Nicola Sayers is a writer and academic whose work explores nostalgia, memory, hope, the city and the cinematic. Nicola received her PhD from the School of Advanced Study, University of London in 2017, and her book, The Promise of Nostalgia: Reminiscence, Longing and Hope in Contemporary American Literature and Culture, was published with Routledge in 2020. She also has an M.A. in Psychology from New York University and a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University. She will teach Creative Non-Fiction at Syracuse University’s London campus in the coming academic year — and is currently spending much of her time working on her first novel. Email: nicola.sayers [at] gmail.com
Website: https://nicolasayers.com/
by Nicola Sayers I regret not having children younger. Like, much younger. I was thirty-six when my first child, now four, was born; thirty-eight when my second was born. I wish I had done it when I was in my early twenties. This is an unpopular perspective. I know this because when I’ve raised this…
by Nicola Sayers I am a modern-day scrapbooker. Which is to say that, like scrapbookers and notebook keepers across the ages, I am incessantly recording: things I have read, things I want to read, ideas I have come across or had, ways I want to be or to look, memorabilia from places I have been…
by Nicola Sayers We tell ourselves stories in order to live. I don’t know where I first came across this sentence. I was in my early twenties, so it can’t have been on Instagram, although I’ve since seen it there so many times that this is now how it appears in my mind’s eye: boxy…
by Nicola Sayers Clickety clack, clickety clack. All aboard the twilight train, a Scottish man with a deep voice announces over the sound of a train heading off into the night. This story is the only one on the Moshi app that I can happily listen to over and over as I wait for my…
by Nicola Sayers What is it to be twenty? Forty? Sixty? Eighty? These points that mark the four quarters of a life — fifths if you’re lucky, larger portions if you’re not. * We read the book together, my mother and I. The book, a work of autofiction, is Siri Hustvedt’s Memories of the Future,…
by Nicola Sayers To be clear: I was snooty, too. I first saw colour-coordinated bookshelves in my friend’s home, and I have to admit that, even then, I liked the look. Each neatly stacked shelf, bright and orderly. It reminded me of the new packets of felt-tipped pens I used to love getting as a…
by Nicola Sayers I recently spent a couple of years living in Chicago, a city that I loved so much it still looms in my daydreams as my ‘one that got away’. During that time, in addition to exploring the many and varied neighbourhoods that make up the city itself, I also found myself regularly…
by Nicola Sayers It’s hard to miss that the writer-director Nora Ephron is popular among women of a certain age and demographic (35–45ish, educated, mostly white, Anglo/American). Her volumes of essays (in particular I Feel Bad About My Neck, 2006) are staples in my peers’ bookcases (I am forty) in the way that Erica Jong’s…