creating spaces with millie jacoby of the dybbuk diaries
what's on your desk and why does it matter?
I am so excited to welcome you to the first instalment of Creating Spaces. In this new series for Twenty-first Century Demoniac, I speak to up-and-coming writers about what’s on their desks, the importance of writing places to them and the creative act, and the question of online vs offline space.
Creating Spaces was born of frustration with the way we aestheticise the writer’s life online, as well as an abiding curiosity with the conditions in which we create art. Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s argument that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own’ to write, the rise of ‘literary it-girls’ and ‘thought daughters’, as well a desire to unpick the hyper-stylised ‘what’s in my bag’ trend, Creating Spaces looks beyond the visual appeal of the writer’s desk to its lived experiences.
My first guest is Millie Jacoby of
. Millie is a writer and linguist from Coventry, currently living in Melbourne, Australia, which means we conducted this conversation over text at what I like to call the ‘coffee-and-cocktails hour’ of long-distance friendships. Millie’s work is concerned with memory, epistemology, Jewish identity, twentieth-century comparative literature, fascism, and trauma.Millie is one of the few writers on Substack who strikes the perfect balance between personal essay and critical analysis, blending memoir and theory in succinct, compelling pieces on wellness and fascism, motherhood and dread, and memory. I’m delighted that she agreed to kick off this new series with me, in a wide-ranging discussion which touched on travel, precariousness, and the delights of organised chaos, as well as a couple of digressions into Joan Didion mania.
HELENA: My first question is a pretty simple one, and the question which inspired this series in the first place. What’s on your desk?
MILLIE: My desk at the moment is currently my kitchen table — I’m very acutely aware that I’m in-between places at the moment, so I sort of set it up and then take it down depending on whether we’re eating dinner there. Generally though, when I’m working, I’ve got my laptop and my three drinks with different functions on standby (water for hydration, flat white for caffeine and diet coke for fun), books and notebooks I haven’t put back on the shelf (my partner’s journal where he sticks his polaroid photos of our travels was left there when I was taking the photo), plus whatever trash I haven’t gotten around to moving or items I’ve brought home from the shop and haven’t put away, like my empty medication packets, tampons, nail polish, etc. I’m very chaotic so a lot of the time I’ll pile things up until it gets genuinely unbearable to work around!
HELENA: Multiple different drinks is the best — I have an iced matcha and water right now. When you sent this photo over, you said you see the kitchen table desk as a metaphor for being ‘hugely in-between places at the moment’. I like the idea of a desk being a metaphor for the work which takes place at it. I am a bit of a neat freak so I’ve always had pretty sparse desks, except when I was studying for my Finals. Then it was chaos. I think that really summed up where I was in my life at that moment. Could you speak a bit more to that idea of the desk as metaphor?
MILLIE: Iced matcha and water was one of my master’s dissertation combos, a very solid choice! I grew up in a house where my mum was also a neat freak and would be very insistent that a tidy room, and a tidy desk, were a sign of a tidy mind and being in control, so I had a real pressure to make my spaces reflect that, but now I have my own autonomy to make them look the way I want them to I’m quite lax about keeping them neat because I seem to operate best in a state of organised chaos, which looks insane to other people but makes perfect sense to me because I know where everything is, and if anyone interferes with it I lose all sense of where things are which is always quite disconcerting to me. I think people like to create metaphors around how they exist in the spaces they inhabit and how they cultivate these spaces as a representation of who they are as a person, which I don’t necessarily think is wrong, but I think it’s also a representation of your circumstances. My desk at work is often a complete mess too, because I have a job that I really can’t bring myself to care about, but my desk at home is a real depiction of impermanence and the fact that none of this furniture is my own, that I am in a country that I am not a citizen of, which I'm moving away from in three months.
HELENA: I want to talk a bit more about your in-between state in a moment, but something else I like about your desk, which you’ve touched on by invoking ‘organised chaos’, is that it speaks to more than just the writing you’re doing there. The tampons and medication are as essential to being a writer as, I don’t know, a fancy pen, if not more so. But every time I see a writer’s desk go viral on Twitter it looks pristine and perfect, no messy notes or dog-eared books or random trash anywhere. It’s a weirdly aestheticised idea?
MILLIE: Yeah, one thing that I’ve always found is that my desk always has things on it which are a real feature of my daily life, whether or not they’re particularly highbrow — I spend a lot of time there when I’m not working from my bed, so why wouldn’t it? There was a point in my life as a teenager where I was quite curious about the studytube/studyblr trend that has thankfully died out a bit, so I tried to make it look more photographable, but it never lasted long, and convinced me that these people were striving for an unattainable state of keeping everything they might ever post online absolutely pristine even if that isn’t something that works for them (maybe I’m wrong and just can’t empathise with them but I can’t imagine it being something to strictly maintain just in case someone is watching). I think the sorts of pictures which circulate online are kind of an offshoot of that and I find it quite sad, if anything. The desk photo I sent you is admittedly tidier than I usually have it, even if everything on there is authentic — if I hadn’t been asked, I wouldn’t even think to share a picture of my desk, as it’s something so mundanely personal that I don’t know why anyone would want to see it! Posting it for virality or clout doesn’t even register with me as a possibility.
HELENA: Oh God I was really into studyblr for a bit, the whole bullet journalling thing. I think that has died down, or maybe we're just too old for it? Now I mainly see it in a sort of literary it girl capacity, if I'm not tempting fate by uttering those words…
MILLIE: God, I hate the whole ‘literary it-girl’ thing! It speaks to a certain sensibility which I found on studytube too, which was that the main characters loved studying for the sake of studying, not the actual studying itself: if you see what they’re all doing now, it’s some EdTech bullshit, or master’s/PhDs in education and pedagogy, because the only thing they know is how to perform studying. I never saw a single one of the main players of these spaces actually talk about their academic interests beyond just wanting to look like they achieve at all costs. The literary it-girl thing feels weirdly similar, in that everyone wants to talk about how much they love Joan Didion, without seemingly ever engaging with Didion beyond a surface level. Anna Khachiyan from Red Scare (who is admittedly one of my least favourite people on the internet) posted something recently about how Didion, with her difficult personality and ‘spergy interests’ (I don’t condone the term but I’m quoting verbatim) would despise and be despised by people who aspire to ‘literary it-girldom,’ and I do think there’s a lot of truth in that, but I digress.
HELENA: Yeah that's a ‘heartbreaking, the worst person you know just made a great point’ moment, isn't it? I feel like the word performative gets tossed around too much online, but the attitude around reading, studying, intelligence, etc really is performative in the worst way.
Something I really wanted to speak to you about is travel and the act of uprooting yourself, because you’ve written a lot about travelling, most recently your move across the globe to live in Australia, and the challenges that brings. A key theme I want to delve into in this series is the act of writing in transit. I don’t think it gets talked about enough. The exposure to new spaces and places and experiences feels key to imaginative work like writing. That being said, as young writers we’re told to write what we know — but if we just stayed at our desks forever we’d be writing about pen pots and keyboards and dirty coffee cups. I wonder if travel or transit feels essential to your work? I know it does for mine, even though I am a very boring and unimaginative traveller.
MILLIE: I do think it’s important to immerse yourself frequently in new environments to enrich your own perspective, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be somewhere thousands of miles away! I think it’s good to write what you don’t know sometimes, and I feel like I get into a bit of a habit of circling the same drains of my own experiences and my own neuroses if I don’t start moving around a bit. There’s sometimes a certain conceit that comes with travelling though, where people think it is a substitute for being an interesting person or engaging with your surroundings in any depth. I always laugh when people wax lyrical about how they ‘found themselves’ on their travels and the only thing they can articulate is their own experience while they keep their eyes firmly on their navels. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more lost than when I’ve been away from home, and that is a good thing! It makes me think about other people and other lives and other histories that I am not a part of!
HELENA: You’ve said a couple of times that you feel in-between places at the moment. I found your essay ‘Nihilist kitsch’ incredibly moving on this, especially when you talk about your 'attachment to the new and the shiny and the strange and the impulse to fly away’, which you see as a kitschy impulse born of denial. What draws you to travel, and how has it affected your writing practice over the years? I suppose especially when it doesn’t work out quite like the idealistic, impulsive dreams you discuss in ‘Nihilist kitsch’.
MILLIE: I’m so happy you liked Nihilist Kitsch, it was something that felt quite difficult to write and to admit to myself, because again, I think on the internet it’s quite difficult to admit that you are having a bad time, but I can’t lie for the life of me and honesty to the point of oversharing has always been something I’ve done since I started using the internet in a big way. I’ve uprooted myself quite a lot but not really out of any active ambition, even though travel is something I really yearned for as a kid whose parents couldn’t shell out for holidays abroad — I chose a degree course where I would have to go on a year abroad and lived in Paris and Cádiz for half a year, and then my partner won a scholarship to do his PhD in Melbourne, so I went with him. I’ve always struggled with knowing exactly what I want, and making big decisions like moving to the other side of the world is probably not something I would do by myself, so when I find that it is difficult and that I’m not enjoying it, I sometimes find myself in a state of resentment that I think tends to bleed out into my writing. Like I said, I find it very hard to disguise these sorts of things, or not to wear my heart on my sleeve.
HELENA: Two writers I've been influenced by recently are Chris Kraus and Kate Zambreno (who is published by Kraus). Both of them talk about the experience of being young/ish women in creative or academic worlds who move around according to the demands of their partner's job market — that it can present both difficulties and opportunities. It's something I've thought about too, also being in a long-term ‘straight’ relationship. I feel like that always feels like a sticky topic for women who create, and that it is an act of work or labour to make a space for yourself to create in. I’m not sure I've made that point make as much sense as Kraus and Zambreno do!
MILLIE: This is definitely something I think about a lot — so far Sam and I have had a fairly equal history of moving based on where the other is at any one time, and he moved to Oxford when I was there for my master’s which was a huge sacrifice, but moving somewhere so far from everywhere you’ve ever known is something else entirely. I think it would be unfair of me to say that he is the only reason I moved here since the only reason he applied for the scholarship to be here was because I said it was something I’d be interested in, but I do feel sometimes like I’m living in a place that is set up especially for for him and that I’m just tagging along for the ride. I often feel like I don’t really have much purpose here — I’m working somewhere that doesn’t fulfil me just to pay the rent; I’m not really doing anything that enriches me; I’ve found it difficult to make those networks of friends and alliances with the same sort of creative rather than corporate drive as me — so the effort to establish a place where I can create often feels very laborious and like I’m snatching tiny slithers of time and space just to hold onto that part of myself.
HELENA: You feel that frustration in the ‘Nihilist kitsch’ essay definitely. I have creative friends who've had questions of money and space play a role in their relationship troubles, but its always been something my partner and I are good at navigating as well. I guess related to the travel topic, I do wonder about the spatial and temporal limits on young writers working today. Of course these have always been here (Woolf is a famous example, Kafka’s struggle for a job where he could write freely is another) but it does feel like its got harder under the pressures of the internet, urban life, work, the housing and cost of living crises and so on. Not to mention the rise of fascism. I really want to be optimistic about the future but I'm definitely a nihilist too — and I think what optimism I do have is born from a place of security, like currently living with my parents, and having an academic grant kicking in soon.
MILLIE: On a practical level, the money and space tension is something that we only have to consider carefully rather than worry about, which makes us very lucky. Being in a couple with fairly stable situations makes it a lot easier to exist in general than single individuals without any sort of familial support to fall back on. I’m always very conscious of that, but I do feel in a sense that I am running out of time despite being 25 and realistically still fairly young and in a secure position. Despite being from a middle-class background, I do feel the temporal and spacial limits, albeit obviously to a much lesser extent than people who are working class — I think in the UK at least, where everyone is so fundamentally weird about class in a way that makes people from other countries look at me like I’ve spawned a third eye whenever I explain it, the difference between working class and middle class writers is the level of precarity, and the difference between both of these groups and solidly rich writers is the level of freedom and opportunity to make it your full time gig when you’re starting out. Sometimes I wish someone could just give me a room, a few thousand pounds and some time, and I feel like I could make a really good go of this, but currently I don’t have any of those things. As you say, the uptick in overt fascism makes all of these things feel frivolous, but I really believe that part of resisting fascism is resisting the notion that there’s any such thing as ‘degenerate art,’ resisting the notion of kitsch, where everyone is sentimental and uncritical and where artists’ only function is to aestheticise and not to critique. Artists who didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in their mouth are often best placed to do that, I think.
HELENA: I feel like that is such a good place to end, as it returns us back to one of the inspirations of this series, which was Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I’ve been thinking a lot about both the radical potential of her vision of space, even today, and the tensions within it, for example as it speaks to the intersection of class and gender. As a middle class writer from a well-off background and part of the UK, I think it’s important to be involved in both creating, acknowledging, and upholding spaces, and also recognising the ways different spaces can offer something important to different individuals and communities. Which was part of the point of this series, really!
MILLIE: Absolutely, and I loved your essay about Woolf and the dinner party as a space which really elucidates this, especially with how invisible class is often made in these discussions.
HELENA: My final question is a bit of a silly one after such a wide-ranging and important discussion, which perhaps returns us to the aestheticised ideal of the writer’s desk, and the cult of personality which has sprung up around certain canonical writers as of late (you mentioned Didion earlier, who I feel is the main one — we won’t even get into the over-dramatic online idolisation going on there). But I’m going to ask it anyway, because it’s fun! If you could visit any writer’s desk throughout time and space, whose would it be, and why?
MILLIE: I really love this question too: for me it would undoubtedly be Annie Ernaux, precisely because of how simultaneously lucid and meticulous she is in her work while also recognising her own fallibility and fuzzier memories, and I wonder whether her desk would reflect that sort of memory-hoarding. Would she pile up documents and diaries and historical artefacts on it, in a sort of organised chaos like mine, or would she have a filing cabinet for these things? Maybe this is delusional of me, but as a fellow memory-hoarder I like to think we would have a similar way of working. I like Didion in the same way agnostics might respect Christianity, in that the source material is decent but the fandom is rabid, and I don’t think she’s nearly as interesting as Ernaux.
You can find Millie on Substack and Twitter / X @bigdybbukenergy. Creating Spaces will continue later this month.
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Excellent piece! I love this series! You highlighted so many important ideas to think about, and I value your honest depiction of living life as a writer and artist in these precarious times. The desk photo made my day. lol my dining table looks quite similar: piles of bank envelopes and utility bills, a stack of newspapers, a beaten up black journal, an empty coffee mug, an opened can of lemon sparkle water. This brilliant essay feels like the antidote to the bizarre trend of posting curated, manicured study spaces as an act of performative intellectualism (dark academia and lit it girls, no thank you!) I love Didion as much as the next person, but you both make an excellent point about how so often these insta style Didion tributes tend to engage with her work on a surface level, heightening her aesthetic appeal as the hot new lit it girl (ugh sorry, I don’t like even typing that) while ignoring the intense substance at the heart of her writing. And I gotta agree with Millie that there are so many super gifted writers worthy of our attention. Rather than idol worshipping the material image of Didion, i appreciate reading about other writers who don’t necessarily check all the boxes for how to achieve social media clout while posting. I loved reading the earnest dialogue between you and Millie. Thank you for writing this elegant, insightful, and honest essay about the spaces we inhabit as artists. Brilliant writing!