For My Cumberbitches
an end-of-year manifesto
My Nonfiction November pick was the masterpiece This Is Not A Book About Benedict Cumberbatch by Tabitha Carvan. The author, an Australian woman and mom, is suddenly struck by Cumberlightning. (Huge thanks to Anna Rollins for the recommendation.)
Certainly Carvan was aware of Benedict Cumberbatch in the Before, but in the epiphanic After, Cumberbatch takes on the glow of a sexual-spiritual lodestar, in other words, a Cumberbitch. I didn’t make this up; this is what his fans call themselves.
It happened in the midst of Carvan’s new motherhood years, “either pregnant or breastfeeding, I was simply hostage to my chemistry.” The loss of time for herself results in the most perfect rebellion:
What came first: the chicken or the eggs Benedict? Correlation or causation; Sherlock Holmes would have something to say about that…As soon as Sherlock finished, I wanted to watch it again. Again! What a waste of my time that would be!
Radical thoughts for new mothers: you feel a feeling all of your own. Total subversion: you act on it, just because you want to.
An obsession with Benedict Cumberbatch might seem a bit teenage girly. Carvan interviews fellow Cumberbitches who discuss various strategies for managing the inevitable Cumber-judgment, ranging from doubling-down to hiding the obsession completely – for the most part not out of shame, but to protect a private sense of self and/or deflect/protect a romantic partner’s feelings. One middle-aged Cumberbitch described her approach this way: “You know, there are a lot of people, their lives revolve around golf. They don’t feel guilty.” Indeed. Carvan writes:
When you’re a girl who really loves a thing, it’s never just about you and your thing. Everyone else makes it their problem. You can’t love the thing unseen, not even in your bedroom, alone.
While Carvan concludes that her obsession with Cumberbatch is teenage girly, she argues along the way that it is precisely that girl and her enthusiastic joy who need to be celebrated, not shunned. Carvan comes to understand that the so-called putting away of childish things was exactly the wrong decision for her, and maybe for us all.
I recognized so much of myself in Carvan’s journey to adulthood. As a teenager she fangirled hard with U2 and INXS. In my twenties I once saved up and followed my favorite band (Swervedriver) on their entire West Coast tour, seeing them in LA, SFO, and Seattle, by myself. It was the best time!
I still love music, but my interests have changed. Or rather, how I prioritize my “list of interests” (a term coined by a friend of Carvan to deflect judgy nonsense) has changed. Spoiler alert: fromage.
The book made me think about the difference between writers/artists and people I might call…normies. No doubt tons of people have a great story or series of paintings deep inside them. The difference is the compulsion to pursue it, to put in the hard work and focus required to study the artform, to write a novel or paint a body of work and then, crucially, bring that work to the public. There’s certainly not much of an incentive. Artists toil away for no money and little prestige 99% of the time. You have to believe in yourself to the point of delusion. We toil because, one hopes, we enjoy the work.
I met a painter recently who told me she worked twelve hours a day on one painting for three months, which made perfect sense to me (it was a huge, beautiful painting). She’d had to organize her life (work, money) to be able to carve out those three months to paint. I’ve met plenty of other artists and writers like her.
In other words, no one is holding a gun to our heads to create art. We are simply compelled to do it. And, importantly, we make time for it. We organize our lives around it, around joy.
This past year I doubled-down on joy with my literary work-wife, Elizabeth Kaye Cook. We went full-metal fangirl on Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, and Jane Austen, traveling thousands of miles to hang out with other fans and attend the author-cons of each writer. Did we feel bad about it? No. We felt great about it! We felt like the giant book nerds we one-hundred percent are! And, the sharing of book-nerditry returned on investment in ways I can barely describe. How to describe waiting in hours-long lines with fellow King fans for King-artists to sign copies of our King-related art? How to describe chatting into the night with our randomly assigned roommates during Discworld at a castle in the middle of nowhere Germany? How to describe nibbling through an exquisitely prepared high tea with other Janeites in the literal Pump Room described in Northanger Abbey and Persuasion? (Psst, article about our Austen pilgrimage here.)
My plan for 2026 is to lean into my list of interests. One’s interests don’t have to be monetized, projectized, or serve any other purpose in life but to bring one joy. My current list:
learning French
kicking around weird places
reading
wild swimming
collage-making
cheese-eating
Looking at this list, I’m delighted that none of them can be monetized. They serve no other purpose than that I love them. I do them purely for my own enjoyment. Again, gun to head, none. I am simply compelled to do them. Perhaps this is the art of living, everyone’s birthright.
Here’s how I will try to arrange my life in 2026 (and do let me know if we’ll cross paths):
Do a two-week French immersion program somewhere in Europe (taking recommendations if you have them). This one is aspirational for sure and will take some planning.
Return to KingCon in October in Atlantic City. So excited!
See more of Ireland. I’ll be in residence at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Aug/Sept working on my new novel.
Learn more about how to edit photos for this newsletter so that they are artsy and beautiful. Related, I just hit 140 subscribers! A million thanks for being here! I’m going to try to pretty it up for you all next year.
So, my Cumberbitches – and all fan-adjacent peeps – I see you. And I know you see me. To you, my real, unjudging friends, I wish you a 2026 filled with your unique, inexplicable interests. My hope is that you get into one of them really hard this coming year and go completely ham on it.
Bonne Année!
Terrific. Thoroughly enjoyed. You're living proof of Oscar's declaration, "“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
Now I am thinking about the parallels between cheese-making and novel-writing. Both such inefficient, time-consuming, bizarre, but delightful human activities! And both use limited ingredients (dairy, the alphabet) to dizzying variety. AND also, when the cheese and/or book is a perfect expression of what it should be, it's someone else other than the creator who gets to enjoy the pure pleasure of gobbling it up.