How to Correctly Take Yourself to Dinner
and what you can expect from Good Decisions in 2025
Hello! Happy New Year. Welcome, 2025. Or perhaps, Buckle Up? I don’t know any more than you do, but we’re here now, so let’s enjoy as much as possible. Enjoyment is radical and sustaining and we’re going to need both in the coming years.
First, some housekeeping. As I mentioned a few newsletters back, now that the book is launched (and thank you to everyone who included me in an end-of-year reading list; reader recs are the platinum level of book lists) I’m turning my enjoyment attention, and intention, here. I’ve been listening to Pictures at a Revolution over the holidays, which talks about Esquire magazine in the sixties being a place that was “urbane, sophisticated, unshy about sexual appetite and a love of the good life” and I thought, that’s an excellent description of what I intend for this newsletter!
I’m going to be introducing a monthly Q&A titled What’s Up, Pussycat? in which I ask women — primarily those sans children, sans partner, though not always, because, believe it or not, other people have enjoyment, too — how and where they get their enjoyment. I’m going to be opening this up to readers as well, so stay on the lookout for links to submit your own.
I’m also going to start a reader mail feature. Last month’s survey was so great, and elicited so many smart responses, I’m going to make it a regular feature. You can find the link to submit a question (or comment, or concern) in the header and footer of this, and all future newsletters. I’m thinking, too, of inviting some guest writers. If you have requests make them known.
As many of you know, I complain constantly about the lack of narratives around women’s lives, particularly women outside marriage and motherhood, and these feel like some small, universally enjoyable ways to fix that.
Some of this content will be paywalled. I’m not going to bore you with a long exegesis about the state of media. Suffice it to say that, at best, pay rates are half what they were ten years ago while living expenses are thrice (if not more). I’m a professional writer with a lot of experience, and writing is work same as anything else, etc. I’m not raising rates — Good Decisions will remain $5/month and $50/year. I am, however, shifting the Founding Membership rate to compliment the consulting services I offer. Now when you choose Founding Membership, which I’ve renamed Brain Trust, you will also have access to quarterly, private, one-hour consulting sessions with me to discuss whatever projects you may be working on or are considering working on. Do you have an idea you need to talk through? Are you looking for advice on a project or potential project? That’s what this is for.
Now! Let’s talk about eating alone.
When we went out to sell No One Tells You This, few editors thought it would make a book. The eternal, what is the story? plagued most of our meetings (not the meeting with my eventual editor Christine Pride, who got it immediately, and also has a new book coming out this year!). In one meeting, I was asked by the head of an imprint what I thought the crisis moment of the book was (this was before my mother died). They pointed to the chapter in Cheryl Strayed’s Wild when Strayed is forced to shoot her horse as an example of what they were looking for. I said, in my case, it was the chapter when I eat alone at the bar after returning to New York having spent Christmas moving my mother to a nursing home. I felt that this was both “me” confronting deep, challenging solitude, as well as the social implications of it, along with feeling triumphant over life choices.
They did not buy the book (fortunately). However! That chapter continues to be the one I hear about most, even years later. Some readers have even made pilgrimages to Colonie, the restaurant I describe in that chapter, to have their own meal, which, as a person who routinely pilgrimages to places based on books I love, makes me extremely happy.
That said, I was also shocked on that book tour to hear from women who asked me how to eat alone, and told me they felt shame over doing so. Successful women who ran companies said this to me! I was floored. Indeed, I still have friends (whom I respect and adore) who only ever eat by themselves on work trips. People! You are missing one of the great joys in life.
I do not know when I started taking myself out to dinner (and breakfast, and lunch). Sometime in my early twenties, probably, perhaps when I moved to New York. I do know that I’ve always understood it to be a measure of a successful life; it’s certainly how I’ve always rewarded myself. It’s still how I reward myself, even though NYC is currently so expensive you basically need to take out a personal loan to leave the house. I don’t understand how to feel good about my life unless my life involves me taking myself to enjoyable places by myself. In addition to dinner, “places” include but are not limited to: the movies, the opera, the symphony, the ballet, Broadway, Paris, museums, massage parlors, cross-country road trips, across the Brooklyn Bridge on foot, across Paris at midnight on a bike.
For example. I stayed in NYC this Christmas and during Christmas week I took myself to Handel’s Messiah at Carnegie Hall (did you know that it’s customary to stand during The Hallelujah Chorus because the King stood during the first performance? I did not!)(Related: the Paris contingent reports the French do not stand…colo/ur me not shocked).
On Christmas Eve, I took myself to the afternoon show of It’s A Wonderful Life at IFC. Or tried to. I arrived late and they wouldn’t let me in. Love a movie house with strict rules! So I walked around the corner and saw a 3PM show of Guys and Dolls at Film Forum (one of the great New York institutions). Do you all know about Guys and Dolls? My mother was not a Brando acolyte so this was missed in my musical upbringing. It is a nusto film. Pet Me, Poppa! Wild.
Then I walked over to Raoul’s to see if there was seat at the bar (close readers of No One Tells You This will recognize Raoul’s from the Thanksgiving chapter) but it was a 45min wait so I continued on. SoHo was dark and mostly empty, and someone was driving around (or having a party..I couldn’t tell) playing live versions of Eighties pop music at top volume. As I made my way across Prince St. U2’s concert version of All I Want Is You echoed off the loft buildings and cobblestone. It felt like I was attending an ethereal private concert beamed in from the decade when you had to prove you were an artist to live in parts of Soho. NYC is all I ever really want, so that, too, felt fitting and perfectly magical. I made my way to Fanelli’s where I got a table in the back because the bar was full, and ordered a Croque Monsieur and a glass of wine.
Afterward, I took myself to Grace Church in the Village to listen to Christmas carol organ music but left shortly after the service started when they opted to begin with Eve in the Garden (a weird choice for a holiday service; I believe Luke 2:1-20 is the only acceptable reading on Christmas Eve) and walked to train at Union Square. The subway was rollicking in the best way - so much great live holiday music and happy New Yorkers all the way home.
If you’re thinking, this all sounds great. You are correct! But let’s get back to where we started. Here’s how to correctly take yourself to dinner. A seven-step guide: