Broken umbrellas, the perversity of food, and seaside dreaming
With Nathan Hill, Sarah Moss, and Jack Underwood
I once said to my colleague Flo Garnett, a very talented editor at Unbound, that I like Milky Ways. It wasn’t a particularly deep or thoughtful conversation but we got a small bit of mileage out of it one rainy Tuesday. She does not, she told me, like Milky Ways. In fact, she thinks they are cloying and ‘quite disgusting.’ In spite of our differences, I like to think we have done a good editorial job together on a forthcoming book on hedges. The typeset proofs have just landed and the whole thing looks wonderful. It is at this moment, when it is set, that it goes from being pages and words to becoming ‘a book.’ It has taken shape and it will soon be born.
I realise now, though, on reading Sarah Moss’ piece in today’s issue of Boundless, that I don’t just like Milky Ways. I sort of need them. Last week was a busy one and I ate (looking at the bin in the corner of my study and counting the wrappers) at least ten. Sarah’s piece is raw and quite moving. As somebody who has known lots of people with eating disorders it made me realise things that I don’t think I totally understood.
Food, as Sarah writes, is always more than food. It is about comfort and escape, memory and desire. What we eat or don’t eat tells the truth about us. There is something there in those countless Milky Ways.
Patrick Galbraith
Editor
Easy living in the face of disaster
Author Nathan Hill on the uncanniness of Fort Myers Beach
The town of Fort Myers Beach sits on the northern tip of a small barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico. There’s only one main road going through town, and on the upper end of that road is the island’s most recent — and most flamboyant — newcomer: the Margaritaville Resort, a 254-room, $200-million pastel extravaganza that’s a little incongruous amidst the town’s otherwise laid-back, old-Florida, low-rise ambiance.
You know Margaritaville, right? It’s the brand inspired by that one Jimmy Buffet song that’s now grown into a whole empire of hotels and resorts and airport restaurants and cruises and RV parks and Pickleball courts and all manner of lifestyle merch with a palm-tree’d, ‘it’s-five-o’clock-somewhere,’ ‘different-latitude/different-attitude’ coastal vibe. This new resort opened in December of last year. If you want to see it, just search YouTube for ‘Margaritaville Fort Myers’ and you’ll find a webcam that offers a live view of the beachfront pool and bar (where they make drinks with appropriately punny names: ‘Last Mango In Paris,’ ‘Tropical Pear-a-dise,’ etc.), as well as the Lah De Dah Grill, a mass-market facsimile of one of those small, rustic, no-frills local seafood joints. For the real thing, go basically anywhere else in town; it is one of those weird postmodern ironies that Margaritaville Fort Myers simulates the experience of a tropical island while also being located on an actual tropical island.
Nathan Hill’s latest novel, Wellness, was published by Picador in September 2024
Little bodies as battlegrounds
The author Sarah Moss on eating disorders and the sweetness of youth
October half terms were my favourite. For reasons best known to our parents, my brother and I went to different schools whose half-term breaks didn’t overlap, so I got to spend a week with our grandparents without competition or distraction. I was my grandfather’s princess, my grandmother’s darling. We went for country drives and pub lunches whereas my parents would have insisted on long hikes and, if they were feeling indulgent, would have let us have sugar-free trail mix. We drove to Harrogate for a spot of shopping, always new books for me and once when I’d left my worn navy swimming costume at home a new one, turquoise with diagonal gold frill from shoulder to hip, best kept, the three of us agreed, for use at their house.
After shopping, we swam in the pool at a hotel, ate lunch in its restaurant, usually duck or steak for my grandfather, invariably scampi for me though I didn’t like the accompanying chips, prawn cocktail with iceberg lettuce for my grandmother who always watched her weight. We strolled in the spa town’s manicured park and drove home in time for my grandmother to cook dinner while my grandfather watched the six o’clock news. At bedtime I had a long bath, hotter and deeper than was allowed at home, with my grandfather’s cinnamon-scented bubble bath, and then read for hours in a big, soft bed with pink bedding bought just for me.
Late October meant Halloween, which in Yorkshire meant parkin and treacle toffee, apple-bobbing and also church for the pleasingly spooky All Souls service. My grandmother and I took a big torch to walk down to the medieval stone church, the country dark pressing up against our backs. Back at home the skies were always orange, street-lit, and the stars never out. We made the toffee ourselves, a cauldron of sugar darkening on the stove, the smell of sin and joy saturating the velvet curtains and thick carpets. At home, sugar was wicked, forbidden. Bad children with bad parents ate sweets and the sweets would rot their teeth and make them fat and that would serve them right. It would take me 40 years to see that my grandmother’s baking and toffee-making were not only indulgences of our shared, complicated passion for sweetness but also covert operations against my father. My body — sugar-sated, cinnamon-scented, turquoise-clad — was the adults’ battleground.
Sarah Moss writes fiction, memoir and essays. Her latest books are My Good Bright Wolf, The Fell and Summerwater. She was born in Glasgow, grew up in the north of England and, after moving between Oxford, Canterbury, West Cornwall and Reykjavik, now lives in Dublin.
The Faber poet Jack Underwood shares a poem from his forthcoming collection
Song of the Sad Man
for Peter Gizzi
You cannot strum or pick this.
You cannot choose to be young again.
But the broken umbrella in it.
But the third-person name of you.
And the confines of the shower exaggerate the alone
before work and people, burying your body upright in water.
And milk from the body of your mother, vitamin sweet,
all gone and waa waa away.
But the energy it takes to summon rage from its kennel.
But the calories expended dragging it back inside.
But the impulse to slap a vein to the surface and feed yourself
with pity like a man, like a man just following orders.
For the hard shoulder surrounds you.
For the way that doubt has befriended a halting searchlight
in your talk.
Like your mind can't swallow its saliva.
Even your coffee order sounds complainy.
What does a man have to feel sad about?
When you can still beat down on the weakling, drag them
by the straps of their satchel. No shortage of hatchlings
to lower your boots upon: we sure made sure of that.
Isn't that what makes men happy?
Chanting dick songs around the keg in a misty clearing
terrified of accidentally loving each other too tender,
of repaying this currency of fear not in kind but in kindness,
as is kinder, as in child, as in more love given back
than you yourself received. No.
Boy. O boy. Sadness sings a man.
You bring your heart to the knife fight, and return to your bed
cupping the blood like like a creature you know it's too late to save.
Heavy crying in slow sets of reps. So blue moon.
Who blew smoke down the telephone but you?
Won't someone call us baby? Won't anyone call us back?
Jack Underwood's A Year in the New Life was published by Faber in 2021