People Who Lunch

January 8, 2024
Australian essayist Olds debuts with a striking collection loosely focused on how people respond to economic precarity and dream up better futures. In “For Discussion and Resolution,” Olds weaves the history of utopian, polyamorous experiments into an account of her own polyamorous relationship. She explains that free love communes stretching back to 19th-century French philosopher Charles Fourier, who envisioned communities with rotating partners and jobs, believed that sex, like other forms of labor, should be distributed equitably among members. Just as those experiments struggled to live up to their founding principles, Olds notes that her own commitment to polyamory was challenged after her partner fell in love with another woman, but she maintains that “it’s always possible, of course, that both monogamy and polyamory are deeply unnatural.” Olds has a talent for probing the ironies of late capitalism, exploring in “Crypto Forever” how digital currencies appeal both to those who feel marginalized by traditional markets (such as the sex worker and the money-strapped PhD student she profiles) and those who think crypto is capitalism’s “next leap forward.” Elsewhere, Olds reflects on clubbing as a type of labor and argues that the hybrid essay is “a form that preserves and reproduces tradition... while pretending to annul it.” Olds’s idiosyncratic perspective consistently surprises, and she elegantly blends cultural, historical, and class analysis into an easy to digest whole. This is a pleasure.

January 15, 2024
A manifesto in defense of polyamory. Readers who hate their jobs and have reservations about capitalism will sympathize with the perspective in this collection of essays. Melbourne-based writer Olds began these pieces on an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. Her main interest was in "post-work polyamory," an idea that's "premised on and committed to anti-capitalism" and seeks to "abolish the need to work within exploited waged (and unwaged) relations in order to survive." In the introduction to this U.S. edition, the author writes "about how people get money (an incomplete list from the book: cryptocurrency, sex work, welfare, property, arts grants, caf� jobs, truck driving)." After a brief history of polyamorous groups and her attempts at polyamorous relationships, Olds presents a manifesto for post-work polyamory, which she describes as "building anti-capitalist strategies into the ongoing practice of equitably distributing labor within relationships"; relates the founding in 19th-century London of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes and similar clubs that "insulated workers from the worst excesses of capitalist modernity" (and documents her visit to one such club); expounds on the hybrid essay form, "both a memoir and a review"; and details the allure of cryptocurrency. Sometimes, the author tries too hard to sound academic--as in writing that polyamory is "the dissemination of reproductive labor into a technocapitalist infrastructure"; "polyamory often tries to banalify itself." Fortunately, much of the writing isn't that stuffy, and Olds has a talent for well-phrased witticisms, as when she says that Michel de Montaigne, thought to have originated the hybrid form, "retired from public life to a tower in his family's castle in Bordeaux (like all good freelancers, Montaigne worked from home)"; or when she writes of a crypto dabbler who writes poetry while working at a brothel: "Guess which one earns them a living?" A set of challenging, intermittently illuminating essays on the nature of work and relationships.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 1, 2024
In many ways, Olds' essays are aiming at well-trod territory: making a life that is financially, romantically, and artistically viable. She holds multiple degrees, jobs, and partners. In her debut collection, however, the Australian writer presents anything but the expected or familiar. This slim volume delivers only a handful of essays, allowing Olds to focus on a topic and arrive at some truly original and thoughtful conclusions. The essays have a range of overarching topics: polyamory, cryptocurrency, the inner workings of a members-only club, and even the personal essay itself (as well as the review culture that surrounds them). Olds adopts a style that varies between academic and confessional and is always provocative. As she candidly presents the framework of the striving life of a young artist, she manages to arrive at some universal truths. One could compare Olds to established voices like Jia Tolentino and Maggie Nelson, but People Who Lunch is the rare collection that heralds itself as something entirely original.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

July 6, 2022
People Who Lunch is the much-anticipated first book by Melbourne-based writer Sally Olds. Known among a devoted coterie of fans for her long-form standalone essays, Olds’ first full collection focuses on a central theme: work and our various efforts to get away from it. Across the six essays that comprise People Who Lunch, Olds combines personal reflection, ethnographic research and flâneur-like observation to investigate the dystopian exploitation that governs our lives­­­ and the micro-utopias that offer some form of escape. People Who Lunch is a celebration of leisure time, and to read this book is a pleasurable experience. Olds’ writing is original and searching, and she is a confident stylist, funny and precise. The author has a novelist’s eye for character and scene, and the best piece in the collection is an affectionate portrait of her own friends—a group of underemployed artists, accelerationist philosophers, nihilist revolutionaries and brothel-working poets. Among the most charming figures to grace the page is Jeff, the 'swole', crypto-investing fashion curator with a conspiratorial air and a Woolworths green bag, neatly labelled with his own name. It’s rare to find new writing this bold and exciting. Olds’ debut will appeal to readers of literary nonfiction as well as techno-futurists, the freelance precariat and all those wondering what has happened to bohemian Melbourne since Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip. Emma Rose is an editor of books and magazines.