My personal brand is ‘eclectic’

I am really, genuinely, interested in almost everything1. I have tried to narrow it down but I can’t.

In terms of my actual career I am an award-winning best-selling novelist including the Orthodox Jewish lesbian love story Disobedience and the speculative fiction novel The Power. And I’m the co-creator of the fitness app Zombies, Run. And I’m a broadcaster, I write and present the show Human Intelligence on BBC Radio 4, which I suppose gives a sense of how much I am interested in: it’s about thinkers from Socrates to Malcolm X via Mary Wollstonecraft. Sometimes people call me a ‘public intellectual’ and I quite like it.

At any given moment I am usually learning at least four different things. I try to mix it up. Currently: piano, front crawl, Yiddish with the Oxford Centre for Rare Jewish Languages and having finished my MA in Classics with the Open University I’ve just started a degree in Maths. My languages, in descending order of skill (apart from English!) are Hebrew, Latin, French, Italian, Yiddish (so German, sort of, although it’s always fun arriving in Germany and not being able to remember which words are Yiddish and which are German), Arabic, Ancient Greek, plus a smattering of others.

Posts I have planned include: my favourite notebooks, what I think about the Royal Family, what on earth is wrong with technology billionaires, how I read, explorations of wonderful London neighbourhoods, how to research a difficult topic, what videogames to play if you love books, how to use ChatGPT for therapy (and how not to) and I still have to write a long thing about Walter Ong to get into a conversation with James Marriott. So that gives you a sense of where we are.

Paid subscriptions

My thinking about this is: I have some stuff I want to write about that I like the idea of writing about behind a paywall for real supporters only. Personal stuff, stuff about my real life, things that I just don’t want to set off an explosion on the internet with as tiny bits of it get quoted out of context. Increasingly I am quite excited about getting a few things written about that are really important to me but which I don’t (yet) want to put into a book, and also don’t want to sell to a newspaper etc. So I am going to try out doing that here. The Very Real Stuff.