A tiny win, a book recommendation, & a question about Blake Lively

So I started using Substack following a long break after Edinburgh Fringe, a break where I’d done nothing but bake, read and get into the freezing cold sea for the sake of the god of wellness, and then wail through the pain, much to the dismay of local fishermen.

On that note, I don’t often read something that compels me to recommend it so strongly, but I just finished Still Life by Sarah Winman, set between post World War II East End London and Florence. If you love books about human connection, loneliness, loss and love; or poetic writing teamed with deep heartfelt nostalgia; or if you love people describing spaghetti, then this is the book for you.

Anyway, it’s lovely having this platform to write on without being beholden to gatekeepers and editors, but also the first real post I sent out got picked up and published in The Scotsman. What a world.

I’ve had a weird sleep pattern lately due to a schedule clash with my partner, which has resulted in me staying up late doing deep dives on YouTube. The latest unexpected dive (unexpected given that I’m not into celebrity culture) is the Blake Lively controversy.

Now, I’m a bit late to the game here as this all hit its peak in the summer when I was in the throes of Edinburgh Fringe, but if you don’t know, Lively is - possibly quite rightly - the latest Hollywood darling to be cancelled. You only need to search her name and mountains of videos on her downfall will pop up. It started with a PR disaster where Blake tried to market her latest movie, which is about domestic violence, as a rom-com. This is an unquestionably detached move on her part and unanimously baffling, if not full-on offensive. Then, off the back of that, the internet got itself into a frenzy, trawling through old clips of her being blatantly rude to interviewers and fans, asking how on earth we didn’t notice before?

There are so many routes of obsession to go down with this: Is she a mean girl drunk on power? Is she a narcissist? Has being in the public eye for 17 years given her main character syndrome? Or is this yet another takedown of a powerful female akin to what happened to Kiera Knightly, Gwyneth Paltrow or even Amber Heard?

What I found interesting about watching these videos - somewhat deliriously, late into the early hours of the morning - was that, in my mind, she could just as easily be misguided, reaching for humour in an attempt to deflect or stay in control of her own narrative, and completely missing the impact it has on others. The bad interview etiquette, teamed with other things I noticed, like switching to safe subjects (albeit the safe subjects do often seem to revolve around her) and avoidance of eye contact, might be the signs of something else as well.

This is why I couldn’t stop watching: There were some moments where I felt really sorry for her. I’m obviously not a psychologist, but my own experiences of being a heavily masked neurodivergent woman made me wonder if it really was ‘mean girl energy’ or just badly masked audhd (ADHD and autism), which never got addressed because she was surrounded by enablers. You don’t know what goes on behind closed doors. A neurodivergent person can be out in public, seemingly the life and soul of the party, and then spend hours in private agonising over every little interaction they’ve had, worried they might have done or said something wrong. Or if you’re surrounded by yes people and nobody ever calls you out in the first place, I’m guessing you might end up in blissful ignorance. There was just something about Blake that didn’t seem to add up, so I did what anyone in the middle of a celebrity culture rabbit hole would do at 2am, I searched for validation on TikTok - and yes, the theory is already out there. Has anyone else wondered this?