DISCLOSURE DAY

Forgive my absence of some ten days and failure to share my carefully considered thoughts about Spielberg’s DISCLOSURE DAY, seen on Saturday morning, which I’ve no doubt you have been eagerly anticipating. I was all set to commit a whole host of words like “disappointing”, “run of the mill” and “deeply average” to paper when I experienced my own disclosure day, of sorts, insofar as I was made aware of a cyberstalker. Cyberstalking, I now understand, is very much a numbers game. While I have been excited to see my Substack post views rise and rise recently, congratulating myself on my writing success by raising glasses of wine with friends and treating myself to an absolutely stunning pair of Chloe heels (honestly, they’re divine! Someone invite me somewhere and give me a reason to keep them!), it didn’t cross my mind that hundreds of extra readings of posts might have been generated by one person, a total of 1,824 in-app post views in fewer than six weeks. That’s viewing an average of 43 posts per day, and that figure excludes posts received via e-mail, accessed without signing-in or downloaded. This one person has viewed my posts more times in six weeks than I, the writer of said posts and she who is tasked with fixing typos and re-stacking and sometimes (reluctantly…) making a correction, have viewed in the two and a half years since I started writing Zero Fucks Left to Give. For a comparison, my second most enthusiastic and dedicated reader (red ribbon and silver medal en route to you, lovely and totes normal reader!) has read 42 in-app posts and started subscribing almost two years ago… and I’ve actually met them.

So, how to respond to such fanatical behaviour? Is it a compliment? Is it threatening? Do I thank them? Block them? Refund their subscription fees? And what about the rest of social media where I have no data to alert me to the numbers of views and visits? How often have they scrolled through my Facebook profile where I share family photographs and have casually dropped information about my children and work and where I hang out? We live in the age o’ information and I have recklessly left a helluvalot of mine out there.

And, the amaze-balls writing to one side, why on earth would somebody do this? Why would anybody make a full time job of reading and re-reading and re-re-reading my entirely unreliable, inconsistent and sometimes seriously snarky thoughts about film and TV and the cra-za-zy world in which we live? I think, if I may indulge in some armchair psychological analysis, this person somehow convinced themselves that my posts are about them, some sort of ill-founded form of transference. The irony, of course, is that now I am writing about them, not only in this post but in the report I filed with the Metropolitan Police yesterday.

The big question I have been grappling with over the last few days is whether or not I should just stop posting on Zero Fucks Left to Give. I started writing and publishing in the wake of illness and a painful divorce, funnelling my feelings onto this platform as a means of processing my experiences and with the aim of building a readership in advance of the publication of my novel, Prospects. Writing freely, per psychologist Dr James Pennebaker, helps us process our emotions by externalising mental distress and giving us the distance we need to manage our responses and take a more considered view of the world and ourselves within it. People extol the benefits of journalling and gratitude writing, and I have chosen to hang my writing on the hook that is our current cultural landscape, including film, television and theatre, choosing to publish as a form of establishing accountability and having a witness to a life which is otherwise solitary. I fully subscribe to the theory set out by Daisy Fancourt in her wonderful book Art Cure, and by consuming as much cultural fare as possible and then writing freely about my reaction to it and the associations I make with my own life and experiences, I am giving myself a generous double dose of self-helping and totes free therapeutic support. Honestly, could I be more mentally healthy?!

For example, yesterday would have been my wedding anniversary, another June non-event, but one which I anticipated may cause me some faint distress. To mitigate the risks of creeping depression or maudlin moping around the house, I purchased a ticket to see Patrick Marber’s all female reworking of David Mamet’s GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS at the Old Vic. One of the first tasks I completed as a newby in a Hollywood production company was to write a set of script notes for Mamet. He had been tasked with (and royally rewarded for… $1M for a draft and a polish… unbelievable, really, given how little writers are being paid today, some thirty years later) updating a Paul Schrader screenplay by rewriting a male role as a female role, and, script-wise, he did about as good a job at it as Patrick Marber has done with GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, i.e. changing nothing at all.

Sadly, the distractions of the cyberstalker and this unrelenting heat (please make it stop! I had a river of sweat dripping from my cleavage all day yesterday…) got the better of me, and I opted for a delightful glass of wine with some fantastically funny friends rather than sitting next to a whole loada sweaty people in a theatre, so I have nothing to offer on the GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS front (for now… I’m going next week…). And guess what? I don’t feel maudlin or mopey or depressed at all, and even without the art/culture bit, I’m still writing. And I still give zero fucks. Zero.

Thank you, dear Subscribers, for reading (in an entirely normal, once-per-post kind of a way…). 🙏