Introducing: Goodbye Without Leaving

A new personal-meets-cultural blog from your favorite lesbian culture critic

In the couple of years that have somehow passed since I last updated this little shopping blog of mine, a lot of big things have happened in my life. I turned 30. I got married. I left my job at BuzzFeed News, where I worked for nearly eight years — the bulk of my twenties. And just this week (!) I moved to a small city in northern England, where my wife Lynette has worked for the last twenty-odd years.

It’s a lot of change in a very short amount of time. Most of it good, or with the very strong potential of being good eventually, after a few weeks of pure and absolute hell. Turns out executing an international move is pretty stressful, and that getting a 15-pound dog into a country that hasn’t had a reported case of rabies for the last century is somehow far and away the hardest part??? I’ve had a comically hard couple of months, which means that, focused as I was on whatever stupid moving task was in front of me at any given time, I haven’t really given myself the room to process the fact that I’m leaving — I’ve left — the longest place I ever lived as an adult. And I bailed out juuust before hitting 10 years in New York City, when I might have become, however briefly, a “real” New Yorker…. Not like those arbitrary markers actually matter, because TIME is not REAL!!!

By this point, some of you may be wondering: Wait, wasn’t this originally a shopping newsletter? Indeed it was, and I loved writing it. And I still plan to work out my thoughts about fashion and gender and consumption and bodies here going forward — just no longer exclusively. Those topics will now be folded into a bigger project I’ve been dreaming of for a long time now.

Welcome to GOODBYE WITHOUT LEAVING, a weekly personal-meets-cultural blog about watching, reading, & making art at the end of the world. It’s also about being a big angry lesbian, and married, and mentally ill, and extremely divided about whether or not I should have children, and how to best deal with and take care of my family back home, and how to be a good person. You know: Life!!! If you’ve enjoyed the previous iteration of this newsletter, or my work as a culture critic at BuzzFeed, or my shitposts on any various social media platforms, this is now the very best way to see more of all that jazz and much, much, more because, buried lede: I’m going independent, baby! Monetizing this newsletter will be one of the main ways I plan to support myself going forward, and I hope you’ll join me for the ride :)

I’ve borrowed my title from the inimitable Laurie Colwin, whose 1990 novel of the same name was my introduction to one of my new favorite writers. She was recommended to me by my friend Alanna Okun, who’s singlehandedly responsible, I believe, for igniting a Colwin renaissance among the thirty-somethings of media-worker Brooklyn. If you haven’t read Colwin yet, you’ve simply gotta!!!! Her own Goodbye Without Leaving is “the story of a woman's attempt to remain true to herself in a world of diminishing returns.” In other words, it’s a domestic comedy about the pains of growing up.

Admittedly, asking a general audience to pay me for my writing — which I’ve been posting all over the internet, free and unpaywalled, since I was twelve years old — is acutely nerve-wracking. Expecting people to sign up for yet another paid newsletter during this, our era of rampant subscription fatigue?? When everybody who, like me, has been dragging their feet on starting or rebooting their newsletters is suddenly panic-posting in the wake of Elon Musk’s doomed Twitter takeover? I’d have to be sort of delusional.

Luckily, that’s pretty much the vibe I’m going for these days. I think often of a speech that Lil Nas X gave earlier this year, at the iHeartRadio music awards, when he credits his own youthful delusions for his now monster success. “I wouldn’t be where I am right now in my life and career if I weren’t delusional,” he said. “Believing that I could drop out of school and become an international success within a year, it’s delusional.”

During a time of great change in my life — change that terrifies and excites me in near equal measure — I too have decided to try embracing my delusions, which you might alternately call dreams. That will involve, to some extent, rediscovering who I am as a writer and a person outside of and beyond BuzzFeed. I have no real idea what I’m doing right now, and this newsletter will function partly as a kind of diary as I try to figure out my 30s in a new country: how I’m going to support myself; what kind of art I want to make, and how to share it; whether I can actually have a healthy relationship with social media; how to be the best partner I can be to my beloved wife, who’s in an entirely different but also exciting/stressful/intense life period right now, as she gets ready to (hopefully) retire in the next few years.

If you’re not super familiar with me or my work, my BuzzFeed essay about meeting Lynette on a lesbian cruise is a good place to start. I plan to get very personal with this newsletter, snuggled safely behind baby’s first paywall. I’ll also be writing about movies and books, my great loves. Maybe you’ve read me before on Chasing Amy, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Three Women, or Marriage Story; if not, those are good pieces to get a sense of my voice as a critic.

Maybe you’re only here because you wanted to keep up with my jewelry making and are feeling very confused right now. A sad PSA: I’ve made the really tough decision to put Shannon Beth Studio on pause for the time being. It just doesn’t make financial sense to keep the shop alive in the UK when I was already barely breaking even back home. If and when she’s reborn, you’ll hear all about it on SBS’s Instagram account.

I know that a paid newsletter subscription isn’t a feasible financial option for a lot of people right now. If you’re interested in my work but unable, for whatever reason, to make a $5/month commitment, please do reach out to me for a free yearly subscription—no questions asked.

If you do have a couple bucks to spare, there is nothing in the world that would mean more to me than your support. I’ve really missed writing and interacting with readers since leaving my job, and I can’t wait to get real & get WEIRD with you all here.

Thank you, love you, hope to see you next week!!

xxSK