tall tales ~ issue 30
On bouldering and also Freelee the Banana Girl
Hi, hello. It’s the end of August, and as I gobble up the promotional material for Alfonso Cuarón’s upcoming series Disclaimer I can’t help but think… Every time Cate Blanchett plays a morally bankrupt woman we get closer to fixing climate change. I can’t explain it — I’m not a scientist — I just know it’s very important that she continues to do it.
It’s been a year since I broke my wrist, and became a full-time writer, and if I’m honest it’s been a weird one. This edition of tall tales also marks my thirtieth email to you — which is the age I think I am because I keep forgetting that I turned thirty-one. I’ve spent the last twelve months in a holding pattern, which doesn’t make for great content but has given me a lot to think about. This newsletter is a dispatch from the storage unit I’ve found myself in, mentally speaking.
In 2020, my friend Kaytlin and I would meet at an extortionately expensive cafe-cum-organic grocery store (I’m not above using cum like this and hoping you will laugh) in Fitzroy North, buy a cookie, and then circle Edinburgh Gardens until our feet hurt. We did this weekly, if not more often. Of course, most people had a similar ritual during this time. And we were all pining after something: a person, a job, a pair of vintage levis to end the horrors. I was in love with a sexy pirate who was still in love with his ex-girlfriend. His sharehouse did NOT have an indoor toilet.
In the last month, Kaytlin and I have started bouldering. Yes, you heard me. Indoor rock climbing. No ropes. I know, the little shoes are so fugly. I know, the gym smells like ethical non-monogamy. I hate the feeling of the chalk on my skin. But god it feels good to climb stuff and have a chat. And this new ritual has reminded me so much of our old one. This time, thankfully, I am not in love with an avoidant pirate. But I am fantasising about all of the things that might happen once I emerge from my storage unit.
About three years ago I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in ages. We didn’t know each other that well, and actually we still don’t, but she’s one of those people I would really like to know better. When I saw her a few years ago she was running a cafe with her partner. It was going well. Really well. But she felt shame for stepping away from creative work. She said to me, ‘I’m reminding myself that life happens in seasons,’ and although I’m sure so many people have said that, on so many podcasts and greeting cards, it hit me for the first time.
I should probably speak plainly: I’m waiting for my book to come out. But at the same time……. I do not want my book to ever come out. You know? I started writing this novel three years ago, which isn’t a long time on paper, but is one entire season of my life in practice. When I started writing rytual I was quite lost. I was selling hand cream and receiving lots of rejection emails, and I was furious with my bad ex-boyfriend for leaving bin juice all over my heart.
My life is really different now. And I have a second book to write, which is a luxury, although it feels weird to move on when the first one still lives on my laptop. I have two superb, whip-smart editors, and the book has a cover, but it also still exists on my desktop in a file that can be altered. Friends have said that it will feel like this even after the book is published, which speaks to that infuriating little truth: wherever it is you think you’re going, you will simply never arrive.
Do you remember Belle Gibson? The woman who said she had brain cancer, and healed herself with ancient grains? I had a work assignment on her recently, and it reminded me so vividly of a different season of my life. Perhaps you lived through this same season. I’d like to call it: The Time I Believed in Wellness Influencers Because We Didn’t Think Goop was Funny Yet. The year was 2015, or thereabouts. I had just moved to Sydney, and I was really into health as a way to control the uncontrollable madness that is being alive and twenty-two years old.
Belle Gibson is one layer of the 2015 wellness onion, but I’d like to go deeper and weirder for just a moment. Have you heard of Freelee the Banana Girl? My experience with referencing her in real life is that you will either be intimately familiar with this woman or assume she is an off-brand Marvel character. If they made a Marvel movie of her life I would purchase a ticket, and that means a lot because even Rachel Weisz couldn’t get me to sit through Black Widow.
For the uninitiated, Freelee the Banana Girl is a vegan YouTuber who preaches the benefits of eating 40 (four-zero) bananas a day. The lifestyle she promotes is called Raw ‘Till 4, and essentially you just eat ‘raw food’ until 4pm, after which you can eat a cooked vegan meal. She believes that oil is a satanic substance, and she is blatantly fatphobic. She actually gained a lot of followers at one point for shaming other internet personalities for physical imperfections she believed could have been solved by eating 40 bananas a day. In short, she is absolutely looney tunes. She is also, you guessed it, an anti-vaxxer. When I brought her up to my friends, Michelle said, ‘Oh yeah, what’s she doing now?’ to which Gill replied, ‘Dialysis, I assume.’
Now, I was vegan for a number of years, and while I was vegan I was also on the internet. I followed a very tall girl who was my age and often shopped at the lululemon I worked at, and actually while I’m on the topic — we must stop shopping at lululemon! The man who invented those leggings is a monster!! And when I worked there we had to arrive at the store ten minutes early to ‘clear’ anything that might inhibit our ability to sell heaps of leggings, and we were not paid for that time!!! But the leggings are, unfortunately, really good. It’s so confusing sometimes to be a girl.
The tall girl I followed became enmeshed in a community of vegan influencers and fans, led by Ms Banana Girl herself. A friend told me recently that they ran into a man who got swept up in the banana-mania, and he said Freelee and her then-partner pressured their young male disciples to get vasectomies while on a group cycling trip to Thailand. The man was literally on his way to have his vasectomy reversed when my friend ran into him. This is not the plot of a weird A24 film starring Florence Pugh, it is real life.
I distinctly remember watching one of Freelee’s videos, in which she said it was okay to sometimes have a large bowl of steamed potatoes for lunch. That’s it, just potatoes. She called it a ‘monomeal’ and said that the quantity of potatoes meant you checked all necessary nutritional boxes. As I said, looney tunes. But one day I was alone in my leaning tower of Sydney sharehouse and I said to myself, ‘I should really get serious about my diet’. So I ate an entire bowl of steamed potatoes for lunch; no salt, no seasoning. I ate an entire bowl of steamed potatoes and then I went to a photoshoot for a friend’s comedy show, and on the bus on the way there I felt like I was going to be sick.
I can’t remember if I did it again, but I certainly didn’t tell anyone about it. I know I said I was lost in 2021, but the feelings of disconnection I experienced throughout that season pale in comparison to 2015. By 2021 I was living in the same city as my family, I was falling in love (with a man who had a toilet INSIDE his apartment), I’d stumbled into a spectacular group of friends, and although I hated selling hand cream, I had a deep love for the people I worked with (who also hated selling hand cream). I was lost because I had a lot of ambition but was finding it hard to follow through.
Maybe I can be the person to remind you that life happens in seasons. A year ago I became a full-time writer, but I also broke my wrist. Last night I used said wrist to scale a wall in fugly shoes. So many of those YouTubers are no longer vegan, and I wouldn’t dream of eating plain steamed potatoes for lunch anymore. I still have a lot of ambition, and I sometimes find it hard to follow through. The sexy pirate works in marketing now. You cannot cure brain cancer with ancient grains. Goop is objectively funny. The seasons will change again.
❤️
stories of note
I saw three movies at MIFF and they were all so SILLY. The first was The Substance, a body horror/dark comedy about an ageing Hollywood actress who decides to take a ‘substance’ that promises an optimised, younger self. Naturally, it does not go well. The second was Rumours, an absurdist comedy set at a G7 summit in Germany. In it, Cate Blanchett plays a morally-bankrupt German chancellor, and because of this nature is healing. The final film I saw was Problemista, which is my pick of the three should you be looking to watch something kooky and heart-warming! Tilda Swinton is one of the all-time greats, and Julio Torres is a genius (as per my last email).
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein - I’m late to the party on this one, but I loved it! The book is billed by the publisher as being ‘for anyone who has lost hours down an internet rabbit hole, who wonders why our politics has become so fatally warped, and who wants a way out of our collective vertigo and back to fighting for what really matters.’
Halina Reijn on the No Film School Podcast - It will come as no surprise that I’m absolutely chomping at the bit to see Babygirl, Halina Reijn’s upcoming erotic thriller starring Ms Nicole Mary Kidman. This interview was recorded on the press tour for her last film, Bodies Bodies Bodies, but is a really great listen for anyone interested in filmmaking.
I enjoyed this, thank you!