Strategy consultant turned writer Natasha Joukovsky joins me to discuss why bourgeois comfort is more conducive to writing than you think, why choice-plots make for better fiction, the eyerolling prevalence of manufactured nonchalance, our shared distaste for Atlantis Bahamas, and MUCH more!
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. For the full transcript, episode takeaways, and bucketloads of other goodies designed to make you go, “Hmm, that’s interesting!”, check out our Substack.
Important Links:
Show Notes:
- “You can do everything, just not at the same time”
- It’s Recursion All the Way Down
- Pretending to Read vs Actually Reading
- Manufactured Nonchalance as a Status Signal
- Counter-Signalling, Fake-Famous & Jim’s Cursed Trip to Atlantis Bahamas
- On No-Choice Plots & Writing in Service of Beauty
- The Self-Deception of Status Hunting
- Why Bourgeois Comfort is More Conducive to Art Than You Think
- Natasha’s Next Book
- “We don’t do auctions”
- Natasha as World Empress
Books Mentioned:
- The Portrait of a Mirror; by Natasha Joukovsky
- The novels of Jane Austen
- Status Anxiety; by Alain de Botton
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (poem); by T.S. Eliot
- Class: A Guide Through the American Status System; by Paul Fussell
- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid; by Douglas R. Hofstadter
- Ulysses; by James Joyce
- Metamorphosis; by Franz Kafka
- Beloved; by Toni Morrison
- In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past); by Marcel Proust
- Collective Illusions; by Todd Rose
- The Status Game; by Will Storr
- Anna Karenina; by Leo Tolstoy
- The Theory of the Leisure Class; by Thorstein Veblen
- A Little Life; by Hanya Yanagihara