No F*cks Given® Newsletter | 12.7.23

Cat names, sewage moats, and deals out the you-know-what!

Hello, hello! How is the holiday season treating you, my favorite fucklings?

Down here in the Dominican Republic, the Christmas carols have been on repeat since early October, nativity scenes are cropping up amidst the palm trees, and they’re sticking conifer branches in the grocery store flower bouquets to signify that ‘tis the season.

(I rather enjoy the cognitive dissonance of “Winter Wonderland” blaring from the giant speakers at my local beach bar in eighty-degree sunshine. Keeps me on my toes.)

Exhibit A

There are lots of new folks here since the October issue went out, so if you’ll indulge me in a smidgen of housekeeping:

I’ve been sending a free monthly-ish newsletter in one form or another since 2016. I recently moved my email list to Substack, where the term “newsletter” means something a little different, so FYI—

• The No F*cks Given® Newsletter (or the NFGN for short) is what you’re reading now. This is a roundup for fans who want to keep up with me, my books and events, etc., and it will always be free.

• No F*cks Given® with Sarah Knight is the new & improved hub that I’ve created on Substack, for ALL of my work. More than just a newsletter, it’s a paid membership experience that includes fun weekly emails featuring tips from across my areas of sweary expertise, private discussion threads with moi, personal essays, and other exclusive perks.

If you’d like to go all in on NFG and support me in this new venture, you can upgrade and get immediate access to the paid archives and receive every new post going forward, plus get invited to the private chats. ←I’m doing one next Thursday; paid subscribers will get an email notification and a link to the conversation!

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And if you want to stick with the free newsletter, that’s cool too! I’m very happy to have you here; I just wanted to be clear about what you get (or, um, don’t get) on the free plan. So that’s the scoop. As usual, your NFG deals, news, and links are sprinkled throughout this newsletter, and the NFG Quote of the Week lives at the end.

Let’s get to it!

What’s up?

As mentioned, it’s Christmastime in the tropics, and I also celebrated my birthday this week, so I’m feeling both extra festive and extra tired. That’s what I get for being halfway to 90 and trying to have more than two cocktails in one night.

Of course, I could also be extra tired because the hubs and I have been trading seasonal viruses, and there was that small matter of the intestinal parasite that knocked me out for 10 days in November because I dared to eat a bowl of lettuce.

Oh, and our yard flooded with the unprecedented rainfall that blanketed the country a couple weeks ago, so we spent the days leading up to Thanksgiving pumping sewage out of the garden (we had a 10-inch moat of poop water surrounding our house) and making a mental note to buy galoshes next time we see them in town.

Ah, Caribbean life! She giveth and she taketh away. There are many good and cool reasons to consider moving abroad (especially if you’re American, per this piece by

Kirsten Powers

), but I must say, experiencing hurricane season up close and personal is not one of them.

Aaaaaanyway…

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NFG DEALS

With apologies to brick-and-mortar retailers (and non-Americans), Amazon US is running a lot of deals right now on my books, and I am bottom line-bound to tell you about them…

• The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck is 40% off in hardcover. That’s $12.50, down from the usual $22.00—aka, a big fucking deal. Get it HERE.

• Get Your Shit Together is on sale in BOTH hardcover (60% off!) and ebook (it’s a Kindle monthly deal for all of December). Get the hardcover for just $8 HERE or the ebook for $3.99 HERE.

• Grow the Fuck Up will be the Kindle Deal of the Day on Friday, December 8th. ONE DAY ONLY, on sale for $2.99 (I don’t have a link because the deal happens tomorrow, and I also don’t have a time machine.)

And last but not least:

• I’m running a 30% discount on GROUP subscriptions to No F*cks Given® with Sarah Knight. THIS POST explains how it works. Perfect for your book club, darts league, fellow school pick-up parents, or any collection of 2 or more likeminded souls.

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What else?

We had a plethora of prestige TV to keep us company in our recent convalescence, including Lessons in Chemistry, which I quite liked (except for the choice they made with the dog voiceover, which I hated with the fire of a thousand suns); the latest season of Lupin (LOVE); and now Fargo, wherein Juno Temple from Ted Lasso competes with Jon Hamm’s nipple rings for my undivided attention.

FUN FACT: we named one of our cats “Mister Stussy” after Ewan McGregor’s character in Fargo S3, solely because of the way season’s villain (played repulsively well by David Thewlis) says the words “Mister Stussy” throughout the show. He does this creepy, sibilant accent that for some reason we thought would be hilarious to mimic when we talk to a cat, which we’ve now been doing multiple times a day for six years.

So…joke’s on us, I guess?

Mister Stussy is not amused.

We also had the pleasure of watching Rumble Through the Dark, the movie based on Michael Farris Smith’s excellent novel, The Fighter. (I guess that title was already taken for film. LOL, thanks for nothing Marky Mark.)

Michael is one of the great talents of his time, easily compared to Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner, yet with a style all his own. When I was an editor, I always said that I wanted to publish writers whose work I would know even without their name on the cover of the book. Michael is one of those (I published his debut novel Rivers, which is extraordinary), and if you haven’t read his stuff, I’m jealous that you get to experience it for the first time.

(He also wrote the screenplay for the movie, which is a feat in and of itself, and it was so cool to see Aaron Eckhart, Bella Thorne, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste bring these characters to life. It’s streaming now in most of the usual places!)

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NFG NEWS

• Brits, rejoice! The £9.99 mass market paperback edition of The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck (which is apparently down to £7.99 at WH Smith right now…) was such a hit that my lovely UK publishers are going back for more. In 2024, matching inexpensive editions of Get Your Shit Together and Calm the Fuck Down are coming your way!

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NFG LINKS

• Fans of the indomitable

  sam baker
  will enjoy this podcast interview we did together last spring when I was promoting Grow the Fuck Up. Listen HERE.

• And here’s another fabulous interview I did with the effervescent and insightful Two Broke Chicks of Australia. Listen HERE.

• I’m surprised to see that (apart from the 10 Tips for Saying No post that was promoted in

  Substack
  Reads), THIS is my top post after two months on the app. The reason it surprises me is because it was just a quickie listicle I posted one day to beef up the site, and I didn’t even email it out to my list until after it took off. Who knew y’all were positively fiending to be told what NOT to be told to do?

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Book recommendations

As longtime NFGN readers know, I was a book editor for fifteen years. I love to read and I understand how hard it is for most writers to get any attention (unless your name rhymes with “Even Sting” or “Ball-peen Groover”), so I like to use my newsletter to shout out my recent favorites. 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!

Fiction:

• Ghostman by Roger Hobbs. This excellent debut thriller written by a then-college student (!) is a master class in page-turning fiction, not to mention in pulling off the perfect heist. I’d been aware of it when it came out in 2013 to rave reviews, but I didn’t realize that the author had died before completing his second book, making Ghostman an even rarer sort of read.

• Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead. I thoroughly enjoyed Harlem Shuffle, the first in this proposed trilogy, and was excited for the sequel. I found this entry a bit slower and more contemplative (likely due to the premise, in which our main character crook attempts to go straight), but still super entertaining—and with the kind of ski-jump ending that’ll have me preordering the final installment as soon as it’s ready.

• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. I was late to the party here, but WOW. This novel about life in Appalachia at the dawn of the opioid crisis was understandably bleak (it is inspired by Dickens, after all), but also full of heart and unexpected humor. These characters will stay with me for a long time.

Nonfiction:

• Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe. Upon finishing Demon Copperhead, I wanted to know more about the OxyContin story from a factual point of view—and in reading Radden Keefe’s stunning exposé of the family that started it all, I learned that even the most seemingly surreal aspects of Barbara Kingsolver’s fictional universe were essentially ripped from the headlines. It’s almost impossible to believe that one family (in conjunction of course with Big Pharma and plenty of medical minions) could wreak such havoc on a generation of Americans, and yet so they did. Devastating.

• Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses by Sarah Fay. Substackers may know the author of this memoir as

  Writers at Work
  —and her advice on growing your newsletter is extremely smart and valuable—but I was even more drawn to the topic of her memoir, on being labeled with no fewer than half a dozen illnesses as described by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM)…a book which, it turns out, has no basis in scientific fact. WTF! I was shocked to learn that the “Bible” of mental illness is deeply flawed and in fact fraudulent on many levels, and I was riveted by Sarah’s description of navigating life with these diagnoses, and the question of whether those of us who suffer from mental illness are truly “sick” and if so, can we ever be “cured?”

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And that’ll do it for today’s NFG Newsletter, my special fucklings. As always, thank you for your support, and until next time: I see you, I appreciate you, and I hope you’re out there giving fewer, better fucks and living your best life!

Sarah

PS: I forgot to mention that another perk of the paid No F*cks Given® subscription is that you get to submit questions for my “You Asked For It!” advice column. Check out THIS post for details.

NFG QUOTE OF THE DAY

“Whenever a task or a plan seems too big to contemplate, remember that life is like an adult coloring book: if you can just commit to filling in all the little sections one at a time, eventually the big picture will materialize before you.”

—Get Your Shit Together

Another fun gift idea: this little coffee table book of my most fun and practical No F*cks Given quotes from the whole series. Check it out HERE.