No F*cks Given® Newsletter | 1.1.25
Great pizza, Bad Sisters, and me in my Wonder Woman Underoos!
Here we are again, my fabulous fucklings: the monthly NFG Newsletter roundup is upon us! Per usual it contains great deals, fun links, book recs, and random AF musings from me to you.
What’s up?
Happy New Year, everybody! Twenty-twenty-four can officially get fucked!
It was my personal worst year since 2020, which is saying a lot. I hope that for many of you, the same was not true; I hope you had tons of good times and joy and fun surprises and success.
But mostly I hope that ALL of us get MORE of that in 2025—just PILES of it. LOADS, as my Brits might say.
In the meantime, here’s a brief update from me to you…
NFG DEALS
Get Your Shit Together is on sale for $1.99 in ebook from Amazon US! If there’s a better way to start the year than with a book that has been proven to change lives and features a scat play joke on page 2, I don’t know it.
Some of the other No F*cks Given Guides may also be on sale right now, January being prime time for capitalist culture to bleed you dry in the name of self-improvement. But I failed to gather any intel from my publishers, so if you want to see if any other deals are afoot, do please visit my website and peruse your heart out:
What else?
Honestly, there’s not much to tell right this very moment that isn’t kinda depressing, and as your resident guru, it feels wrong to foist that on you on literal Day One.
(Among other things, I had surgery at the end of the year, it did not go well, and I have spent the last couple of days vacillating between “super bummed” and “incandescent with rage.”)
Instead, let’s focus on the highlights of the festive season. In no particular order, these were:
Bad Sisters season 2. Excellent. No notes.
Black Doves season 1. Same, same.
Multiple forms of artisanal pizza were ingested, plus classic NYC pizza to maintain my baseline.
Ooh, I’m fully vaccinated against shingles!
Also, my hormone therapy is working and I don’t want to kill everybody and cry all the time!
We finally got onboard the Brooklyn Nine-Nine train and it is the perfect stupid show for slow-brain times. GINA 4-EVA.
Knight Family Christmas Eve, an event we’ve only been able to attend thrice in the last nine years, which makes it even more of a treat.
These photos that my uncle found while clearing out my grandmother’s house:
Book recommendations
As longtime subscribers know, I was a book editor myself for fifteen years and I like to shout-out my recent favorite reads. I don’t take requests or PR trades or anything like that; whatever I recommend is because I truly enjoyed it and think other people will too.
Yikes. So…it appears I have not done one of these book recs thingies since September, and since I was reading myself into a dissociative state for much of October/November, there’s too much ground to cover in one brief newsletter. Again, let’s stick with the highlights.
Fiction:
The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Was this a perfect book? No. Was it fresh and fun and interesting? Yes! I don’t read a lot of sci-fi, but for some reason time travel has always intrigued me, and this novel came highly recommended from one of my fucklings. Honestly, it was my second most surprisingly enjoyable read of the year—behind Margo’s Got Money Troubles—in the sense that neither book is my usual “thing,” and I loved them both.
Birdman by Mo Hayder (and all seven books in the “Detective Jack Caffrey” series). I’m always looking for a crime series to get stuck into (see: achieving dissociative state) and it’s getting harder and harder because I’ve already read a lot of the great ones, but somehow I missed Mo Hayder in her heyday. These books were incredibly gory, just disgustingly wretched, the darkest shit imaginable—aka perfect bedtime reading for moi.
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore. I liked this a lot! Not as much as other people, but more than some (hi
) and I especially thought she stuck the ending, which is hard AF to do.
Nonfiction:
Be Ready When the Luck Happens: A Memoir by Ina Garten. What can I say? I stan our queen of hearth and home (and, apparently, of badass negotiating skills and naked ambition). Ina’s memoir was just the right combo of light and dark, and offered a clear, candid look into the mind of the woman behind the empire. She’s a fucking beast and I love her.
Alrighty folks, that’ll just about do it for today. (Told you I’d be brief.)
Happy Fucking New Year!
I’m going to begin as I mean to go on, which is to say: binge some more Brooklyn Nine-Nine, drink the Champagne we forewent last night because we are tired olds, and have an early bird dinner at my favorite restaurant in Brooklyn before we pack up and head home to the Dominican Republic this weekend.
As always, thank you for reading my ridiculous newsletter, and until next time: I see you, I appreciate you, and I sincerely hope you’re out there giving fewer, better fucks and living your best life.
Sarah
PS: I took the paywall off of my post from January 1st of last year, so everyone can benefit from its teachings in 2025. Enjoy. I stand by every word.
What if There is Nothing Wrong with You?
Allow me to introduce you to the concept of mental redecorating, or as I like to think of it, “feng shui with a side of fuck that shit.”
Brooklyn 99 is THE BEST for comfort watch!
Also I am boring EVERYONE witless with my favourite line from Black Doves
"OH MY GOD, SHUT UP! We are literally a car full of assassins trying to find the moral high ground!" (delivered in a sharp Welsh accent, obviously) 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Here's to a better year for us all.
So glad your HRT is working! Does the rage abate? (Interestingly predictive text just changed the rage to Hecate. Hmmm)