A couple of years ago I wrote a story for the New York Times about Mimi, a British girl who came to New York to make it as a writer and who ended up working as a stripper in a club just off Times Square.
After the story was published Mimi was fired. She then found another job as a stripper, got fired again, landed a book deal, became a yoga instructor, traveled, and finally moved back to the UK. Now, she is looking for her first home (Mimi, I feel your real estate pain), looking forward to the publication of her book next year, and working on ideas for book number two.
I’ve followed Mimi’s blog for the past couple of years and it has been strange to watch her simultaneously love and loathe New York and New Yorkers. Now, she’s back in London. And it seems the tea and biscuits and the number 41 bus are taking their toll. Maybe it’s time for Mimi to return to the city she loves to hate:
No TagsIn the meantime life trundles on in Crouch End. I still can’t quite get to grips with the sheer normality of Britain. It’s just so much less dramatic than the States. In New York I felt like I was in a movie 24/7, living out some bizarre scripted life I had no control over, and when I left even the ending was so… scripted. I lived like a novel, and here in the UK I struggle to conjure up something to write. It’s all tea, biscuits, conversations in pubs, chats with mental yoga teachers about their raw foods diets, which may sound interesting, and certainly is, but is also like being stuck in a soap opera on loop. It’s good to recover here - I’m loving teaching and researching the next book, and applying for jobs to keep me ticking over financially, but I’m also itching to get somewhere where there’s something to write about, other than Faisal in Marks and Spencers who sold me Jam Sandwich biscuits today, or the Iraqui guy in the PO who always tells me he’s going to take my yoga classes, or poor James McCavoy and the Number 41 bus. I find the normality of Crouch End more surreal than the circus of NoHo in New York…
