Find Deep Reading lists at phoebe.substack.com

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Sandeep Salter is a friend who is like family to me — we met on the first day of secondary school in London and I spent a considerable chunk of my teenage years in her family home. She has lived in New York since her university days, and her CV is a Google Map of the most distinctive independent businesses in the city: Printed Matter, McNally Jackson, Goods for the Study, Picture Room, and now Salter House — the family brand she runs with her husband Carson, which is best known for the cotton nightdresses that inspired a thousand imitators.

In this conversation, we talk about the discipline that comes with growing up as the child of dancers, the efficiency of feeling genuinely comfortable in your own skin, and Sandeep's commitment to building something at her own pace in a city that champions speed above all else.

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@phoebelovatt

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@salter.house

Lydia Pang is the co-founder of creative agencies MØRNING and EVENING, and the author of Eat Bitter: A Story About Guts, and Food — a memoir in eight recipes about fertility loss, relationship struggles, and burnout induced by over a decade of working herself into the ground.

She's also someone who has spent her career branding other people, which makes her examination of her own long-suppressed vulnerability especially compelling. We talked about the mythology of New York, the tension between creative purity and commercial survival, and what it means to write a book like no-one's reading.

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Deep Reading lists can be found at phoebe.substack.com

@phoebelovatt

@deepread.phoebelovatt

@lydia_pang_

Deep Read #51 is with New York-based author Stephanie Wambugu. Her debut novel Lonely Crowds centres on the intense bond between two young women, Ruth and Maria, who meet at a Catholic girls’ school in Rhode Island and remain entangled in one another’s lives into adulthood.

We spoke about the discomfort of ugly emotions, the dangers of ‘staying too long at the fair’, and the realities of navigating artistic ambition while trying to establish stability, intimacy, and a truly “adult” life.

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@phoebelovatt

@deepread.phoebelovatt

@stephaniejeriwambugu