Welcome to Tell Me About It!
Please join our community - and join me in raising an eyebrow at life for women
When I was 22, I worked briefly as a celebrity reporter. My job was to go to parties, where celebrities hung out, and report back to my bosses with interesting tidbits from the night.
The only problem? Most of them weren’t that interesting, or had sent their hairdresser to the event in their place. Probably the most exciting thing that happened to me at that time was being given a gratuitous once-over by Jason Orange. Take that.
Thankfully, I was also quite rubbish at that job. Otherwise I might never have found my way onto a newspaper features desk and ended up as Women’s Editor of a national paper, aged 32.
That was when the interesting stuff really showed up. I got to talk to and think about women non-stop. Sometimes those women were famous and I still thank my lucky stars for opportunities to interview the likes of Erin Brockovich and Queen Camilla (I’ve dropped all my names now, so you can relax. And let’s be honest one of my most-read articles was on the death of the thong, so it wasn’t all glamour).
Mostly, though, I was speaking to women from different walks of life: domestic abuse survivors; Kurdish freedom fighters; new mothers; old friends; carers; activists; body positivity campaigners; entrepreneurs; Holocaust survivors; sex workers.
Those women were the most interesting thing that had happened to me. They taught me to widen my world view and showed me that, regardless of who you are, life as a woman is rarely on a level playing field.
And through it all, I spent a lot of time feeling very… well, angry I suppose. Once your brain is switched into that frequency, it’s hard to tune out again. And you carry a lot of those women’s stories with you - they seep into your bones.
Since leaving that job a year ago and becoming a full-time freelance writer, it’s sometimes been hard to know where to put those feelings. So here I am.
But while there will definitely be quite a lot of ‘what the hell’ in this newsletter, it won’t be a weekly rantathon. There will be stuff on female friendship. Things that makes me laugh. Issues I care about and perhaps you do, too. Despite the name, there won’t be much about Grease, though there might be the odd stud. But there will be a lot of looking at the world like the image at the top of this newsletter.
Basically, if you’ve ever liked my articles, my book BFF? The Truth About Female Friendship, my podcasts BFF? and Imposters, my previous 51 Per Cent newsletter, or just my Insta posts, this might be for you.
I hope you’ll tell me about it as well - the things that are getting you excited, or getting on your wick. Then maybe we can make this something really fun and interesting together and form a community of likeminded women. Let’s do this.
Love this Claire, Keep up the amazing writing!
Always enjoy your writing, Claire. So pleased you've started a Substack x