Really Good Tomatoes asks irreverent questions and offers hopeful answers. It’s a newsletter about culture, behaviour, food, art, relationships, pleasure, politics, work, environment, identity, and society. For people who refuse to be fobbed off with crap tomatoes.
When I was 22, I moved to Rome. I didn’t have a job there, and I didn’t go to study. In fact, I had just graduated and had no idea what I wanted to “do next,” a loaded term if ever I heard one. Actually, I did know what I wanted to do next and that was to live in Italy. But it’s fair to say I didn’t have any long-term plans, or clear career goals.
I also didn’t have any friends in Italy, a fact that seemed trifling when I booked my flights, but which became one of the defining features of the year I spent there. It turns out being shy in your second language is a guaranteed vibe-killer. My Italian was passable when I arrived and pretty great when I left but I was never completely fluent and I felt diminished by it. I also hated getting things wrong.
Fear of ridicule, of being seen to be “doing it wrong,” was the driving force of my shyness for many years, and I still haven’t entirely shaken it off. On holiday in Sardinia last summer, I returned from figuring out how to pay my stepdad’s parking ticket and confessed to my husband that I’d got a phrase wrong when asking for help in the tabacchi.
“I know it doesn’t matter, and I’m obviously a tourist so it’s not like they’re expecting me to be fluent, but I still feel really ashamed. I can feel this real tightness in my throat when I fuck it up.”
“Yeah, that’s mental, Franks,” he said, lovingly.
At 41, I can see that he is right. These days, I can observe it, “sit with it” as my therapist might say, and ultimately laugh it off. At 22, I could not do this. I managed to find myself a job, an apartment, and I navigated Italian bureaucracy to get my permesso di soggiorno, but I struggled to make friends. From the outside, my life spent grabbing my caffè on the way to my teaching role, commuting up Via Veneto to go to my job translating the wine column for an expat magazine, stopping for a taglio on the way to my evening job in an Irish pub, getting a ride home on the back of someone’s moped, looked every inch the adventure I’d hoped for. In reality, I was really lonely.
So when Stef, a German colleague from the pub, invited me to Sunday lunch with an American family she’d met at her Italian class, I went. That they turned out to be Southern Baptists, that lunch included obligatory participation in their Sunday service, that the pastor was an ex-marine who told the story of watching a female soldier idly pick dirt out from under her fingernails to demonstrate why women weren’t suited to active service, that their youngest child insisted on watching Disney-Pixar’s Cars every single time we went round, somehow did not stop me going back. I tried to tell myself I was being an anthropologist and in some ways I was, for truly I had never met people like this and they intrigued me. But I also liked the familiarity. I felt grateful to be invited somewhere, to have people who were looking forward to seeing me. Stef treated them as a benign curiosity. Her worldview was wildly different to those of the Americans but she wore her conflict lightly, and I resolved to do the same.
Of course, they tested me. For the most part we avoided politics. Bush was still president at the time (of which the Baptists approved) and when it came to Iraq, the pastor tended to fall back on his own experiences of war, rather than opining on the current conflict. The pastor’s wife hinted at a rebellious childhood growing up behind the Iron Curtain in Hungary, followed by raucous teenage years in Canada after the family managed to emigrate. But she also talked about falling in love with her husband and “getting saved,” and when we went to IKEA one Saturday afternoon, she told Stef and me how she’d sought permission from the pastor to go shopping. “I told him, if he wants me to perform my wifely duties, he needs to let me feather the nest,” she smiled.
There was a dicey moment when I mentioned my sister. My niece had been born the year before and my sister was still living with the baby’s father, although neither the relationship nor their living situation was great. We were all quite worried about her.
“They need to get married,” the pastor said, firmly. “Nooooo, I really don’t think so,” I said.
“A child should be raised within a marriage,” he insisted.
“Only if the marriage is happy,” I replied. “Unstable relationships aren’t good for children.”
“God teaches us…” he began, but I nipped it in the bud. “It would be the worst possible decision for everyone involved.”
I can’t say whether these experiences informed my next move, but over the subsequent few months, I applied for, and was accepted onto, a masters degree in culture and society. The following Sunday, the pastor gave a sermon about the perils of education. Too much knowledge, too much intellect, he quite literally said, caused folk to stray from God. Hell was full of people who had believed learning would bring them happiness.
You’re probably wondering why I didn’t simply get up and walk out. You might be wondering why I hadn’t done it four months previously. You have to understand, these people fascinated me. I couldn’t believe they were real. After the sermon, the pastor barbecued on the veranda and we ate tomatoes and mozarella in the sun, our now pleasant chit-chat punctuated by the voice of Owen Wilson as Lightning McQueen drifting through the living room doors.
On my last morning in Rome, the pastor and his eleven-year-old daughter came to the airport to help me with my luggage. The pastor’s wife had given me a necklace of vintage amber beads that had belonged to her mother. “Think of us, whenever you wear it,” she said. And indeed I have thought of them often over the years, with bemusement, with exasperation, with compassion, and with regret.
I thought of them when Trump was elected the first time, and I’m thinking of them now, as he attempts to defund higher education.
I recently finished reading Julia by Sandra Newman, a retelling of George Orwell’s 1984 from the point of view of the female protagonist. I adored it. The world Orwell created was so brilliant that, though it is objectively horrifying, it was a joy to spend more time there. And Newman does an incredible job of expanding on this world. Julia’s London (her Airstrip One, her Oceania) is familiar, but beautifully enriched. As Natasha Walter wrote in The Guardian, returning to certain scenes “can feel almost like encountering scenes from your own memories.”
Of course, one cannot help being struck by the fact that a story that was so very pertinent in 1949 feels once again on the nose. We all know the first thing any regime, be it political or theological, does when it wants to control its people is limit their access to information, to ridicule academia, condemn critical thought, and silence conflicting views. Keeping people uneducated keeps them obedient. At the very least, it restricts their ability to rebel.
Is now a good time to remind you that Really Good Tomatoes is a reader-supported newsletter? So if you’re enjoying it, it would be super cool if you thought about upgrading to a paid subscription.
It costs £4/month or £40/year. Paid subscribers also have access to the entire back catalogue of paywalled articles.
It’s been a while. I took some time off from this newsletter over Easter and before I knew it, two weeks had turned into four. That’s the thing about newsletters. Absolutely no one is holding you accountable. Even the readers. If they get fed up, they’ll simply cancel their subscription but nobody, not one person, is ever going to actually call you out. In a weird way this is a downside of us having a slightly more intimate relationship. When we understand that the people creating the content we like are real individual people, making things on their own, we’re a little bit less likely to kick up a fuss if they don’t deliver. But from a creator’s perspective, this does reduce the incentive somewhat, and when life is a neverending juggle of priorities, the ones labelled “literally no one gives a shit” tend to end up on the floor.
Awwww just kidding. I know you give a shit. But you see what I’m saying? And honestly, I’ve had more conversations about this with people “thinking about starting a newsletter” than I can count. The thing is, while Substack obviously positions itself as a potential income stream for writers, the reality is, hardly any of us are going to make any money here. It’s like OnlyFans. Sure, you’ll hear lots of fabulous stories about the handful of people making megabucks. But the vast majority (we’re talking 90%) of users are scraping together about £100 a month.
And that’s fine! It genuinely is. My theory is that, to build a successful newsletter on Substack — and by “successful” I mean bringing in a sustainable revenue, whatever that means to you and your business — you need one of two things:
A big profile (and, most likely, an existing audience to bring here)
Something genuinely useful to sell
Every single example I’ve heard or seen of someone making money (by which I mean £1000 or more a month) on Substack, has ticked one of these boxes. I don’t have either of these things. And I’m fine with that. Obviously, the profile thing could potentially shift over time but I instinctively feel like it won’t. I’m just not that… well, likeable.
DON’T TRY TO ARGUE WITH ME, I SAW YOUR RESPONSES TO THE SURVEY!
Once again, I’m kidding. I don’t mean I’m not likeable, I just mean that I’m not the kind of warm, relatable, uninhibited, inviting person everybody imagines they could be besties with. And that’s sort of who I think you need to be if you want to grow your platform. Who knows, maybe I’m dead wrong about that. Maybe there’s a huge audience for aloof, prickly, impatient, tomato-obsessives, I just need to dedicate the time and energy to finding it. But that, of course, is the other problem. I am simply not willing or able to put in the hours that would require. I have so many other things to do.
And as for having something genuinely useful to sell. Lol. The freelance writer pyramid scheme is real and while I have benefitted from things like coaching, I have no desire at all to become one. I also don’t suck at teaching. I come from a family of teachers (my mum, my nanna, my stepdad) and while I think I’d probably be okay at it, I just… really don’t want to.
So. Here we are. My approach to Substack, as I’ve explained to many people in our “Should I start a newsletter?” chats, is first and foremost to make sure it’s valuable to me. There is no financial imperative to be here, and very little psychological imperative (although do feel free to up the emotional blackmail if you think it would help!) so unless it is providing some tangible benefit, it will be impossible to sustain. And the tangible benefit for me is that it is a place to put things. It’s a place to try things out, to workshop ideas. If nothing else, it’s good exercise.
I just had a weekend by the sea with one of my best oldest friends, by which I mean that, of the friends I’ve known the longest, she’s one of the ones I like most. I have friends I’ve known longer, but they’re not as good. We met in the first year of uni which means we’ve now known each other for more than half our lives. We’ve seen and shepherded each other through a lot of different iterations of self. And I think for the most part we’ve managed to be incredibly patient and loving and curious about one another, even when the timelines of our lives diverged (eg with careers, travel, children), or when it seemed like we were on different pages. Being friends with Louisa makes me feel good, not just about myself and about her, but about friendship generally — what it can be, what it can do, and how it can work.
Anyway, she took some pictures of me going for a very chilly Sunday morning sea swim and I was delighted because swimming is something I tend to do alone so naturally there are no pics. But also because one slight downside (perhaps) of breaking up with my phone is that I don’t take as many photos full stop. I mostly think this is good. I am focussing on being in the moment, actually spending time with my friend, not just documenting our time together. But occasionally I have to remind myself that having the odd memento is nice. Especially if the last time you went on holiday together was 2012!