Eat This For Lunch Every Spring Day Of Your Life
On DIY luxe; on building community, and why it matters more than anything; on this phenomenal carrot salad!
Say you’ve written a little book and you love your little book.
Say you’ve written a little book and you’ve put your whole heart into the little book.
Say you’ve written a little book and you want it to be a big book, you want everyone to see that this book is the book of your heart and that you’ve put everything into it and that this book is actually something pretty special.
In the olden days of publishing, this is when the publishers would throw you a launch: an enormous party, much champagne, candles, catering, etc. I know this because I have seen Sex And The City. It’s a major New York event! The book launch is news! In the city that never sleeps!
Everybody who has ever been to a book launch in London in 2026 watches that Sex and the City episode and crumbles to dust. Book launches now are famous for two things, which is 1) bad lighting, and 2) warm white wine.
This is a terrible problem if you love things to be gorgeous; and everyone to look gorgeous; and for the wine to be extremely cold and, ideally, expensive champagne.
My number one advice to anyone who wants to make anything is to surround yourself with people who also make things, and ideally some of those people should be people who make things happen.
Fortunately, if you love gorgeous things and cold champagne, you are probably already surrounded by the kind of people who can make things happen. My number one advice to anyone who wants to make anything is to surround yourself with people who also make things, and ideally some of those people should be people who make things happen. You need a peer group. You need colleagues and companion in this creative war we wage against entropy. Writing— and all art making— is against the natural order of things, which is to fall apart and disappear: it is a very difficult task to try and pin down a moment, an emotion, an idea, and you will need people on your side. You will need people who can make things happen, and you will need to become a make things happen person.
All the best things I know were made by someone for someone; and made in a kind of community of people making things for someone. If you want to make art, you must make art with your friends. And then, when you want everyone to know that your art is the art of your heart and that it really actually is actually quite something, you will have a team ready to lift you up. And of course there are publishers and editors and marketeers and publicists. Of course those people are amazing and wonderful and when they are good they are the best at what they do. But nobody will love your art, lift up and support your art, like the people who watched you make it. Nobody will love your art more than the people for whom you made it, and those people are the ones you need if you want to, for example, make a Sex and the City style major and gorgeous Event.
We launched Kate’s book by throwing a dinner party for thirty-five people in what is, by day, a brightly-lit and glass-fronted café. We got the space because Kate works there sometimes as a barista; and Kate works there as a barista because she spent so much time writing this book in there, talking to people, which is the whole thing. Be in community with people who make stuff, even if what they are making is coffee and/or a local café space and what you are making is a romance novel or a cookbook. Be in community!
I actually thought it might be helpful to talk a bit about the practicalities of throwing a launch, in case you wanted to feel glamorous and gorgeous and special about your own art. I think, really, it is one of my favourite things we have ever done as a collective: it made me feel like I was exactly where I wanted and needed to be, and that all the work we have all put into building community together had achieved something pretty amazing. Kate just asked loads of people she loves and most of them made it, and I think you should do this if you have made anything lately that you feel could do with treating like the beautiful thing it is. (These tips probably work for most kinds of parties but they are for throwing yourself a beautiful luxe art launch.)
Here is how we did it. (A long list incoming, plus the recipe for some unbelievable carrots with carrot-top salsa.)
We quite literally unscrewed almost all of the lightbulbs, much to the dismay of the photographer.
We lit a million candles, ditto.
We made sure that there was an excellent— if dismayed— photographer coming (Kate’s wonderful friend, Tom Jacob: see again, community!) who was happy to be a roving eye. A beautiful time is beautiful but a book launch has to be seen to be believed.
We kept the wine very cold, and also, we asked everyone to bring a bottle of cold wine. (Community again.) We had so much wine and so much champagne and I had one single perfect glass and yet took so many bottles down to the recycling. This is party. This is living.
Writing beautiful menus. I insisted on this bit, even though Kate had one million things to do, and I feel completely vindicated by how great they turned out I thought it would be nice for people to have a souvenir! I love to have items from beautiful events and I love to stick things on the fridge. Kate has exquisite handwriting; and, plus, the local print shop— who of course turned out to be run by the boyfriend of someone Kate knows, community again!— printed four to a page for us from a scan of her writing and it cost five pounds forty.
