Mo Fanning's Blog

Days when you’d wake to the death rattle of someone coughing two doors down

If you spend any time on Facebook - and I recommend you don’t, unless you enjoy seeing your former classmates morph into genealogists with anger issues - you’ll know nostalgia has become a competitive sport. Grainy photographs of pubs that stood proudly for eighty years, served fourteen regulars, and finally shut are everywhere.

“Such a shame,” says someone who has spent every Friday night for two decades drinking in Wetherspoons. “Should never have gone,” adds my auntie Pat who once ranted over the Christmas dinner table that pubs should be shut on holy days and only open until ten on any other.

Mo’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Facebook comments groan under the weight of grief, outrage and wistful longing for an ancient and beloved institution cruelly taken too soon.

The same longing for days when women couldn’t hold credit cards and men held doors open for women in crinoline skirts lurks beneath photos of old high streets. “Look at it back then - proper shops! Butchers! Record stores! A Wimpy! Now it’s just charity shops and nail bars.”

Everyone laments the loss, but nobody seems willing to admit the obvious truth: the reason the shops vanished is because we stopped going. We got convenient. We got cheap. We got same day Prime delivery and forgot what it was like to actually step outside for something other than bin day.

Nostalgia makes people forget their own part in the demolition.

We talk about the past as if it was snatched away, when in reality we gently pushed it down a flight of stairs and then stood there, clutching our pearls, wondering who could possibly have done such a terrible thing.

But nostalgia is a crafty thing. It edits. It crops. It applies a soft-focus filter over reality, smoothing out the inconvenient bits. Pubs with draughty windows. Pubs that served indifferent microwaved lasagne still frozen at the centre. The landlord with the personality of a shoehorn. The stamp-sized women’s toilet that required maths and Olympic-level upper-body strength to enter.

Facebook turns these into cathedrals of lost community, victims of progress, martyrs to modernity - instead of what many of them really were: pubs that barely scraped by.

The High Street nostalgia is just as selective. People forget that the reason those “proper shops” disappeared is because they stopped buying anything that wasn’t discounted with a code, shipped by mega-corp, or on offer.

We let the butchers go first - not because they weren’t good, but because supermarkets offered chicken breasts in a plastic tray that didn’t require making small talk about the weather. Then the record shops closed down. Then most of the bookshops. We stopped using greengrocers.

One by one, surrendered at the altar of convenience.

And now? We grumble about how the high street is nothing but charity shops, vape dens, takeaways, nail bars, and forty-seven cash-only barber shops staffed by men who look like they model part-time for ASOS.

Well, yes. That’s because the only things we still buy in person are emergency hairstyles and chips.

I’m not saying all nostalgia is nonsense. I love a good stroll down Yesterday Lane as much as the next person. But let’s not rewrite history into some misty-eyed fantasy where everything was perfect until someone ruined everything with avocado toast and mobile phones.

If you didn’t shop there then, you don’t get to mourn its absence now. If you spent the 90s buying books from a supermarket, you don’t get to complain about lost independent bookshops. If you bought your jeans online with free next-day delivery, you don’t get to tut at the empty storefronts on the high street.

We didn’t lose a golden age. We traded it in for convenience and then lied to ourselves about the receipt.

There’s a particular kind of nostalgia common in the Midlands - one I recognise in myself. We look at old housing estates, red buses, open markets, kids French skipping, and convince ourselves life was just so much simpler then. That there were fewer choices. Fewer screens. That there was just us, our mates, a packet of crisps, and a tennis ball in an old sock that we’d bounce off walls.

But that’s memory doing what memory does: sanding down edges, inflating virtues, pretending the world was kinder than it actually was. The 70s and 80s weren’t some golden age of community. They were cold, draughty, grimy decades where people hated other people and stuff didn’t work. Waking to find ice on the inside of your bedroom window wasn’t cute.

Do I miss the past sometimes? Yes.

Do I want it back? Absolutely not.

Not unless we can bring it back with central heating and Deliveroo.

Some of this is tied to age, I suppose. The older we get, the more the past becomes a sort of personal museum where we curate exhibits designed to reassure us that we came from something solid. Something shared. Something real. The world feels faster now, cheaper, temporary. And nostalgia steps up like an emotional chiropractor, cracking bones back into place.

But part of it? Part of it is genuine grief. Not for the pubs or the shops. We grieve the versions of ourselves who used them. The nights when we stopped out until two in the morning. The friends we’ve lost touch with. First boyfriends and girlfriends. The sense that the world was still big and full of possibility and hadn’t yet had a chance to disappoint us.

Nostalgia is a longing for a life we’re convinced we once had.

There are days when I catch myself scrolling through Facebook, staring at a shuttered shopfront and whispering, “Ah, I remember that place,” as though I had been a loyal patron. In truth, I went once, didn’t like the lighting, and bought nothing but a packet of Poppets.

And yet, there’s still a pang.

Because nostalgia is sticky. It clings. It coats everything in amber and pretends that what we lost was perfect, when really what we lost was time.

And yes, before anyone asks, nostalgia sells. Especially at this time of year, when readers reach for stories that feel like comfort food. It’s partly why my Christmas-adjacent novel Ghosted does that yearly little winters’ dance in the bestseller charts - there’s something about two seniors onboard a cruiser liner full of men behaving badly that scratches a sentimental itch without needing to wear tinsel.

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? We don’t want the past back. We want the feeling of it. Warmth. Light. Certainty. A pub that didn’t need to be perfect, because we were young enough not to notice the imperfections.

I don’t begrudge anyone their sepia-tinted scroll. But I do wish we could be a bit more honest when we look at old places and sigh over what’s gone.

It didn’t just disappear.
We let it go.
Piece by piece, click by click.
And now we stand in the ruins, clutching our smartphones, asking each other how on earth it happened.

Nostalgia is a thing.
So is amnesia.

What about you? What’s the one place from your past you miss - even though you know full well you never went there as often as you claim?

Mo’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

An AI-Generated Book Club image

My inbox is permanently perfumed by waves of “compassionate” strangers who—against all odds—have seen through Amazon’s fog of indifference to glimpse the true heart of my novels. Who knew I was weaving “tragicomic tapestries” and “multi-POV masterpieces”—and here I thought I was just trying to keep my dog in biscuits. And myself.

Every message is performance art: a blizzard of adjectives, characters’ names, and praise so effusive it causes me to blush.

Mo’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Take Rainbows and Lollipops, for instance. Vicky’s “pressure-cooker career battles” resonate, Jake’s “grief” sings, and Lucy’s “chaotic desire for love” stirs the scammers to tears. And always, always, there’s the breathless assurance that my genius is misunderstood by the algorithm, stifled by under-optimised keywords, but—rejoice!—help is close at hand for a “modest token of appreciation.”

The Great Amazon Visibility Thing

There’s a template lurking behind every email. Does your “contemporary fiction” not soar up the ranks? Fear not: some invisible committee has decided the only thing separating you from Colleen Hoover’s royalty statements is a cinematic book trailer, 2-3 “high-impact targeted strategies,” and a polite PayPal transfer. Suddenly, you’re offered “ethical review outreach” (that sounds even more suspicious than regular old sockpuppeting), “community spotlights,” or a heartfelt “reading feast” that, oddly enough, involves you buying coffee for 3,207 complete strangers.​

Book Clubs from the Twilight Zone

Nothing says authenticity quite like a book club you’ve never heard of, from a city you’ve never visited, run by a leader with zero detectable internet history and a Gmail address. Huge (and eager) communities of “chaos gremlins” or passionate souls are poised to “lift you to greater visibility”—just send some ARCs and maybe cover that “modest” admin fee. If you’re lucky, they’ll also ask for an Amazon gift card by way of thanks.​

Translated Emails: A Public Service Thing

“Your novel changed my life.” (I Googled your author name, stole a pirate PDF of your book and ran it through ChatGPT.)

“We’re selecting you for a reading event.” (You and 2,000 others, courtesy of Mailchimp.)

“Let’s collaborate to bring your book the attention it deserves.” (Please send money.)

Love-Bombed (and Broke)

Why do these scams persist? Because it costs nothing to do and just takes one person to answer. And Because praise disarms, especially for authors who mostly hear silence from the void. The message is always the same: your book is brilliant, but only we can help it find its people … for a small, recurring charge. It’s emotional phishing: leveraging every creative’s soft underbelly with laser-guided AI and enough emojis to float a drowning career.​

So next time you get an email gushing about how your “nuanced exploration of found family” made them weep, reply with this: “Thank you for your kind words. I especially loved your last line. So did all the other authors who received it this morning.”

Mo’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Just this weekend, I was accused of “fem-rage” by someone who meant it as an insult. A broadside disguised as banter, delivered with that all-too-familiar brand of gay malice. Rather than suffer in polite silence, I’ve decided to own it. Because Lily Allen’s new album, with its surge of women’s anger media coverage, isn’t happening in a vacuum.

Gay rage isn’t just a toxic masculinity repackaged in better clothes. It pulses through our apps, our gyms, our bars, our endless scroll through fuckboy bodies. We’ve inherited a problem and somehow made it worse. We’ve polished it, marketed it, turned it into a product we sell back to ourselves at premium prices.

Mo’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The perfect gay man is chiselled, charming and cultured. Rich enough to suggest emotional stability, fit enough to imply moral superiority. Anyone who deviates from this canvas becomes disposable. We’ve internalised heterosexual contempt and refined it into something more vicious, because it comes from inside the house. When we’re taught to despise ourselves for falling short, that self-loathing needs somewhere to go. So we redirect it at each other with surgical precision. And call ourselves catty. In a good way.

Dating apps have industrialised this catty cruelty. “Looking good” has become both commodity and currency. We’re measured not by our humanity but by our adherence to impossible standards—filtered, trimmed, chemically enhanced. Need to fit into those Speedos? Join a gym and hit the next spin class. Need a break from food? Spend your money on Ozempic instead. Looking your age? Think injectables. The wellness industry has weaponised our insecurities into a billion-pound market.

Toxic masculinity ripples through our world differently than it does through straight culture. There, at least, the oppressor and oppressed occupy distinct categories. Here, we’re both - simultaneously policing and policed, our own worst critics and harshest judges. We’ve created elaborate hierarchies based on arbitrary markers: masculine versus feminine, muscle versus fat, “straight-acting” versus queer as a nine-bob note. The audacity of “no fems, no fats” worn like a badge of discernment rather than bigotry.

So where does the rage go? Not at the structures that created these conditions, but at each other. We’ve become unconsciously savage, wielding wit like a scalpel.

There’s an archetype we’ve constructed: the perfect gay man. Chic, hot, fit, witty, cultured, rich enough to suggest stability, emotionally unavailable enough to maintain mystique. Anyone who fails to meet these impossible standards becomes a target. We’ve turned our oppression into a pyramid scheme where everyone believes they’re one good workout, one better job, one more product or procedure away from reaching the top.

When we’re taught that our worth depends on our fuckability, and our fuckability depends on meeting impossible standards, rage becomes inevitable. But instead of directing it outward - at the systems that demand our conformity - we turn it inward and then sideways, at anyone who reminds us of what we fear in ourselves.

Open any app and you’re confronted by generic faces: polished, smiling, dead-eyed. You compete. You starve. You inject. You present your best self while your real self withers. The anger builds, but where can it go? Not at your boss who underpays you, not at a society that just about tolerates you. So it goes at the man whose profile says “masc4masc,” at the former friend who got your promotion, at the stranger whose very existence reminds you of your own inadequacy.

This is where rage enters the conversation. Not as a weakness, but as resistance. The feminine gay man, mocked, marginalised, and made invisible, carries a particular fury. We’re told we’re “too much” while simultaneously “not enough.” Too camp for the straights, too femme for the gays. Relegated to a no man’s land where authenticity itself becomes liability.

This rage is anger at those happy to reproduce the very hierarchies that set out to oppress us. It’s the exhaustion of watching gay men perform heterosexuality drag while claiming it as authenticity.

The moment a “straight-acting” gay man calls someone ‘too camp’, he reveals his hand. He’s bought into the myth that proximity to straightness equals value. He’s swallowed the poison and decided to share it rather than spit it out.

So yes, this past weekend, I may well have been showing every sign of ‘fem-rage’. I’m furious at a culture that tells young gay men they’re worthless unless they can bench press their body weight. I’m incensed at the normalisation of eating disorders dressed up as “wellness.” I’m livid at the casual cruelty we dress up as “preference.”

But most of all, I’m angry that we’ve accepted this as inevitable. That we’ve decided the only way to survive is to become our own oppressors, while the real architects of our suffering go unchallenged.

The thing about gay rage is that it sees clearly. When you’re excluded from the party, you get to see how shabby the decorations really are. When you’re told you’re not man enough, you start to question why masculinity matters so much in the first place.

Perhaps it’s time to embrace the mess, the fury, the magnificent rage that refuses to apologise for taking up space. Because the alternative - some kind of polished, poisonous perfection we’re killing ourselves to achieve - well that just isn’t working.

We’ve been sold a fantasy of assimilation that requires us to destroy parts of ourselves and each other. The rage isn’t the problem. It’s the only sane response to an insane situation. The question isn’t how to eliminate it, but how to channel it - not at each other, but at the systems that profit from our self-destruction.

In a world that wants us small, controlled, and compliant, gay rage might be the most radical thing we have.

Mo’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Halloween is a thing now, isn’t it? I mean, it always was, but back in the black-and-white days of the 1970s it felt more… theoretical. We made scary masks out of cornflake boxes, and there was vague talk of hollowing something out — though pumpkins hadn’t yet reached the West Midlands. I suspect it was a swede. Or a potato. Certainly not a carrot. Even…

Read more

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

When ads appeared online to promote my last novel "Rainbows and Lollipops," I expected the usual mix of enthusiasm and indifference that greets any book launch. Instead, Facebook comment sections became anti-gay hunting grounds. Some strangers called me a paedophile. Others detailed exactly how they planned to kill me. One…

Read more

October isn’t just pumpkin spice latte season — it’s the ideal month to dive into Ghosted. Here’s why.

1. Autumn is the 'reflective' season

As the leaves turn brown and the days grow shorter, it’s hard not to look back on the year so far. Ghosted’s themes of second chances, reconciliation, and self-reinvention fit perfectly with that reflective, end-of-ye…

Read more

August is the month that pretends to be endless summer while shaking with recalled 'back to school' anxiety. Pride season technically wrapped in July, but don’t tell the gays — we simply relocated the glitter to Manchester, Brighton, and a Six Flags rollercoaster.

Edinburgh Serves History (With a Side of PTSD Jokes)

The biggest cultural mic drop of the mo…

Read more

Up-lit (or uplifting fiction) promises readers hope, comfort, and a belief that love and connection can win out.

That promise is its strength, but also its trap. If the ending is obviously happy, the journey can feel flat. If you dodge hope altogether, you betray the genre. The craft challenge is to deliver endings that feel fresh, earned, and emotional…

Read more

Photo by federica ariemma on Unsplash

I’ve lost count of how many novels I’ve read where the big “life-changing journey” begins when the 25-year-old main character is still busy dealing with lingering acne or struggling to download the latest app. Freed up by some Korean beauty miracle potion, they quit their job, chase wild dreams, fall in love, or trek…

Read more

There’s a version of burnout I used to believe in. The cinematic one - staring at a blank screen, empty coffee cup in hand, making deals with every kind of God, wishing I could conjure a single sentence.

That’s not what I have. My reality is messier.

Mo’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider beco…

Read more