It's always the palette cleanser that does it.
I'm just getting back from a walk, and I'm listening to Katie Couric interviewing Virginia Evans about her book The Correspondent. Crossing the kitchen, I'm filling the coffee maker when Virginia admits she wrote it as a way to clear her head after her last book didn't sell.
I end up just sort of standing there for a minute, shaking my head.
This book, The Correspondent, just won the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction. It was her debut novel... she wrote seven books before this one that never got picked up. Katie clearly did her homework. The questions she's asking are fantastic — some of which are even crowd-sourced from her subscribers. Hitting the lights as I'm leaving the kitchen, I'm gobsmacked at the difference between podcasters who just shoot the shit and award-winning journalists who ask scaffolding questions like these. This isn't, like, some ground-breaking interview on international relations or anything, but that distinction has never felt SO clear to me. I liked Virginia and her work already but I'm learning a ton that's making me even more of a fan.
Sinking into the chair by the windows in my office, I'm still thinking about how Virginia called the book a "palette cleanser" for her writing. That seems like it's been coming up a lot for me lately, too. I keep hearing artists talking about a project taking off when it was only ever meant to be some throw-away thing to keep their creativity flowing into their next actual project.
Why is that?
I'm gazing out the window at a much-beloved gray morning, with its cooler temps and dewiness rather than the insufferable humidity of late. Virginia's talking about how she, her husband, and her kids leaned into that palette cleanser real hard. Like, decided to shake things up and go live abroad type of clean-slate. That's when she wrote The Correspondent, a couple hours at a time, in the mornings before everyone else was awake, from a walk-in closet attached to the bathroom of the apartment they were renting... I'm listening to her describe this and I'm still caught on the part where the whole thing was supposed to just be about clearing her head.
There's something to that—making something, anything, instead of making stuff that has to be perfect for someone else.
Are you a perfectionist? Why is that?
onward.
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