AustLit

'Sally Olds’s essay collection, People who Lunch: Essays on work, leisure & loose living, deals primarily with worlds, or subcultures, on the margins of society. Each holds within it a kernel of hope for a different way of living: club culture with its embrace of hedonism and rejection of living-to-work; cryptocurrency’s promise of financial returns outside state-regulated markets and wage labour; polyamory’s attempts to break free of the stultifying nuclear family unit. None, however, has managed to pose any serious threat to the existing order and most have come to live comfortably within or alongside capitalism.' (Introduction)

'Early on in Sally Olds’ debut essay collection I’m immersed in a familiar world:

It was a Friday night and I was drunk outside a nightclub in Melbourne called Hugs and Kisses, sometime in early 2018. I wondered aloud about the building – a two storey red brick warehouse that looked industrial, or pre-gentrification industrial, given that ‘industrial’ usually refers to post-industrial buildings retrofitted with industrial chic (open spaces, washed concrete, bare bulbs).

  (Introduction)