Since Taylor Swift dropped The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD), much has been made of her lyrics - the who’s who and the confessional questions and whether she needed an editor. But perhaps the line that caught my ear the most was in Florida!!! ‘All my friends smell of weed or little babies’, sings Swift, capturing the sharp delineation between millennial thirty-somethings. There’s the one side with kids or wanting them; the other, child-free and unlikely to change that any time soon (nor want to).
The brilliant
dived into the line for Vogue, looking at the ‘stilted adulthood’ that millennials have experienced and asking why there’s this split. It’s a great article that I highly recommend. But I’m more curious about how it taps into the Great Maybe of Motherhood. The will-we-won’t-we that seems to be a central topic of every other conversation I have these days. The way that it splits through the core of us. Everyone, it seems, feels the need to decide right now what their choice is.The Great Maybe is also at the core of Olive,
’s debut novel. I decided to revisit it this week after listening to TTPD. Olive is the story of a young woman considering the choice of whether or not to have children, how she navigates that decision, and how it impacts her relationship with her friends. It’s funny, painful, thoughtful, and incredibly relatable. And whilst it’s a difficult and sometimes controversial topic, Gannon explores it with warmth and a lightness of touch that makes it unputdownable.When I first read Olive, I was resolutely single, hyper-focused on my writing and I was pretty sure that I wanted to remain child-free. I felt like Olive was written for me. I respected the titular protagonist’s absence of broodiness and laughed in recognition when she fretted over her lack of ‘ovary twitching’ when seeing other people’s babies.
Me too, I thought, That’s me.
Likewise, Olive’s anxiety around whether her friendships could survive through parenthood was one I felt panicked about. All my friends were beginning to couple up and I wasn’t. All my friends were starting to talk about fertility and timing and whether they’d buy a Bug-a-boo. I still wanted to go to Unwined to unwind. My decisions at the time were beginning to feel like a chasm yawning open and I was scared of what that would mean. So I latched on to Olive, feeling nothing but gratitude that someone - even a fictional someone - struggled with the same worries, same fears.
In that first reading, I highlighted this passage: “Maybe people who want kids or live for their kids will never get it why I don’t want them … But here are a few reasons: kids would ruin our relationship. Kids are hard work. Kids will destroy my body, and my freedom. Kids will destroy my bank account, and I don’t have any money as it is. The world is overpopulated! The world is a mess!”
But it’s funny how those weren’t the lines that stood out to me on my recent read-through. Sure, I still fret sometimes about all of the above, but what shone through the novel for me this time wasn’t the decision-making. It was the choice and the focus on choosing. There are so many ways to live a fulfilled life, writes Gannon, and I found myself nodding. The lines that sung to me this time were those that focused on the multitude of ways to live well, create well, and build a legacy.
I realised that Olive isn’t just a book exploring the idea of being child-free by choice. Not entirely. It’s about the decisions we make, the pressures we feel to live a certain way and follow a certain script. It’s about choosing the life you want for yourself and in your own time. We have to give ourselves the space and time to make the right choices, whatever that looks like. I’m a different person today - the future feels wider, there are branching paths ahead but these are choices that feel nurturing rather than overwhelming.
Olive is a really good book, one that I think is fantastic to read and reread and urge anyone considering the Great Maybe to do so. Now, I’m going to finish this review here, with the reminder to be gentler, to take the pressure off, take things slower and more intentionally. You don’t have to make a final decision today. You don’t have to know all the answers right now. Or, as is so well put in Olive:
“I just want everyone in this room to remember to look deep inside and know sometimes we don’t have to stifle ourselves with the pressure. We don’t have to build up this huge unanswerable question in our heads: Do I Want Kids? It hangs over us, but why? Sometimes we can just roll with it, make smaller natural decisions as we go along and follow what makes us happy daily, and in doing so we will make the right decision for us in the end, without turning it into something so pressurised. Do you know what I mean?”
The Pairing: Royal Flush, Sparkling Tea (Alcohol Free)
It seemed appropriate that Olive become the first book to pair with a non-alcoholic wine option. Emma was the first person I heard talking about sober-curiosity and I wanted to respect that with my pairing. Plus, there are now some genuinely very good options for those of us who enjoy an evening drink but perhaps don’t really fancy an alcoholic one on a Tuesday night.
When it come to non-alcoholic wines, you have a couple of options. You can go for a dealcoholised wine - such as those produced by Noughty or Oddbirds - or you can go for an alternative that’s simply bottled a bit like a wine. Royal Flush is one of the second variety - a sparkling tea that’s designed to be an alternative to Champagne. Now, let’s quickly say that it’s absolutely not a like-for-like. You can’t really compare it to a glass of Drappier or Chapel Down. But it is genuinely delicious, otherwise I wouldn’t recommend it.
Of course, there are definitely wines that would absolutely pair well with this novel, so if you want to drop a comment below, I’d be happy to chat about some of the options. For example, I was tempted by Château Cambon’s Gamay, an iconic Beaujolais from a female winemaker. Not only do I love to celebrate women in wine, but I was also following a thread of thought about how approachable Emma’s writing is - how she takes a fraught subject for women, that of motherhood and choice, and tells a story that engages our empathy and makes that subject emotionally accessible. But today, we’ll stay in the no-and-low zone - because it really is lovely to have more options than ever for an evening tipples!
The Wine: Royal Flush is a sparkling tea made from Darjeeling, a lighter and less astringent type of black tea than your average English Breakfast blend. This is a leaf that’s layered and complex than most green teas, and is known for having three ‘flushes’ ie. harvests. This wine alternative is specifically made from highly-prized ‘first flush’ leaves - meaning they’re picked in spring time and you can expect to find some really delicate, interesting flavours in there including some more arboreal and saline notes.
Tasting Notes: Funnily enough, you’re going to get notes of tea - specifically Darjeeling. You’re also going to notice some fruitiness - think white peach, grape, and lemon - with a medium body and good acidity. It’s much drier than the majority of the dealcoholised options but still more off-dry than anything else (think Sec vs Brut). One of my favourite things though is that you actually get some good tannins with this one thanks to the tea leaves, so you get a much better mouthfeel from Royal Flush than some of the super young wines that have been dealcoholised.
Where can I buy it? The Real Drinks company sell Royal Flush alongside a variety of sparkling AF teas on their website. You can buy a case, a bottle or bunch of cans depending on your preference. You can also buy Royal Flush for £9.99 in Waitrose.
Fun facts: Darjeeling is globally acclaimed as “The Champagne of Teas” and part of the reason for that is that it can taste more like wine than any other tea - in fact people say it literally tastes of French grapes and Himalayan mountain air. The most common comparison is to Muscat, thanks to its ‘musky-sweet tasting notes’ similar to muscat wine. Honestly, I was surprised when I started reading and discovered that Royal Flush isn’t made from the second flush which is supposedly so much like Muscat. I’d love to find out why.