Every month is Womxn's Month at FOUR Objects but every March we try to find a new way to celebrate those who inspire us to lead better lives. Last year we decided to send letters of appreciation along with Work Shirts to 31 such women, Fanny Singer among them. We love the work she has done and the life she has led. If you haven't yet read her first book, Always Home, we suggest you get on it before the next one arrives. It's a coming of age story, travel log, food diary and memoir wrapped up in a hug next to a hearth fire with a glass of your favorite red. Read on to learn more about her writing journey.

And if you don't know already, Fanny Singer is a writer and the founder of the homeware design brand, Permanent Collection. In 2013, she received her doctorate in Art History from the University of Cambridge. Her first book, Always Home: A Daughter’s Recipes and Stories, a memoir of growing up in her mother Alice Waters’s restaurant, Chez Panisse, was published in 2020. She has written for a wide range of publications including WSJ Magazine, New York Magazine, Apartamento, Artforum, E-Flux Agenda, Frieze, and more. She is the co-author of a Substack called The Green Spoon about cooking for children (and their exhausted parents). Her forthcoming book, Salad, Always, will be published in 2027 by Knopf.

Fanny Singer was interviewed by our friend and writer Eva Kenny from Dublin, Ireland. Her short stories and criticism have been published in Artforum, ArtPapers, Banshee, The Beckett Circle, the Dublin Review of Books, Frieze, the Irish Times, the Journal of Beckett Studies, the LA Review of Books, Stinging Fly, and numerous artists’ books and exhibition catalogues. She is currently finishing her first book, a collection of stories titled Colonialism with Nowhere to Go. Her doctorate, from Princeton University, was on Samuel Beckett’s fiction. 

Eva: Fanny, I know you as author of the beautiful memoir Always Home and through your design brand, Permanent Collection. But before embarking on these projects you did a doctorate in art history at Cambridge, writing about Richard Hamilton, right? 

Fanny: Yes, and doing a PhD was for me almost an accident. I moved to England with my college boyfriend who had won a fellowship to study at Cambridge. To be able to go overseas with him, I applied for a Master’s in art history. I'd been working as a fine art printer in New York after I graduated from college, and I definitely didn’t see going to graduate school. It was just a way for me to be in England, to have this one or two year experience together. Then I applied for a PhD, because it was another way to stay in the country, and I thought if I don’t get full funding for it, I won’t stay. And then I did. But I didn’t have designs on an academic life. Nor did I imagine writing something the length of a doctoral dissertation. I didn't even conceive of myself as a writer at that point—I was only twenty two. 

Although, that said, I recently found an email that I'd sent to a friend several years ago with a paper I’d written for a History of Science journal on John Constable’s cloud studies. And it wasn’t bad! It actually really sounds like me still, which is remarkable because honestly, I can barely take a glimpse at any of my former academic work without cringing.

It’s always nice when you look back at something and think, this is good. I don’t know where it came from, but it’s good. The hard yards in front of a blank screen or page, trying to get those first words down, are completely forgotten.

From a more forensic perspective, it’s really interesting to look at something and think: this is from when I had already become myself. Or: this is from before I had become myself, or found, for lack of a less clichéd term, “my voice.” When you have examples preserved over these periods of time, you're able to look at it from a more objective standpoint. Like, I was trying something on here. Or, here I had hit my stride. And almost every time I write an art review—which I do every few months now, but I used to do much more often—it always has to be something I've thought about for a lengthy period and then written quite quickly. Every time I look back at one of those reviews I wonder if I even wrote it.  There is a sort of fugue, or flow, state that occurs with certain subjects that I find fascinating to look back on, because the product of it is often virtually unrecognizable. Not as someone other than myself, but just as something that happened almost without my knowledge. 

Well, it’s strange because it’s obviously coming only from you, because you’re the person who’s written it; you’re the author. And so it should be the most recognizable thing, or one would think that your own voice, your most internal something that you're externalizing, would be the most familiar thing to you. How is it that it’s often the most mysteriously, uncannily, distant visitation? 

I'm especially interested in painting that is extremely economical. What goes into making a painting of quality is still generally misunderstood—considerations as reductive as the quantity of paint used, or quality of brushstrokes, continue to be a benchmark. But there's something almost alchemical about a very economical painting, one that can transform something very physically slight into something awe-provoking. To be able to achieve that, the amount of thinking and the amount of work that has to have gone on, either imperceptibly in that canvas or elsewhere beforehand, is extensive. For two colors to work deftly together, you have to know so much about color. All the things that go towards creating a masterpiece, or even just a very successful painting, are not necessarily immediately evident, but are felt because of the background work. And I think that writing’s like that too, or it is for me anyways. 

So in your own writing, what’s running in the background, or how do you do that preparation for work? 

My rituals are like, dick around, watch something like ER or a run-of-the-mill police procedural. There is a certain quality of cinema below which I will not indulge, but I'm an equal opportunist when it comes to television. And often I’ll laugh at something while I'm writing, which sounds insane and which I think is only possible in this digital context of near-constant distraction, where we almost need it in order to function. I might get bored writing something, so I’ll have something on, but I'm not even really watching it. I just like the background noise; it becomes a kind of radio play. I realize I’m admitting to a quite psychotic way of working, but when I really, really need to work, I truly shut everything off. I lock everything on my computer. I cut off my phone, and I sit in my office in our backyard. But if I'm just chipping away at something, and there’s not an immediate deadline, I’m very circuitous in terms of how I both physically and mentally occupy space. I used to be very self-critical about that process. I still don't understand why I can’t just sit down and really thoroughly read and research something. For Christ’s sake, that's what I had to do for my PhD. Why is it still such an uphill battle? 

I don’t know, but I still have to drag myself to my desk every day. I love it once I’m there, but I have to give myself a little pep talk every single morning. 

I have to dip in and dip out and flip through and find something that's more scintillating or more relevant—I can’t just exhaustively canvas a subject. And that’s why I thought I wasn’t cut out to be a teacher, because I think you do have to be extremely literate in the subject to impart that subject intelligently to students. My brain doesn't operate like that. It’s hard not to believe that there’s a superior way of doing things. 

Welllll…. 

Now I’m convinced otherwise! I’ll wait until nearly the last minute to write a piece and then send it to my editor and they’ll respond with what feels like totally unwarranted praise. This is obviously very externally validating and makes me think that I must not be turning absolute shit into my editor. But, there it is… It feels crazy to be a writer who can't sit down and write in a more normative way.

Actually the motivation behind these interviews is really to ask writers about the “more normative way” of writing. There’s still such a fixed idea of what a real writer is or how a real writer writes, which I suspect is bogus. There’s a template, and it’s as mythic as the idea of a real artist. A lot of what I’ve been doing in the last few years is trying to demystify that idea of what you do when you’re a writer and what your process is and what the correct process is and what the correct product is and how serious writing should be, even if only for myself. 

I think academia will really fuck you up in that regard. 

Oh yeah. And as well as that, the people that I typically hear saying “I’m not a real writer,” or who have serious doubts about the validity of what they’re doing as an art form tend to be women. Maybe it’s just the women I talk to.

I see that, for sure. The way that we still continue to protect the male writers and their time, even in the dynamics of our relationships, is really interesting. And especially to observe how those dynamics are shaped in the context of a relationship of two people who are both writing. I remember hearing Zadie Smith speak at a women’s dinner at King’s College, and she gave what remains one of the most salient talks on motherhood and writing that I’ve come across. She spoke of how she and her husband navigated the demands of parenthood, and how different it looked for both of them. On the surface, it seemed completely unfair, because she's the more famous novelist, but she’s also the mom. You can’t opt out of being the mom if you've decided to be a mom. Even the mom who’s doing the least is still doing the most. It’s just impossible to frame it any other way. But—being a mother, she explained, did dimensionalize her writing. 

Hmmmm...

Before she crossed the Rubicon into motherhood, she did not have access to those layers of emotion, those layers of, like, psychic torment and blinding love, and all the things that have the potential to make writing more profound. In essence she described a dynamic in which her husband had more mental freedom from their children and therefore more protected time, but lacked access to the very particular experience of being pregnant, birthing a child, and having the simultaneously excruciating and sublime demands of that child on you, of how it alters the way that you both feel and can describe feeling. It really stayed with me. 

Well, I don’t have children yet, and have fewer responsibilities than almost anyone I know, so I have a lot of free time to write and I actually don’t think it makes me more productive, or that I get more writing done, or that my writing is better than writing by people with no time at all. I have to give myself a lot of structure, otherwise days seem to fill up just doing little errands. How do you structure your time?

There are more hygienic ways of writing, obviously, but mine is very porous. I make my daughter’s lunch, I drink some tea, I change out of my unstructured pajamas into some unstructured pants and then I sit in a minimum of four different places around my house. When I need to get serious I usually sit in an actual chair, but otherwise I kind of dip in and out. Like if my husband wanted to install a camera in our house and look at me during the day it would be horrifying, but the reality is I’m generally still delivering what I need to deliver. It’s just a wildly tortuous road. Never a straight line. If being a novelist was my only gig, I would probably put myself in a more boxed-in position in order to write, but I’m constantly doing different things. My job is as much going to see artists in their studios, or developing a new homeware product, or reviewing a show, as it is making a recipe to see if it’ll be successful for my new salad book, or cooking a kid’s recipe and thinking about how to make it more nutritious or alluring. 

We may be getting around to a place in culture where it’s more widely accepted to be a quote-unquote multi-hyphenate, but really it’s just a reflection of what women have been doing since fucking forever. It’s like, you have to have competency in so many different things––intellectual competencies, yes, but my career is just another version of having to make sure that we have clothes that fit our daughter as she grows, or food in the fridge to eat for the family. Which is just to say that all these different things that women do are incredible, and valuable. And they all require a certain amount of creativity and intellectual engagement and a mode of working where you’re not just in monolithic devotion to a single pursuit or focus—it’s actually a much more natural reflection of the way humans have to operate in order to survive.

There’s creativity, and then there has to be some pleasure in it too. Otherwise, why are we doing this work no one is asking us to do? No one is making us do any of these things in 2026. So I wonder what part of the writing process you like most, or if you have a kind of ecstatic moment, when something clicks, when you can feel that it’s really working? 

For sure. I love writing about art most of all, and, yes, there are joyous moments when I feel like I’ve used language in a way that really gets the most out of it. As an undergraduate, I was one of the many, probably thousands, of students who had Harold Bloom as a professor. I took his poetry courses and I took one of his Shakespeare courses and I got to know Harold quite well, because my college boyfriend was his assistant. And so I read many of his books outside of what was assigned, and I remember this idea that he posited, which is that the best criticism of a poem is another poem. And there’s something to that. There are these synergistic moments in writing, where you can actually get at something through the beauty of language, in which you can evoke through words what is beyond simply verbal. Occasionally, the beauty of language frictionlessly connects with the beauty of art and is—in those moments—a magnetic, a very sexy, alluring feeling. Which sometimes happens not by design. And actually it’s generally only successful if you're not striving for it. If it happens, it’s because you are finding the right language. And by far the most validating thing I've been told by an artist is that reading what I’ve written about their work has helped them understand it better. 

Well, ultimately you have to write about something, and for someone. I’m not totally convinced that the monolithic devotion you mention is in fact the best way to write––in isolation, focused on a tome, producing it, then starting another one, without the interactions of life. Because sometimes I read a certain type of literary fiction and sort of think…what is this? and who cares?

It can be missing something. And I mean, it’s obviously case by case, but for instance, George Saunders writes from the little shed at the back of his house, but he’s also a teacher, so he’s constantly interacting with people. But then when you think about what George Saunders is writing, you realize some types of writing need to come purely from the most deranged, isolated inner parts of someone’s mind. And then other writing suffers from a lack of human connection. 

I really love his book on writing, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. It’s so beautiful and full of other people and life and other writers. It’s social. I’ve taught it and used it to teach creative writing and it just gives me a kind of warm glow.

I saw him give a talk at a City Arts and Lectures in San Francisco and he was just… well, just the deep humanity of that man. He has a tremendous amount of empathy. Yeah, he’s figured it out. 

I think we can safely say that George Saunders has figured it out. 

He’s figured it out. He’s one man we can trust.