I keep thinking about this girl I went to school with who was determined that she was going to be an author. When we were 15 she was forever talking about The Novel, which she was already in the process of writing, and it was clear she assumed that once published it would instantly make her a star of the literary world. She was a skilled writer even by pretentious grammar school standards, but still, it being a pretentious grammar school we were told at least twice a week how amazing and clever and talented we were and lots of us thought we were going to be someone, and even at that age I kind of knew that wasn't really true - most of us would go on to lead solidly middle-class lives that were comfortable and privileged but generally unspectacular.
So imagine my surprise when, twelve years later and having long forgotten all about her, I was flicking through the Observer reviews section only to spot a photo and an article about her brilliant debut novel. Obviously, I immediately got on google to find out everything so I could tell all my friends I knew a FAMOUS AUTHOR. The book got cover quotes from Jeanette Winterson and Val McDermid, good reviews in the Times, the Mail and the Independent, thousands of Goodreads ratings and hundreds of mostly positive reviews on Amazon and Waterstones. It was published in the US and Australia, and she went on Women's Hour to do an interview about it. It was about as successful a launch as a literary debut could hope for.
(I am eventually going somewhere with this, I promise.)
Here's the thing - if I said her name, probably no-one here would have heard of her. Maybe a couple, because we seem like a group that skews female and book-loving and IIRC there's one or two Frauen who work in the writing and publishing industry. But despite getting professional recognition most first time authors would hardly dare dream of she's far, far from a household name. The book probably sold enough copies that if she didn't have a day job she could live frugally on the royalties for a year or two, if that. Her Twitter account has just over 1000 followers.
I don't know whether she was disappointed that after all the buzz around the publication her first book didn't catapult her to the heights she used to expect, or if she already knew by then that it wasn't going to work that way. I do know, from my occasional social media stalking, that since its launch she's kept up a blog where she writes regular reviews of other people's art, tweeted a lot from her small professional account, promoted other authors' work, been to networking events, and done signings for a handful of people at a time at small independent bookshops. Oh, and published a second book, which wasn't as hyped as the first but still got a positive reception. I can well imagine that if she keeps it up she still might become a household name one day, or at least well known in the book world, but it's all a very long way from the literary superstardom she imagined when we were kids.
In the end she'll probably also end up with that solidly middle-class but unspectacular life that I predicted in the first place, only unlike most of us she might get to achieve it by following her passion. Which is awesome! But I think a lot of people look at full-time creatives and think "wow, what an amazing life, just getting to hang out doing your hobby all day and being rich and cool", when in truth it's still work. Although it has a lot of upsides, like any job there are parts that are boring and feel fruitless, and things you have to do on days where you really just want to stay in bed til 5pm and eat pizza, and the added problem of not having a reliable income stream because you're always dependent on how much other people like your work.
All this to say, my guess is that Jack's life has followed a somewhat similar trajectory, up until the last part. I think she grew up knowing full well she'd been handed a nice middle class life, but always believing she was destined for more (although unlike Author Friend, that belief doesn't seem to have been based on any obvious inherent talent). And then one day her blog randomly went viral, and almost overnight she became the sensation she'd dreamed of. Features in the Guardian and Telegraph! Appearing on primetime BBC alongside Andrew Neil and Michael Portillo! Jeanette Winterson (again) singing her praises! Speaking in Parliament! I think it must have felt like the universe was confirming what she knew all along, that she was meant for bigger things, that the trajectory from here was only up.
But like Author Friend, if you want to be famous for your work you need more than just a burst of great initial publicity, you need to treat it as a job. And I wouldn't be surprised if Jack didn't understand that, and thought all this attention meant her old life was over and from now on it would be nothing but media appearances and hobnobbing with top BBC talent, forever. It's clear that for whatever reason she really hates working - being charitable, maybe she gets really bad procrastination anxiety, and perhaps she does even have ADHD that she manages extremely badly (not an excuse for any of the grift if so, obviously). Or she might just be really bleeping lazy.
At the same time, unlike AF Jack didn't do anything to earn the publicity in the first place, and so wasn't really equipped with the skills to convert it to a long term career. She has no specialist knowledge of social issues, no prior background in campaigning or charity work (unless you count mithering about local politics on facebook), and wasn't part of a bigger organisation where someone could have mentored her through learning how that world works. She may well have intended to become a genuine anti-poverty activist at the beginning, but even with a boost from the good press, any campaign she started was never going to get off the ground without a long period of unglamorous grunt work first. It would have been a big ask even for someone who was passionate about the issues and didn't mind putting in long hours behind the scenes, let alone someone who stumbled into the deep end by chance. If poverty was straightforward enough that a random woman with a recipe blog just needed a bigger platform to solve it, we'd have had it sorted ages ago.
Anyone who wasn't such a monstrous narcissist probably would have just accepted that their 15 minutes in the national spotlight was over, maybe leveraging it into a partnership with an existing campaign if they wanted to stay in activism. Jack seems instead to have tried to claw it back through a kind of Pavlovian repetition of what she did to get it in the first place - whining about being poor, raging against the Tories and writing budget recipes without any real cooking skill. Unfortunately it got lapped up by the lefty Twitter bubble, another vapid cult of should-have-beens disappointed with their careers in dying media or mid-tier academia and trying desperately to get famous for snarky one-liners instead, which would only have reinforced the idea that her behaviour worked.
And to keep it going she's had to keep doing more - more whinging about her life, more 'campaigning' that also amounts to whinging about her life, grifting on Patreon to fund the full-time whinging about her life, dating people with connections, trying to be besties with anyone vaguely in her orbit who's somewhat famous. And what's she got out of all this? Sporadic newspaper columns, some awards that are mostly from minor publications no-one outside the aforementioned lefty bubble has heard of, and some speaking engagements attended by, I'd guess, a few hundred people maximum. (The only one I'm aware of that would have been bigger was Glastonbury, and... well.) Still opportunities that most people would consider themselves fortunate to have, but she's never really drawn the kind of acclaim that her black hole of an ego demands - even just within the cookery niche she's far from an A-lister, never mind among the wider celebrity landscape. Maybe in her own mind she really does consider all of that to be tireless, thankless work.
At the same time, it's clear that her personal life has been steadily falling apart. She's surely addicted to something, whether it's alcohol, coke or just Twitter notifications. All of her fiancé(e)s have broken off their relationships with her, she seems to have few if any real life friends, and whatever the hell's going on with her family is at the very least extremely weird. She keeps no-showing or being late for professional eengagements. She rarely mentions leaving the city except for a very occasional work booking or romantic weekend (it's always struck me as really strange that she seems so desperate to have an extraordinary life, and yet as far as I know she's never even tried living anywhere outside of Southend). To be honest she rarely seems to go out - she plainly spends almost all her time alone in her dirty, cluttered house browsing social media, but even there she's tightly restricted the circle who can interact with her, to people who won't contradict her delusion that she's an exceptional person living an exceptional life.
It's a pretty tragic combination of chance and personality that's turned her into this public farce instead of just one more faceless, bitter why-not-me as described in the article, and I'd feel really bad for her if she wasn't STILL taking and taking from people who can't afford it and shamelessly unrepentant about the whole thing. When the right person within the lefty Twitter bubble calls her out, when the Patreon income and speaking gigs dry up completely, when she needs a job but the gap in her CV is eleven years long and her reputation's been publicly trashed by her own actions, none of the spineless 'oh, but she does so much good!' blue tick enablers who are just as much to blame for this whole ugly affair will be there for her, because they're also out for themselves in this empty popularity contest and she'll no longer be useful to them. It's happening right now. But hey, if nothing else at least she got to spunk some kindhearted people's money on expensive sideboards. Hope it was bleeping worth it.
) she gets a constant flow of expensive items, brand new from high end shops. Everyone else gets old junk under the guise of being thrifty and eco. There’s nothing wrong with giving thoughtfully chosen second hand things, just not when it’s a load of mismatched unwanted junk that makes no sense, that you want to get rid of, and when you set no limits on spending for yourself.
).
