanel,

what you are paying for is the contract they have with an A-list star. That's the price of the cream is the $12 million a year that they're paying to Charlize Theron or whatever. So that has nothing to do with the content of the cream and it's basically useless for your personal skin. I feel really good that terry though i haven't seen her in so many years it's like it's such a magical weird potion that connects me to who i was um and the fact that she's looking like and the fact that

she's thinking of me the only other feeling really similar to it it's gonna sound so weird and this shows you this is actually actually weirdly a good example of the tone and the paths in busy being free is that the only feeling to me similar to to terry the a-list facialist making me this cream is the north lond the suburban North London milkman delivering my milk in bottles. And when I get it, I'm like, someone did something nice for me at five in the morning and is connected to me, even though we don't know each other. And there's a magic to it that appearing in me,

leaving the money out there and the emptying and the refilling the milk bottles are connected to the los angeles face cream for me in how they make me feel safe it's also a nostalgia thing though because i think that though both of those things like the idea of you know having a milkman bring you milk when you could just order it on deliveroo like it's a thing of the past it's like a relic of, I don't know, human connection that we just don't get that much anymore. I exist to her even though she doesn't see me as sort of the ultimate you think about at night.

With love, right? It's like, do I still exist? We're not in touch. Am I somewhere in the recesses of their mind where I am? I'm so interested in beauty regimes and like, you know, the things that women do to ourselves in order to try and maintain the way that we look and I can imagine that there is a big difference between that environment in LA and that environment in London have you noticed that

well the answer that people don't like me giving here is that i see much worse surgery in london like i see much more noticeable injectables like there's been so many times in london when i first moved here on the underground where it's like am i meant to say to the person on the underground that their eyebrows look insane they look insane like maybe nobody's gonna tell them if i yeah a recent import back to the city doesn't say that's not what it's meant to look like um there's better surgery in la i was about to say the first thing that comes to my mind is the people that know what they're doing are in la yeah and um well look look at marilyn monroe she you know they've gone through her old x-rays and what we could see was true she

had a nose job and she had a chin implant and that's like what is it 70 years ahead of surgery being done now that's bad surgery and hers was amazing um I think the other misnomer about LA is actually my experience of it was much less eating disorderly than in england than in london certainly like london probably having grown up under kate moss and heroin chic and all of that maybe i'm overly alert to it but i see um skinniness celebrated in london uk culture London UK culture whereas in LA 100 million percent was about uh strength and muscles and tone and you know uh to me a class you know the classic LA look is Jennifer Lopez is um who's the astonishingly Jessica Biel. Oh yeah. Like those are, those women can hurt you if they wanted to.

They're athletes. And that's not a London look to me. That's Los Angeles. So maybe I'm being defensive about my old town, but I think it's actually way less fucked up than you think it is. Do you think that women in the public eye who have had work done yeah oh us that information because that's a whole debate about like if you know because obviously there are so many people in the public eye that it's kind of obvious that they've had quite a lot of work done but they often don't tell people you know it took kylie jenner however long

to tell people that she'd had her lips done for example and bella hadid with her nose job but and they get a lot of scrutiny for not being open about what they've had done but do you think that they oh what's that or not i can't i don't know what i'd feel i think it's psychotic i i so i once a year if i can i'll go and see dr colbert who is a amazing um Botox fairy who is generally in New York sometimes Los Angeles and all the women in the public eye who are celebrated for allowing themselves to age beautifully naturally with dignity are clients of his but the way you would know is if you go i hope he doesn't mind me saying this because he's a wonderful uh cultured uh charming

and generous man is if you go to his instagram page if there's a celebrity on his page promoting sunscreen it usually means that they were in that day for injectables they also are using his sunscreen but yeah for sure and he does something i've never seen anywhere else trade secret potentially but i'll tell you is um he doesn't put botox in one place like he would never put botox in your forehead or on the sides of your eyes he puts a billion tinsy, insy, wincy little drops all over your whole face, including in your scalp. So everything just goes and relaxes. I've never found that anywhere else. And so I would not risk doing it anywhere else.

But I'll completely fess up. I do that once a year when I can track him. That's it for today. Thank you so much for listening and watching. You can subscribe to us on all major podcast platforms and also watch us on independent TV, all connected devices and major social media platforms. Thank you so much and I will see you soon. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era,

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