8 Questions for... Laura Kennedy

Peak Notions

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Laura Kennedy

is an Irish writer and journalist based in Australia. She has written on everything from philosophy and culture to beauty and sport for titles such as The Irish Times, The Sunday Times Style, The Guardian, Vogue online, Grazia and others. She holds a PhD in philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin, and is the author of Some Of Our Parts, a book that considers our obsession with collective identity labels in a culture of individuality. She is the author of Peak Notions on Substack.

1. Why Substack?

Having worked within legacy media for more than ten years, I think that what it rewards most is certainty. But I live in doubt and the bloviating certitude we encounter all around us right now makes me feel tired and disengaged. We’re in a cultural moment characterised primarily by doubt – I think it’s the root of all that defensiveness and overconfidence. The loud people are shouting hysterically and the quiet people are doubting in isolation. Most of us seem routinely baffled by what is apparently just normality now. It’s a rational response to a preposterous time.

My background is in academic philosophy and journalism. I spent a decade as a beauty editor while simultaneously writing columns about how philosophy applies to culture and everyday life. How we’re all using it all the time, usually unknowingly, often messily. When we’re deciding whether to go on that second date, or what we believe or reject when we’re scrolling social media, or which products we buy. I am also, like most of my generation, chronically online.

I’m fascinated by the stories we build about reality and how they are disseminated. I’m interested in where our ideas come from, how we package and repackage them. How we fashion them into cudgels and bash one another over the head with them. Substack is a place where I can ask questions and explore ideas with a total freedom I don’t have everywhere else. It deliberately leaves room for heterodoxy.

2. How long did it take you to find your groove?

I think that place between certainty and apathy is my groove but it took me until relatively recently to realise its full value and lean into that unselfconsciously. I still experiment. I have the weekly Peak Notions column which is free to read. I do audio versions of my writing for paid subscribers, run a Peak Notions Book Club where we meet via Zoom to discuss philosophical fiction and non-fiction (I’m excited for the next one on The Handmaid’s Tale) and we have a weekly chat via the Substack app.

We had a chat recently on genAI and how we might think about and adjust to the way in which it has already changed everything from education to your email inbox. One of my favourite aspects of Substack is that despite all its growth this last year, the whole platform is still finding its groove. There’s room for experimentation and readers have a sort of good-faith attitude that allows writers to just try things. It’s collaborative in that way. There’s less reward here than anywhere I’ve ever written for looking like you’ve got everything figured out.

3. How has it changed you?

It has made me more insufferable, which is really just an Irish way of saying ‘confident’. For a long time while I worked solely in traditional media, I was hunched over with this corrosive and deeply unattractive resentment that the best work I did wasn’t considered valuable, like some sort of aggrieved, muttering crustacean. I wanted to do something different, which is always considered a bit cringe, misguided and unwise… unless it works.

An aunt once told me in my teens that I have “a chip on my shoulder” and I’ve always wondered why she considered that a critique rather than a compliment. I don’t come from a culture or a context that encouraged self-belief or nonconformist thinking. That fury to kick doors in – to say what you don’t see others saying when you think it’s true, to do something different and to try to make a contribution – is a necessary kind of confidence.

In an ideological landscape utterly devoid of epistemic humility and filled with people using beef tallow as sunscreen or doing cold plunges to raise their IQ and self-diagnosing with autism after seeing a TikTok video or confidently suggesting that annexing Greenland is just common sense, really, that doubt – that questioning – has value. Having this confirmed by such an open-minded, generous readership here has fed that confidence. My aunt would be horrified. I’m delighted.

4. What mistakes have you made?

It took me too long to shake off the fear. I’ve written about how working in media can be detrimental to a writer’s sense of self-worth – it’s an unavoidable consequence of trying to hang on and make a living in an industry in crisis. Everyone is flailing, the traditional advertising model is no longer working effectively and as a result your sense of what readers have an appetite for can become skewed if you let it.

After a lot of feedback suggesting that there isn’t an audience for the sort of writing you most enjoy doing, sometimes you can’t get out of your own way just out of habit. It took me longer than it should have to relax and realise that it’s fine if I do what I want here and fail on my own merit – which is a respectable way to fail – if that’s what is going to happen. No adult will storm in and confiscate my laptop. I’ve realised, to my horror and glee, that I am the adult.

Thankfully, it’s working so far. Peak Notions is growing and I’m somehow building a smart and engaged community. Still, failing to get out of my own way and worrying excessively about failure (I quit my job and moved from London to Australia – a country I’d never even visited – to focus on writing, so the stakes were pretty high) probably slowed the progress for a while.

5. To pay or not to pay?

This is a question so many people clearly struggle with. I see them on Substack Notes regularly pretzelling themselves out of sanity trying to reason it out. I get the dilemma. The deep terror that nobody will value your work enough to pay for it. The sense that you’re taking a liberty or hassling people by asking.

If you value someone’s writing enough to want to read it, then it’s worth paying for if you can. If you can’t (and I’ve been there!) then that’s okay too. My weekly column is free to read because I want it to be accessible to everyone. But nobody is entitled to read a writer’s work. Stressing about whether other people will think you’re too big for your boots for asking to be paid for your work is counterproductive. Some people will think this, always. Who cares? I’m a professional writer. If I didn’t get paid, I could no longer do this – my vocabulary narrows significantly when I’m hungry. Money is a measure of market value. Yes, there are other measures, and other kinds of value, but I can’t eat any of those.

6. What artistic and technical choices have you made?

I was an early adopter of audio, recording my written work for Substack. Since it’s for paid subscribers, I open with a quick intro and tell them what’s been going on, the thoughts that led to that week’s topic, and any news I have to share. It’s a way of establishing and maintaining a relationship with those who directly support what I do. I’m a passionate consumer of audiobooks. I find audio snobbery so gauche. As though languidly listening to three hundred hours of Miss Marple will bash all the Plato out of my head. As though you are less serious or intellectual for reading with your ears during the few stolen, highly contested minutes you might get to yourself in a day. I want people to consume my writing in the way that’s most valuable to them. I’m grateful they want to engage with it at all.

I experiment on Substack but always prioritise building a structure of integrity into my work. I get people unsubscribing pretty regularly because they feel seen by one column I write and then expect me to align with them on every issue they care about. I’m never aiming to maximise the comfort of my reader and sometimes that alienates them, especially as things become even more politically siloed and (as unfortunately looks to be the case after that half time performance) bootcut jeans once again tragically regain a dangerous level of cultural prominence.

7. What’s been the effect on your writing?

These last two years have sharpened my writing into something that isn’t afraid of itself. People who come from the background I come from don’t usually get to do what I’m doing. It can leave you feeling like a fraud, an outsider and, occasionally, like you’ve turned up to a polo match in your underpants wearing of those multicoloured novelty clown wigs.

The first time I met a writer was after I had become one myself. I didn’t know anyone who read philosophy or worked in media or a creative industry. It was a universe I had no idea how to pass in. For a while, this outsiderism made me feel that I should resemble other voices more but Peak Notions has made this looking in at things my strength – the philosophy, the journalism, the tendency to constantly adjust the lens between the enormous questions that orient our lives and the smaller ones that really feel more important in the moment.

You can’t think about the future of democracy or whether being online so much has made you just like the people you hate if you’ve just realised you’re out of toilet paper at the worst possible moment. Life is both, so I write about both.

8. In it for the long haul?

Gosh I really hope so. There’s little else I can muster this level of enthusiasm for. I figure out what I think through writing so without it I’m not sure what sort of person I would be. Plus, what would I do with all my annoying questions? Bother my family with them? ‘What are the limits of bodily autonomy?’; ‘Can you be against capital punishment but support euthanasia?’; ‘What is this profound and fundamental uncertainty we collectively feel about the future, and how might we think about it without going utterly, utterly insane?’

I’ve been writing independently for over four years now and balancing it with the other media work I do. I can’t see myself stopping. Who knows what will happen – with this platform or any other – but I think that Substack has changed the digital media landscape in a way that has liberated writers, democratised writing on culture and opinion, and seriously disrupted the legacy media model. As long as I can continue to kick doors in here, this is where you’ll find me (and the chip on my shoulder).

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Laura Kennedy