NIM: Start Here
Nothing in Moderation is a memoir about appetite: for experience, recognition, escape, intimacy, reinvention and truth. It moves through countries, cities, relationships and identities; through art, technology, law, ambition, sex, drugs, alcohol and shame. It is about the lives we construct, the versions of ourselves we perform, and what happens when those constructions can no longer hold. At its centre is a question: What does it cost to become the person you thought you wanted to be? This is not a redemption story arranged neatly around lessons learned. Nor is it an exercise in confession for confession’s sake. It is an attempt to look directly at a life shaped by excess, secrecy, desire, fear and survival—and to understand the forces that made that life possible. The story travels from the formative landscapes of South Africa to the seductive mythology of California and beyond. Along the way, private experience repeatedly collides with larger cultural forces: celebrity, politics, technology, censorship, the law, the internet and the shifting boundaries between public and private life. The result is both personal history and cultural record.
Nothing in Moderation is a memoir about appetite: for experience, recognition, escape, intimacy, reinvention and truth.
It moves through countries, cities, relationships and identities; through art, technology, law, ambition, sex, drugs, alcohol and shame. It is about the lives we construct, the versions of ourselves we perform, and what happens when those constructions can no longer hold.
At its centre is a question: What does it cost to become the person you thought you wanted to be?
This is not a redemption story arranged neatly around lessons learned. Nor is it an exercise in confession for confession’s sake. It is an attempt to look directly at a life shaped by excess, secrecy, desire, fear and survival—and to understand the forces that made that life possible.
The story travels from the formative landscapes of South Africa to the seductive mythology of California and beyond. Along the way, private experience repeatedly collides with larger cultural forces: celebrity, politics, technology, censorship, the law, the internet and the shifting boundaries between public and private life.
The result is both personal history and cultural record.
Why a serial memoir?
This memoir has taken over ten years to write.
Memory does not arrive all at once.
It returns in scenes, objects, songs, names and sensations. Something that seemed incidental in one period of a life acquires meaning years later. A person disappears from the story but continues to shape it. A private decision reveals its consequences only after several chapters have passed.
Serialization makes room for those echoes.
It allows patterns to emerge gradually: the pursuit of access, the tension between desire and safety, the seduction of reinvention, the instability of belonging, and the distance between the person looking outward and the person seen by others.
Readers are invited to notice those patterns as they develop, not merely to be told, at the end, what everything meant.
Why a paid subscription?
Writing a memoir of this scale requires more than producing chapters. It involves research, editing, narration, archival work, visual material, music, production and the careful preservation of a coherent story across many forms.
A paid subscription directly supports that work.
Free readers will be able to explore selected chapters and public posts. Paid subscribers receive the complete memoir as it is released, together with the deeper audio, visual and archival layers surrounding it. The planned publication experience includes full chapter access, author-read audio, photographs, soundtracks, video, additional essays and ongoing discussion.
The subscription is not simply a gate around the writing. It is a way of making an independent, ambitious memoir possible without reducing it to the demands of advertising, algorithms or a single launch week.
It gives the story time.