After splitting from my husband and four years of celibacy, getting out there was daunting. Was I ready to be the ‘older woman’?
In the decade I lived in California, before I moved back to Britain in 2018, men would sometimes approach me in cafes or the gym, once at the Norton Simon museum, where Eve Babitz had played nude chess with Marcel Duchamp. On the 12-hour flight home from LAX to Heathrow, I lost all appeal. No man ever talked to me again, starting with the customs agent who turned his head as I walked through with the last of my legal weed. When I flew later that year, to take my kid to her dad who was working in Atlanta: lots of attention! When I landed back in England … silence. After a year of this, I caved in to my friends’ demands to join a dating app.
I put up the most me photograph that exists: writing, in a city with a view, wearing a pretty dress that made me feel powerfully “Rita Moreno”. It was literally Rita Moreno’s dress, which I’d bought at a consignment store in Venice Beach. There’s a cat leaning into me and next to my computer you can see Richard Avedon’s photo of Truman Capote, the Julian Opie painting of Blur that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery and, at the front, a snapshot of my mother as a college student.
