No F*cks Given® Newsletter | 5.7.25
15,000 fucklings in the house, plus a deal on F*ck No! in audio
Here we are again, my fearless fucklings: the monthly-ish 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?
Well, folks, imagine my delight when I woke up to the news that my ridiculous little newsletter has reached a fabulous milestone: 15,000 fucklings strong!
THANK YOU for inviting me into your inboxes all these years—and for reading the books and writing in the journals and listening to the podcast (RIP)1 and all the rest. It has made the past decade of this second-act career so rewarding on so many levels, and I truly appreciate it.
It’ll be a quick update today, but a fun one—especially if you like book recs up the wazoo!
NFG DEALS
Fuck No! is an Audible deal for the month of May. Sign in with your Audible account to access my most boundary-busting book for only $4.99 - that’s 65% off!
And if you do purchase the audiobook and find yourself looking for the printed extras—like the FN flowchart and my patented FuckNotes (they’re like MadLibs, but for saying no), you can download them from my website at any time.
What else?
As a lifelong Red Sox fan, I’ve been enjoying The Clubhouse, a Netflix documentary that followed the 2024 team, most of whom are still playing this season (or getting injured again this season, sigh). It’s especially cool to watch the segments set in the Dominican Republic, where I live now and where so many star players, including our own Brayan Bello and Rafael Devers, got their start.
And I personally love all the “inside baseball” shit—the way the pitching and hitting coaches strategize before games and between at-bats, all the institutional knowledge of former players like Jason Varitek and Alex Cora combined with insane technology and statistical analysis—it’s super nerdy and fascinating. (Also, not for nothing, the music supervisor on this series did an outstanding job.) Highly recommended even if you’re not a Red Sox fan but love the game.2
Speaking of Boston, I’m one month away from heading to Beantown for my 25th (!) college reunion. I haven’t been back to campus in a loooong time, and I’m excited to wander Harvard Yard and fire up some memories of the good old days.
There’ll be a core group of old friends in town—including one of my roommates who I adore, but who, due to geographic complications, I haven’t seen since maybe 2010-ish. (She is a 6’ tall former varsity rower and soccer goalie; I am a 5’ 2” endomorph theater kid. We make quite the pair.)
EARNESTY ALERT: The older I get, the more I appreciate having the kind of quality people in my life that I can know for twenty-five years, go fifteen without seeing, and expect to catch up with again like no time has passed.
NFG NEWS
I’ve just completed a few textual updates to the Calm the Fuck Down Journal, which is going into a new printing with its new cover art to match the rest of the updated series. By this fall, both You Do You and the CTFDJ should be on shelves looking swanky AF in their neon finest!
The Spanish edition of Get Your Shit Together, published by Planeta and sold primarily in Mexico (as Arregla Tu Desmadre) and Spain (as Cómo Solucionar Tus Mierdas), has sold 60,000 copies. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!? I realize this may not mean anything to non-publishing biz insiders, but that is an insane amount for a foreign market that only picked up the book halfway into its overall life.
May I just say: Estoy muy agradecido a todos mis lectores españoles!
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.
I haven’t done one of these since March and I’m realizing now that I read so many great books since then that I’ll have to save some for the next newsletter, lest I topple your TBR piles. For now…
Fiction:
Exposure by Ava Dellaira. My favorite read of the year so far, this is a novel about friendship and grief and the events of a single night refracted through the lens of four people who experienced it (or its aftershocks) very differently. It was heartbreaking, shocking, tender, gorgeously written, and so, so compelling. By the end I was, to put it mildly, shook. (Personally, I wasn’t able to get through Hanya Yanagihara’s multi-award nominated A Little Life, which some critics have referred to as “trauma porn.” To me, Exposure was a more palatable way into exploring similarly dark themes. I really cannot recommend it highly enough, if you have the disposition for this kind of stuff.)
The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen Thompson Walker. I also really enjoyed this novel by my former coworker (Shout out Team S&S circa 2010-2015!) and author of The Age of Miracles. It’s hard to talk about Jane O. without spoiling the twist(s), so all I’ll say is what I told Karen when I DM’d her upon finishing: “I was glued to the last 50 pages and so in awe of how you handled all the layers in play.”
Animal Instinct by
. And last but not least, yet another terrific work of fiction, also written by someone I had the pleasure of working with many moons ago, and whose career I’ve followed with fondness ever since. I hesitate to call it a “pandemic novel,” in case that turns you off, but I think it’s important to note how Amy took one of the most challenging, frightening collective experiences in recent memory and used it to create a wise and poignant story about human connection. Plus: sex. LOTS AND LOTS OF SEX. (Like, lots.)
Nonfiction:
If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury by
DeRuiter. I waxed on about this book in my recent post about “breaking free from the cult of nice,” but I’ll say it again here: LOVED. IT.Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. I had read Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family and the dawn of the opioid crisis in the US, and then I was reminded by
in her always on-point monthly reading roundup that Say Nothing should be on my radar. It was riveting reading, and a reminder that humans have spent centuries upon centuries ensuring that we simply cannot have nice things.
RECENT POSTS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED
On [not] smiling more:
On mental decluttering:
On being selfish—in a good way:
Aaaaand that’ll do it for today. As always, thank you—ALL FIFTEEN THOUSAND OF YOU—for supporting my No F*cks Given® empire (LOL) by reading my ridiculous newsletter.
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
Turns out ya girl doesn’t love listening to herself talk as much as you might think, but there are 26 episodes for YOU to enjoy at your leisure!
Unless you’re a Yankees fan, in which case: suck it.
Oh you! This is so generous of you, thank you for the shout-out! You're truly the best <3 <3 <3