A tale of two girl crushes

and the time I shared air with PWB.

Hello friend,

In November 2019, sitting at the airport waiting for the first leg of our flight back to Australia (international travel feels like a life time ago, doesn’t it? I mean — for us plebs, anyway.), I began to panic. Standing near our gate for the YYZ-LAX flight was a woman in Breton stripes, a great leather jacket, and the unmistakeable ‘impossibly chic’ haircut. With barely the wherewithal to whisper, I told my partner, “THAT’S THE WOMAN ON MY LOCKSCREEN.”

Phoebe Waller-Bridge was on my flight. We were going to share circulated cabin air. *swoon* Instead of approaching her calmly like a normal person might, or aggressively and oddly as I have a track record of doing with CBC celebrities, I opted instead to sweat profusely. I told myself, from 28 rows behind her on the plane, that if she was on our next leg, I’d approach her. Because then, you know, I’d have something to say to her. We’d have something in common! I spent a solid 6 hours sweating and planning out conversations with her in my mind, then never saw her again, and was just really damp and smelly for the next 16 hour hop to Melbourne.

Last week, I developed a new, exciting PWB-style girl crush. I finally put two and two together that the actress who plays my favourite character on the Crown (apparently I now empathize with Camilla?) also wrote and was the show runner for season two of Killing Eve (initially PWB’s baby - watchable on Crave), and wrote and directed the movie I’ve been most excited to see for the last few months, Promising Young Woman.

After going down the rabbit hole (someone book this woman some chat show appearances that I can binge on Youtube, pretty please), and adding her headshot to my vision board, I can safely say that if I should ever have the opportunity to bump into this woman, I will likely be as weird as I was with the Baroness Von Sketch women and just as sweaty as I was on the flight to LA, sharing air with her friend Phoebe.

I sometimes wonder if I’d be a bolder or more capable, confident woman if I’d had women like Emerald or PWB to look up to when I was young? Or if I had shows like Fleabag or Killing Eve to watch? Maybe I’d have been slightly more motivated to pursue things I was interested in, rather than the things I was told were reasonable and practical. Maybe I wouldn’t have based life choices on what a ‘good’ girl would/should do if I had seen that smart, snarky, semi-wicked women were so interesting and worthy of celebration. There’s a lot of maybes in there.

All this to say, welcome to my lock screen, Emerald Fennell!

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I’m reading

Emerald Fennell’s dark, jaded, funny, furious fables of female revenge. Why are far-right figures always on the news in Canada? The Canadian connection with the US capitol riots. Lovely legends Billie Piper, Lucy Prebble, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge talk about the show I Hate Suzie, which is infuriatingly not available in Canada, yet.

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The (incidentally Canadian) good stuff

A Tale for the Time Being is starts with a young Japanese girl’s diary washing up on the shore of Vancouver Island in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Tsunami. Naoko’s diary conveniently falls into the hands of a novelist named Ruth who lives on Cortes Island, and she takes Ruth on a wild ride in an attempt to document the life of her badass Buddhist nun grandmother before she (the young diary author) offs herself. It’s wild and bonkers and plays with place and temporality in a fun and freaky way.

The author, Ruth Ozeki, is also a badass Zen Buddhist nun who splits her time between Cortes Island and New York. She got her start doing set design for low-budget horror films in the ‘80s and producing Japanese TV shows. Can you tell Ruth is edging into girl crush territory? Anyway, her novel A Tale for the Time Being is wonderful and you should read it. You can get it from Chapters.

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Until next time, have a great week. If you have a friend who you think might not hate this, why not forward it to them?

- Trish,