After selling her business and giving the money to charity, Sarah Wilson travels the world with one small rucksack and zero commitments. Not counting a handsome goat herder and other lovers she meets along the way.
Sarah Wilson worries how to sell her new message. She found it easy when she was a young newspaper columnist, and when made editor of Australian Cosmopolitan at just 29. She found it easy when she became the TV host for MasterChef Australia, a telegenic presenter promoting high-end dining at its most glossy. Wilson then found it easy to transfer those skills to campaign against the overload of sugar in the western diet: her bright and breezy I Quit Sugar books sold like hot cakes in Britain, America and beyond; photos of her glamorous, former model self reassuring the sceptical that a life without cola wouldn’t be that dry and boring.
But now? Now at 49, she has sold her multimillion-dollar turnover I Quit Sugar business and given the proceeds to charity. She shed her earthly possessions ― at most they fit in two suitcases; more often she owns only the contents of a small backpack. Which is useful, as she has spent the best part of the past decade flitting from place to place mostly by foot or bike, buying as little as possible, right down to taking home the half-used wrappers of butter normal people leave on café tables. She still has the day job as a writer. But she is as free as a bird: no husband, kids, mortgage or bills. If she so fancies, she can linger in Greece to have a “two-week affair with a goat herder in Ikaria ― Xristos ― who spoke no English. We swam each day between his goat duties.” Or spend weeks reading in Parisian cafés, or walk 30km to a business meeting, or take off day after day on wild hiking trails, her credit card stuffed down her bra so she is not encumbered by so much as a bag.
This is the fantasy life, the content that provides us office drones with daydreams, and accounts for some of her 265,000 Instagram followers. But for the downsides, first we need to talk underwear. Wilson is gracefully resigned to the fact that the antiquity of her pants is the starting point for many curious about a less acquisitive life. The title of Wilson’s latest book, This One Wild and Precious Life, is drawn from a line by the poet Mary Oliver, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Wilson’s answer is, I summarise, “not distract myself by buying endless multipacks of briefs at Marks & Sparks”. Once her rotation of just three pants gets “all jowly in the gusset” (I love this phrase), she considers buying more. But then she gets lazy, and “gamifies” how long she can go without purchasing. “It becomes fun to see how long I can delay the gratification of shiny new knickers.” Once she went 379 days without buying any material goods except groceries. “I know this because my accountant called to ask me, ‘Why do you have no receipts? How are you actually living?’” She still wears a dress she bought aged 18. On two occasions, both after ending year-long stints of not purchasing stuff, she got calls from her bank’s fraud squad and had to confess she had indeed, with some reluctance, bought a jumper.
We meet in a London café owned then by Bill Granger, an Australian restaurateur and “mate” from her old MasterChef days in the Aussie food scene. (Granger died in a London hospital on Christmas Day). She’s breathless: she marched fast for an hour to get here from her friend’s flat; when her bike plan failed, she even considered hitchhiking. “Hitchhiking?” I repeat in a shocked whisper, trying to imagine this force of nature flagging down snarling London drivers, a female Crocodile Dundee.
She looks radiant: all tanned, muscular energy. No surprise that when she needs a face scrub she collects the discarded sachets of sugar off people’s coffee cup saucers. It’s only when we are better acquainted that I get my face near her jolly patterned leggings to inspect. They are somewhat faded.
“I only got these a year ago, but I’ve worn them probably three days out of seven ever since,” she says. “I have the option of going to a shop and buying something today, but it’ll make me quite miserable.”
We are coming to her point, via her faded leggings. Wilson is an extraordinary person. She hasn’t just quit sugar; she has quit shopping, settling down and status. Not everyone can live like her ― you can’t dally with a Greek goat herder if you are a nurse with three children to feed. Yet most of us could stand to buy less, and think more about the consequences of our spending on others. Is she the one to get through to us? Or will we balk at a lesson in frugality from someone with a substantial financial safety net?
What she really wants us to know is she lives like this for pleasure. Yes, she also gets tempted by whatever bauble everyone else is buying. But she pauses, and sees if she can find another way to give herself that dopamine hit. Every time she resists more tat and instead has a chat with a friend, a walk in the woods or reads a book, she feels better about both her life, and the future of the planet. Many of us, deep down, somewhere uncomfortable, know she is onto something.
“It’s amazing when you start to live this way,” she says. “When I see people buy a nice car or expensive jewellery, I could get upset and jealous. But I don’t. I wish people could know how much joy they could have if they release themselves. Shopping makes people sad, in the end. And yet we do because it is an addictive, vicious cycle. We are dangled the next new thing, and we keep going back hoping that the next hit will be the one that satisfies us.”
The working title for this book making her case was Wake the F*** Up: a more Aussie shorthand. She is not daunted by multitrillion forces of consumerism that is dependent on us buying endlessly more stuff that we have no way of getting rid of; burning carbon, polluting seas and overflowing landfills in the process. The “buy less” life doesn’t have an Instagram ad but it has its own secret weapon.
“The only way it’ll work is if this way is sexier than the status quo,” she says. “I’m not doing this to be a self-flagellating martyr. I’m just lazy, and impatient to live a good life. This way is more joyous, and fits with the happiness principles that have been studied and that we can all witness. They’re also congruent with being engaged in trying to fix the climate crisis.”
Somehow I don’t think I could make the jowly knickers life look as glamorous as she does. But she doesn’t see herself that way. She grew up in the countryside outside Canberra, the eldest of six children and her parents were, “in my dad’s words, ‘broke not poor’, as poor is a mentality”.
“I was a very shy, very small kid, and very much bullied as our family was weird. We had no money for school excursions or camps, no activities after school. It was running free outside.”
Wilson is intense. When young she channelled it into writing opinionated newspaper columns. She was then recruited to edit Cosmo, despite the fact that Wilson “had never read the magazine in my life, never worn make-up, never worn high-heeled shoes”. To this day she has never owned a handbag. What did they see in her?
“They were very good at identifying people who would work hard. And I flogged myself for four years and then got very sick.”
Wilson had until this point been successfully managing the anxiety that first flared in her student years, that she wrote about in her book, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful, a New York Times bestseller. But then she came down with Hashimoto’s disease, an autoimmune disease of the thyroid. She stopped work to undergo intense medical treatment.
“I had been on red carpets, fêted, handed free clothing. I uncoupled from all that. I chose to really live.”
She began the I Quit Sugar brand almost by accident, after experimenting with diet changes to assist her recovery. It began as a self-published e-book and went on to become a bestseller in Britain and internationally, ballooning into supermarket products and online programmes. After earning enough to secure herself a stipend for life, she then sold off the business in 2018, giving the proceeds to a philanthropic trust. If she currently earns ― from books and speaking events ― more money than she needs she says she gives it to charity. “For a while I was giving away 80 per cent of my income. When I get to a point when I think the money’s too much, I’ll do another dumping.
“I don’t profess that’s just altruistic. It’s partly a mental health exercise. It was a line in the sand ― what are my values? But that’s also part of it. It would be good if more people lived according to what keeps them mentally well.”
Does she still “quit sugar”? “I struggle with it like everybody else, but I avoid sugary foods. I stick with how I ate when I was running the programme.” This is not as hair shirt as it sounds: most days she has a few squares of dark chocolate for breakfast. Sugar, for her, has parallels with environmental sustainability. Sugary foods are so cheap and prevalent they are often the easiest way to fill up. Similarly, fossil fuels and fast fashion are not priced in a way that takes account of their damage.
Her latest book isn’t as accessible as I Quit Sugar: critics note a “messy” writing style, even as they also find her ― as I do ― boldly strange and maddeningly thought-provoking. Others have pointed out that the intensity of feeling she has for the planet seems at odds with her carbon footprint: now based loosely in Paris she still flies, primarily to Australia once a year.
“It’s a tricky one, isn’t it?” she says. “I’ve consulted many people about whether the reason I fly is worthy. And I don’t own a car, I take trains, I minimise as much as I can. But I’m well aware of my hypocrisies. I would say we should each be doing as much as we can.”
Things could have taken a different turn. She tried hard to have a child. She had three attempts at pregnancy in her early forties, each ending in an early miscarriage. In her fourth attempt (in an arrangement with a male friend), she was horrified to find the pregnancy flared her previous illnesses to such a degree she knew she could not carry the baby. “My health couldn’t sustain it,” she says. She took the extremely painful decision to terminate.
Years on, she is also single again. In her book she writes, “We are getting fatter, dumber, ruder, sicker and sadder because we are addicted to our screens.” Part of that is the modern loneliness of being ghosted in online dating. As a “hopeful romantic”, Wilson uses the apps and her bio makes a point of saying she doesn’t “dick people around”. Over the years she has dated men of many ages. She is as open to the 22-year-old Slovakian she went on a date with before a mountain ascent as to the flirtations of the older Parisian fox. Is it just fate that she is not in a long-term relationship or part of her “light packing” mindset?
“Both. Many men find the idea of a woman who’s free and recalcitrant really threatening,” she says. “That said, I make no secret of the fact that I have lovers in different places around the world. Beautiful men, whom I’m very, very fond of.”
Her physical bravery, heading off for extended and rugged solo trips, wouldn’t be as remarkable in a man. It was in evidence when she was 23, cycling for weeks along a notoriously rough Australian trucker highway.
“I was staying in truck stops with those guys that you might suspect are rapists, and they were so protective of me, getting on the CB radio to look out for me,” she says. “I choose to have faith in humanity. That’s how I choose to live. If I go down that way, so be it.”
She still holds onto that faith. I realise, as she heads off into London, quaintly asking the waiter for help with directions, that Wilson makes progress along her less trodden path not just because she is strong. It is because she is also vulnerable.
This One Wild and Precious Life: Our Path Forward in a Fractured World by Sarah Wilson (Pan Macmillan Australia) in stores now.
Written by: Helen Rumbelow
© The Times of London