For Danielle Gay, words are more than a medium, they are a means of inquiry, a way to make sense of the world. As a writer, editor, and literary curator, Gay’s work is driven by a fascination with the nuances of storytelling and the intersections of literature, culture, and personal experience. Formerly a writer at Vogue Australia and Gritty Pretty, she now leads the Reservations Book Club, a carefully considered space for readers who seek depth and resonance in their literary choices.
Whether she’s dissecting the fragmented beauty of The White Book by Han Kang or revisiting a high school favourite, One Day, through the lens of time and experience, Gay’s reading is immersive, intuitive—less an act of consumption and more a conversation. She believes in books that shift something within us, in essays that expand our understanding, and in the quiet power of Substack newsletters to offer an antidote to algorithmic saturation.
Below, we speak with Danielle Gay about the words that have shaped her, the Substacks she returns to, and the literary figures who continue to challenge and inspire.
The last Substack I read …
Pulling The Thread by Elise Loehnen, the former chief content officer at Goop. Like in her podcast of the same name, Loehnen’s Substack is all about pulling apart the web of threads that make up who we are in an attempt to understand why we’re here. It’s thought-provoking and important.
A book I am currently reading …
The White Book by Han Kang, my current selection for The Reservations Book Club. A meditation on the colour white, this is a moving fragmentary novel about grief, mourning and the fragility of life.
The literary character I most identify with is …
Reading, for me, is a somatic experience; I feel it deeply. It makes me connect with every character I come across, even if only briefly.
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An article that changed my perspective is …
Joan Didion’s appearance in The Art of Nonfiction No. 1. It was comforting, as a writer, to hear Didion refer to writing fiction as a daily dread, knowing all the while that she can still manage it.
My favourite Substack I subscribe to is …
David Whyte’s. Whyte is a Yorkshire-born Irish poet, whose work investigates the human condition. His poetry is deeply resonant; I love receiving one of his poems in my inbox weekly.
A writer I wish more people knew about is …
Jhumpa Lahiri. While she is widely published and has written for publications like The New Yorker, I continue to meet people who haven’t heard of Lahiri. Her work Whereabouts, a novel in vignettes, is my favourite literary work to date.
Growing up my favourite book was …
I remember reading One Day (recently of Netflix fame) by David Nicholls in high school and thinking the structure, as well as the twist at the end, was immensely clever. When I was a writer at Vogue, I had the joy of meeting and interviewing Nicholls for the book’s 10-year anniversary and it was fascinating to hear a writer reflect on what it’s really like to write a phenomenon like that; how it shapes their life and work for decades to come.
A book everyone should read at least once is …
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Grief will touch us all eventually; Didion’s memoir of losing her husband captures it in a way no other work has. Her words have stayed with me, woven through the shifting textures of my own grief over the years and I know I’ll return to them again. The perfect gift for someone who has lost someone.
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The best advice I’ve read in a Substack is …
Your vibration must be higher than what you create, otherwise you cannot manage it. This is from Pulling The Thread by Elise Loehnen and she’s saying that when it comes to art, we need to be sure that our vibration—our individual energy for something, or the consciousness state that we can bring to it—is higher than what we are trying to bring through.
Someone I really want to start a Substack, would be …
I wish Didion was still here to share passages of her notebooks with us… though let’s be honest, she wouldn’t.
My first Substack I ever wrote was about …
It was an essay of loss and love; looking back, it really does get to the true essence of what Reservations is about.
The best thing about reading Substack newsletters is …
An algorithm-free experience of your favourite writers and creators; content that is cool, calm and less saturated than social media.
