GarnerRama Part II and some updates!

The giveaway is a Helen Garner fiction gift pack

Hello from Brisbane! It’s remarkable how often I’ve written a newsletter from a hotel room. I love it. It feels romantic, like I’m penning a dispatch on the road. Which reminds me—next week tickets will go on sale for the huge February 2024 Aweventurer trip! You can register your interest here to get access to the bookings portal as soon as it’s live. We have already sold 50% of the spaces because the people who came to Morocco and Türkiye get first dibs. I reckon that’s a hugely good endorsement. Türkiye sold out in less than a fortnight too, so once the portal opens you cannot afford to hesitate if it’s something you’re serious about. Here are some sneaky teasers I’ll give you because I love my newsletter readers:

• There will be a hot air balloon ride at sunrise

• There will be a 4hr cooking lesson

• There will be home-cooked meals for us on three nights—these have always been a huge highlight and a great way to make sure our tourist dollars are going straight to locals rather than giant companies

• We’re going to have two required readings this time—one fiction and one non-fiction title—to cover both this nation’s ancient and modern history, which you’ll soon understand is fascinating and significant

• We’re doing a murder mystery party (I KNOW; TOO GOOD!!)

Anyways, I have to stop typing about that or I’ll give it all away.

I’m back here in the land of the Brown Snake for some speeches and events and then to see my family before I scoot back to Sydney on Friday afternoon to be ready for the big weekend of workshops. Speaking of which…

Ace Hotel Sydney asked me to run an event as part of their new ‘Slow Series’, so I decided to adapt one of the workshops I gave on the Morocco Aweventurer trip in 2020. I call it ‘Diarising and Note-Taking’ and it’s about how memory works, how to practice noticing things, and how to shrug off limiting ideas of what a diary ‘should’ be so that you can keep your own diary in whatever format flows easiest. It’s a hugely beneficial practice not only for writers but for all kinds of creatives. The tickets were $40 and it sold out in less than 24 hours.

So! I’ve decided to run a version of it online as a livestream. Put 7:30pm on Wednesday 26 July in your diaries. The regular newsletter will go out at 5pm and we’ll meet online later. Livestreams about books, reading, and writing will be happening every month starting in July for paying subscribers. If you can’t make that time, I’ll find a way to put the recording online for a month or so. Again, only for paying subscribers.

Alrighty, let’s get down to biznuss. Here’s what’s in GarnerRama Part II: This time it’s fiction. (Haha.) I’ve written ‘How to do so much with so few words; The Children’s Bach is a writing masterclass from Garner’. I suppose because I’m in a bit of a teaching mindset at the moment, and am voraciously reading fiction for lessons I can take and use for my own fiction. I cannot believe The Children’s Bach isn’t more talked-about and taught.

Astrid Edwards

has written ‘Helen Garner’s uncomfortable spare room’ about The Spare Room (duh) and it’s my favourite thing she has ever written for News & Reviews. A big call, I know, but Astrid lays out her personal history as both carer and cared-for, and makes a compelling argument that The Spare Room fails as both a novel and a documentation of the dichotomy.

The reader question I’ve answered this month is:

Where do you start with something this big? I don’t think I have any ‘regrets’, but there are things I could have handled better and lessons I wish I hadn’t had to learn the hard way. On the ship in Antarctica I met all these 50+, 60+, 70+ year old people and so many of them were great but also a lot of them were screaming on the inside. They hadn’t made peace with who they were, and when they were removed from all contact with the outside world and placed in an astonishingly alien environment, some of them unravelled. When I looked around at those people I saw that fortitude didn’t correlate to money or prestige.

I started writing an essay-ish answer to this twice and both times it came out like a part-preachy, part-overly-earnest graduation address. Yuck! So I had a bit of fun with it and came up with ‘18 Things I’d Tell An 18 Year Old Woman’. Some funny, some serious. Life advice in a list; take it or leave it! I’m your new feminist Jordan Peterson!

‘How to do so much with so few words; The Children’s Bach is a writing masterclass from Garner’ by Bri Lee

Within about five pages I knew what I was reading was really good, and when I finished it the next day I closed it and had one of those rare fuck moments when someone in your field has performed to such a high standard that you’re simultaneously killed and rejuvenated.

There are five people. A couple—let’s call them the ‘main’ couple—Athena and Dexter. Athena and Dexter live in a shabby little house with their two kids, one of whom is high needs in a significant, non-verbal way, that is never specifically diagnosed with a label. There is another sort-of couple—Elizabeth and Phillip—who have a daughter together and are lovers of some sort but not exclusive. Then there is Elizabeth’s younger sister, Vicki. Vicki is about twenty years younger than Elizabeth and has come to stay because their mother has died. I’m giving you a picture of this large cast of characters because it’s frankly astonishing how very real all five of them feel to me, and The Children’s Bach is a short little quickie of a novel. It could even be a novella. The Wikipedia page describes is as a ‘novella’ but on its own cover here it says ‘novel’.

The terminology matters because I think Australian audiences look down their noses at novellas. I’m not sure if that sentiment is shared overseas. Ben Lerner is a Huge Deal and he did the introduction to the 2018 edition (a version of this introduction was then published in The New Yorker here) and Rumaan Alam, also a Huge Deal, has written an introduction for an edition being republished in America later this year. I just don’t see Australians raving about The Children’s Bach in the same way. Certainly not in the way they still revere Monkey Grip, for example. And I don’t see why, apart from an eternal underestimation of what a novella can do. In Lerner’s introduction he writes:

‘The efficiency and precision of Garner’s descriptions (Philip, for instance, falls “into strange beds in houses where a boiling saucepan might as easily contain a syringe as an egg”) allows her to accomplish in a sentence what for other writers would require pages of exposition, ruining the effect.’

I think the detail and the ‘noticing’ that people love in Garner’s diaries should have made The Children’s Bach much more of an enduring success. There is something extremely tangible about both the people and the setting. I believe this family lives in this house. I believe that the arrival of the young woman, and of Phillip the musician, bursts Athena’s suburban bubble. Someone’s at-home haircut is ‘a helmet of blond silk’. Elizabeth remarks that it’s cold and Dexter replies, ‘But you can smell things growing.’ Vicki imagines her dead mother ‘lying on her back in a dark box, crabbed and cramped as a bat.’ And get a load of this description of a boy who is excitedly trying to tell a story to a person begging him to shut up: ‘He had not heard a word. His eyes had gone out of focus, his pitch was up, his pace was accelerating, his smile was the one-sided, manic grimace of the born raver: he was away on the high seas of narrative.’ I could go on with these delightful examples. Every single spread had one or two things that impressed me—details I felt sure were drawn from real life, or sentences with impeccable rhythm.

I must admit, however, that the musical ‘themes’ in the book didn’t appear particularly important to me. Athena is learning the piano, yes. Her husband knows a lot about classical music, and Phillip is a rock guitarist of some kind. So what? Garner has said that one of the (few) ideas she started with was that there would be a boy who could only be reached through music. This, to me, wasn’t anywhere near the most interesting or profound thing about Billy. Billy is the only person whose interiority we don’t have access to. We know what sets him off and what calms him, but we don’t see his insecurities. He cannot clarify his position on sexual politics like the adults do with language. Nor can he establish his personality being either cheeky or demure like the other two children. What Billy ‘gives’ this book, if any character can be understood like that, is a reminder of the real stakes of life that otherwise wise-cracking intellectuals fucking each others’ partners might simply lack.

There are passages in The Children’s Bach where people talk about Billy in a way I’m not sure would be published today. This gives me pause in both directions. Especially after just having read Astrid’s writing about Garner’s treatment of illness in The Spare Room. There was some similarity in the feeling of not being allowed to ‘know’ Billy that was reminiscent of what Astrid has written here about not being allowed to know Nicola. Athena, Billy’s mother and primary carer, is clearly struggling. The family are not wealthy. Billy will not be able to go to some kind of establishment for a few more years. Vicki volunteers to take Billy for a walk and is shocked by an intrusive thought she has when a large truck passes. Vicki presents this thought to Athena who replies simply that these thoughts have occurred to her ‘hundreds of times’. Athena says she ‘used to be romantic about him’, imagining a good and wild little boy just trapped inside, but now she has accepted there’s simply ‘nobody home’. There is no judgment here, either from Garner onto Athena, or from Vicki onto Athena. As a reader seeing Athena’s position, regardless of whether I thought her comments ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, I certainly believed they were real. Intrusive thoughts like this do occur to people. An author needs to be able to write about ugly thoughts in characters’ minds without being somehow implicated as sharing those thoughts. But still… the Billy and Nicola thing. I’m not sure. This is the depth you get when you look at multiple works by an author, I suppose—patterns?

Lerner also mentions the lack of judgment:

A book about, among other things, families and “the rough sexual world that lies outside of families,” The Children’s Bach is an exceptionally nonjudgmental work of art, free of the moralizing that often accompanies the fiction of roundness.

But I disagree with him here. Whilst the approach to parenting is judgment-free, I think Garner’s approach to sexuality and relationships is on display in some oblique way. Dexter doesn’t approve of the situationship between Elizabeth and Phillip. Dexter asks Elizabeth at one stage, ‘Does he—you know—betray you?’ (‘Of course he does,’ she replies. Elizabeth later tells Vicki that the secret to winning in a relationship with Phillip sleeping around is to act like she doesn’t care.) Dexter says he wants Elizabeth to be ‘happily married’. But of course the joke is then on Dexter because it turns out his marriage isn’t actually ‘happy’ either. It blows up from the inside. Athena does a bad thing. Then Dexter does a bad thing. And he is dragged into the brutal reality of suburban marriage being a lifelong tit-for-tat. His romantic bubble is brutally burst. Nobody, regardless of how clever or stupid, kind or mean, can make long-term monogamy work. Sound familiar?

https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/unheard-melodies-on-helen-garners-the-childrens-bach

Spending a great deal of time with Garner’s work has shown me this recurring theme: individuals—real or imagined—often reveal themselves in the ways they fail to live up to models of sexual propriety. In Garner’s pages a person may be punished according to societal norms, but they win in terms of having a spine. Vicki is 17, sleeps with both (much) older men, and is simply happy for the root, no strings attached. She is not judged, but she is also exercising the sort of carefree attitude Garner’s characters are often either rewarded or revered for. It’s a similar see-if-I-care thing that allows Nora in Monkey Grip to maintain her dignity and composure in the face of Javo’s inability-slash-refusal to commit to a life with her. The First Stone lays Garner’s sexual politics out clearly. That line in Lerner’s quote, ‘the rough sexual world that lies outside of families’, comes from a scene at the end of the book, in the aftermath of all the wrongdoing, when Dexter and Elizabeth are fighting. ‘He was afraid of the way he imagined she lived; and she wanted, in some obscure sadism, to induct him into it, into the rough sexual world that lies outside families.’ What extraordinary language! Doesn’t this one sentence tell us so so much about both of them?

There is all this and more in the space of a novella. Having just edited my own novel down to about 100,000 words, I’m frankly in astonished awe right now. I have two main protagonists and told myself this was the ‘reason’ my book couldn’t be any shorter. Two whole people, each with families and friends. Whilst it’s true we never see much beyond the strange five-way relationship these two sort-of-families share in The Children’s Bach, we still gain a full-bodied understanding of each of the five. This is the kind of book I’d be thrilled to dissect with others. (We learn in the final chapter that Dexter doesn’t know how to operate his own washing machine!?) It would be the ultimate teaching tool; the juiciest bookclub meat. And considering you can down it in a few hours, I think you’d be nuts not to give it a go.

I haven’t read Cosmo Cosmolino, which came out in 1992, but it baffles me that Garner never really returned to fiction after proving how well she could do it. I know, I know, The Spare Room is a novel. But Astrid makes the compelling argument that, really, it sort of isn’t. It's this other in-between thing. I guess if you believe both Astrid and I you’d be thinking that Garner should do more fiction-fiction? As always, better read yourself and make up your own mind. I, for one, intend to start it from the top again tomorrow.

‘Helen Garner’s uncomfortable spare room’ by Astrid Edwards

I am yet to enjoy a book by Helen Garner. But I approached The Spare Room reverently—carving out an evening on the couch without distractions and with a glass of wine—for the selfish reason that the subject mater resonates with me. A woman becomes carer to a friend. It is one of our oldest stories, although one of the least told.

Garner published The Spare Room in 2008, making it her first novel in 16 years. The premise is simple: the fictional narrator, Helen (see what Garner did there?), offers the spare room of her home in Melbourne to her friend Nicola, who lives in Sydney. Nicola has terminal cancer and, after conventional treatments have failed, she travels to Melbourne for a course of alternative medicine, which Helen does not trust. The work is short, only 200 pages, and covers the three intense weeks Nicola stays with Helen.

Although sold as a ‘novel’, I struggle to call it that. It feels more comfortable to describe it as autobiographical fiction. The content draws on Garner’s experience caring for her friend Jenya Osborne. Like so much of Garner’s work, The Spare Room includes other circumstantial true-to-life details, such as playing the ukulele and living next door to her daughter and grandchildren.

My caring and being cared for baggage

I care about caring. And I am invested in how we write about it.

I was a carer in my 20s, although we didn’t use that language then. We didn’t even recognise that is what we were doing! My boyfriend lived with severe mental illness, and after caring for him for years I was diagnosed with PTSD. Caring is hard. A few years later I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. Extremely ill and in need of a carer myself, I returned from Melbourne to my parents’ home in Sydney so they, especially my mother, could care for me. Those months in my parents’ home were literally a lifesaver.

My point in sharing this is that I am a biased reader. I am aware caring is complicated. It comes at a cost to the carer, and sometimes to the one being cared for. It is unrecognised, far too often feminised, and almost always undervalued. So to see caring – and specifically women’s caring – in literature is meaningful to me.

So too is Garner’s specific experience of caring for someone who is dying. Garner is of an age when she may have grown up with rituals around caring for the dying that our contemporary life has sanitised. I mean, my great-grandmother knew how to lay out a body. In turn, my grandmother was a live-in carer for my great-grandmother for the last decade of her life. The wheel turns, and my mother cared for my grandmother when she was dying of cancer. I was young and encouraged to stay away, and now in my 40s I find I have no skills in this regard. I wish I had paid closer attention to that act of caring.

And by picking up The Spare Room I hoped, perhaps, I would learn something about it from Garner.

Critical reception to The Spare Room

Upon publication Garner was clear what her intent was. She reflects, ‘I’m very interested in the kinds of feelings these losses provoke. They are not what I’d expected. They are often tougher and less appealing, the kind of feelings that you would rather not admit to having. I’m interested in those feelings and I’d like to put them out in the world somehow in the form a story, and open a conversation about them perhaps.’ You can trace this train of thought throughout the text, for example when Garner/Helen says to another of Nicola’s carers ‘It’s the worst thing about me – I’m an angry person. Anger’s my default mode’.

The Spare Room attracted plenty of praise on publication, winning both the Victorian and Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards and being shortlisted for many more. Peter Carey, a writer of the same generation as Garner, wrote the puff for the cover, calling it a ‘perfect novel’.

I disagree. Which puts me with critic Robert Dessaix, who argued upon its publication The Spare Room work is not a novel but rather journalism or ‘a hard-hitting, flinty-eyed report from the front’. This sleight of hand, provocatively blurring the line between fact and fiction, is what Garner has been doing throughout her career. It was a revelatory mode of writing in the 1970s, but at what point can we admit this has been done – to use an inappropriate metaphor given the subject matter here – to death? I find the ‘what is fiction what is fact’ vibe disingenuous and the overt blending of the real and fictional maddening.

I feel guilty reacting that way, and I find myself musing over Ceridwen Dovey’s 2014 essay ‘The pencil and the damage done’. Dovey interrogates why female writers are critiqued for writing about their own life in fiction when male writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard are praised for it. But then, I find everything about Knausgaard irritating too, so the lesson here may be that I should stay away from writers who tend towards autobiographical fiction.

Dessaix had me squealing with glee when in his review he continued, The Spare Room ‘reads like the monologue of an angry, exhausted friend, sitting across the kitchen table from you, telling you, since you haven't asked, what looking after poor, mad Nicola was like in gritty detail’. On this I sympathise with Garner. Caring is all consuming. But who wants to hear about it? And no matter how much you love them, the one you are caring for is usually experiencing something profound and they may make it difficult. As Garner/Helen says, ‘she’s cast us as the carriers of all the bad stuff – and somehow we’ve let her. She sails about with the ghastly smile on her face, telling everyone she’s going to be better by the middle of next week, and meanwhile we’re trawling along the bottom picking up all the anguish and rage that she’s thrown overboard’.

But at this point I diverge from Dessaix, and also from Dovey’s thoughts five years later.

The difficulty I have with The Spare Room is that Garner does not ask the reader, and indeed she does not let the reader, consider the point of view of Nicola. We only experience what the narrator Helen experiences. Dessaix sees this as virtue, whereas I see an unfathomable void. For most of the 200 pages it is just Helen and Nicola in a room together, with occasional exceptions when they are both at home in different rooms, or Helen is at home or in the waiting room waiting for Nicola to finish treatment, or a previous carer visits them both in Helen’s home. Structurally, The Spare Room reads more like a play with two main characters, although unfortunately Garner only wrote one of them.

Which brings us back to whether this is a novel or not. If it were a novel in the traditional sense (and yes, I hate using that word ‘traditional’) it could be filled with whatever Garner felt compelled to create in order to provoke whatever response she desired in her reader. But because The Spare Room is essentially a representation of her actual experience, the work does not venture into the mind of Nicola. As a reader, I think the work lacks for it.

It is all well and good for Garner to want to explore the hard parts of caring. It is atrocious so few works deal with this part of our lives. But why write it in a way that ignores the autonomy or voice of the person being cared for?

As always, Garner writes beautifully. She describes the alternative treatment centre brilliantly – ‘the room within was painted a strange yellow, the colour of controlled panic’.

And her subject matter and personal experience is critical. If these 200 pages had been a personal essay asking the difficult questions that surround caring the work would have had – and still have – way more punch and be on less ethically dubious ground.

To be clear, I do not judge how the fictional Helen or the real Garner found the act of caring. It is fucking tough. All the negative thoughts and feeling shared with the reader benefit us all, because that is what caring can prompt is any of us. But what I do question is the absence of Nicola, which in this presentation veers dangerously close to disrespect.

Representations of caring on the page

Caring – the art of it, the import of it – is one of the many silences in contemporary public discourse. Just think of the appalling way we treat disability support workers and aged care workers in Australia, even after the experience of the Pandemic. It is also a silence in Australian literature. Caring is a messy painful business, too often sanitised away. But we are seeing works begin to challenge this.

Sarah Holland-Batt’s The Jaguar won this year’s Stella Prize. Like The Spare Room, The Jaguar is short and concise, written from the point of view of a carer. It includes all the messy bits, the mean bits, the lonely bits… but not once does Sarah diminish or belittle or dismiss her father. The difference in approach between Garner and Holland-Batt is stark. Just like Helen’s Nicola, Holland-Batt’s father made plenty of bad judgement calls during – and perhaps because of – his illness. Perhaps it is the fate of a carer to witness such poor decisions. But despite sharing these episodes, her father remains centred in the work. He is a whole, vibrant, autonomous person. This perhaps mirrors Sarah’s advocacy outside the bounds of poetry. Her personal submission to the Royal Commission into Aged Care and Quality and Safety is devastating.

In terms of The Spare Room, my question both as a biased reader and a literary critic is: what is the  value of articulating the unattractive emotions of a carer in a way that lessens the humanity of the person being cared for? Why can’t the work find a place for the carer and the cared for? On every page of The Spare Room I wondered how Nicola felt. What drove her to put blind trust in Vitamin C, coffee enemas and ozone saunas when she needed palliative care? What drove her from her own home to move between the spare rooms of her niece and a series of friends? But Garner does not give Nicola a voice.

Caring is a shocking, human responsibility. For too long there has been a public assumption the cared for is more important that the carer, which cannot be true if any caring arrangement is to be sustainable. I suspect The Spare Room is likely to be exactly the book someone deep in the emotional trenches of caring may need. Near the end of the work Garner writes, ‘I came to love the intimacy of our labour, I would have to help carry her to the lavatory, where I learned to wash her arse as gently as I washed my sister’s and my mother’s, and as someone will one day have to wash mine’.

But damnit, Garner’s The Spare Room leaves out Nicola, the cared for, in a way I find profoundly disconcerting. Needless to say I find Garner’s metaphorical spare room uncomfortable, but I suspect she wouldn’t invite me to stay.

Life, love, art, work, politics, advice, rant? Bri answers your questions!

The reader question I’ve answered this month is:

I’ll probably need to learn and re-learn these (and other) lessons my whole life. But for now, here they are.

18 things I’d tell an 18 year old woman heading out into the world:

1. Calling attention to a problem will sometimes make you feel like you have somehow created a problem, or are responsible for it. You aren’t! People who benefit from the status quo (or from silence) will always demonise and shame those who speak out. Practice saying: ‘I am not the one at fault here.’ Practice saying: ‘Why is that funny?’ Practice saying: ‘I was not put on this earth to give you a boner.’

2. Often when people criticise you or bully you, they’re saying a lot more about themselves than they are about you. Got a good comeback? Great; zing it. But the ultimate comeback in life is to truly forget they even exist because you’re busy doing you. The Corrs say ‘Forgiven, Not Forgotten’, but in my experience, if someone has wronged you, you’re aiming for the opposite.

3. If you are ever tempted to think you are not like other girls, remember that although every single human being is unique, you are almost certainly being a dickhead right now.

4. They win when you are hungry. You cannot do your best work when you are hungry. No level of thinness will ever be enough, and you will regret every single joyous meal you missed out on due to fear. Don’t allow this thing any other name than fear. A fear can be conquered.

5. If a man ever says to you that you’re ‘mature for your age’ what he is really saying is that he is too immature for women his age. I am very old (over 30 now!) and the thought of dating an 18 year old fills me with pure eau de cringe. If a dude my age wants to be intimate with you be very sure you’re getting exactly what you want out of the interaction, because he sure is.

6. In every decade there are older people trying to make younger people afraid that machines will take their jobs. The bigger question to be asking is: how can a company be run by someone who makes more than a hundred times the salary of their lowliest employee? The way to financial security is not to elbow each other in the dirt, it is to collectivise and prevent worker exploitation. You don’t care about this very much because you’re 18, but trust me, the other graduates fighting for unpaid internships are your friends. Know thy true enemy. Unionise against thy enemy.

7. Send safe nudes.

8. If you can delight in learning new things then for your whole entire life you will be capable of finding joy. Learning can be solo or with a lover or with friends. Learning can be light or heavy. All it takes is an acknowledgment that you do not currently know, but you would like to know. Then you will like it. Ta-da! The meaning of life! It actually doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

9. Statistically speaking, the person you are dating right now is not your forever person. However, if you are sure they are, then fuck the haters! Anyone not presently in-love is madly jealous of those presently in-love. Don’t half-arse it. And don’t be embarrassed. Love is wonderful.

10. Sometimes you will be blue for no reason. Allow the blues.

11. SPF50+ EVERY DAY I AM SERIOUS ABOUT THIS I CAN FORGIVE YOU EVERYTHING ELSE.

12. It is good to strive towards independence and self-sufficiency, but it is also good to strive towards community and togetherness. It need not be a binary. Sometimes the pendulum is the balance.

13. Drink a full glass of water before you go to bed every night. Can’t hurt.

14. It isn’t actually cool to say you hate kids. Kids are fucking hilarious.

15. Giving is good, but in this world there are people (especially men) who don’t even see what you’re doing as ‘giving’. They see your actions and they do not see ‘work’, they see ‘things women just do’. Make sure that when you do give yourself—your time, your effort, your smile—it’s to people who deserve it.

16. Try to be the same sort of person regardless of whether or not anyone is watching. Knowing yourself and being true to yourself takes time, and a bit of trial and error. If there’s a big difference between your public and private self, ask some gentle questions about that misalignment.

17. It’s what you do when you’re down that counts. Sometimes someone else has hurt you and sometimes you’ve done some hurt. So, what are you going to do about it? Hold other people accountable and hold yourself accountable, then try your fucking hardest to move on.

18. Better to chase satisfaction than happiness. People who are ‘happy’ all the time are psychopaths. But if you’re living a life that is true to your values you can enjoy a constantly full inner well of satisfaction. Learning the difference between the two will, ironically, lead to more of both.

Upcoming Special Edition and Giveaways

The winner of last week’s giveaway, a copy of Infidelity and Other Affairs by Kate Legge is #62 out of 150. I’ve emailed you, Clara Allen!

This week’s giveaway is a copy each of Monkey Grip and The Children’s Bach. Enter with your name and email address and I’ll draw a winner at random next week.

I’m making some big announcements about future special editions in the coming weeks. There’s a lot to be excited about. Stay tuned! xx