Chloé Williams searches the bookstore for a book of essays about enjoying ordinary things. This is something she writes about constantly, but she still can’t get enough. McNally Jackson is bustling with people. A white felt heart garland hangs over the stationery section. Mice ornaments litter the shelves. The coming holiday is in the air. We both scour the shelves for the book until we admit defeat and ask a worker if they even have it. We find out they don’t and continue to browse for anything else that sounds enticing. 

Every couple aisles, Williams picks up a book and tells me something about it. She’s reading The Iliad, but wishes she waited for a different author’s translation. She tells me she’d freak out if someone said their favorite book is Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey. She recommends John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, which I plan on buying before we leave. She picks up a copy of Jenny Slate’s Little Weirds and says, “My book is gonna be kind of like this.”

Williams currently works as a copywriter, nannies for two families and publishes a newsletter twice a month. As if that is not enough to keep her busy, she recently received a book deal from an indie magazine. They found Williams through her monthly newsletter. 

Williams started “Chloé in Letters” in October 2020 as a way to consistently share her work online. In mid-November this year, she reached 4,000 subscribers. “I made this and played pretend until I believed I was [a writer],” Williams wrote in a celebratory Instagram post to her 10,000 followers. “There is no sweeter internet than the one we share together.” 

She admits, however, that she sometimes fantasizes about getting rid of her phone. After going through a reading slump, Williams banned using her phone on the subway. When the algorithm keeps her own online community from seeing her posts, she has to remind herself this isn’t all there is. “I try to go off vibes alone and if I’m happy with what I’m making, that’s all that matters,” she says.

Going off vibes alone doesn’t always work in her favor. Williams’ subscriber count is more or less directly related to her engagement on other social channels, like Instagram and TikTok. Williams says she struggles to understand her Gen Z audience and what media they deem “valuable.” She finds that people can be judgmental of what or how she’s reading too. “I wish they’d understand that people contain multitudes. I can enjoy a romantic, fantasy novel and read The Atlantic,” she says. 

When we meet over Zoom, Williams arrives two minutes early. Her curly hair is tucked inside a grey crewneck with the word “loverboy” written across it. Her Brooklyn apartment sits so close to the M train that she apologizes every time it passes by. A cat named Lady comes into view and Williams tells me she is only one of her many roommates, including her twin sister Ava. She suddenly turns her laptop to show me the wall above her desk. Photostrips, playing cards with notes written on them and something else that can only be described as a love letter cover the old paint. This is where she writes.

Each month, Williams picks a theme to mull over in her newsletter. Some themes from the past include: home, mediocrity, desire and love. Besides an essay, the newsletter has other subsections, a playlist and a curated Pinterest board. Williams’ “Library Snag” pulls quotes from her favorite books of the month. “Poetry Purgatory” is a way for her to share musings she writes in her notes app that would otherwise never be published. After a few months, Williams expanded and she began writing a paid version of the newsletter. She found new ways to engage the members of her community that were willing to pay for her work.

Following her graduation from Hunter College in the summer of 2021, Williams experienced intense burnout. The paid portion of her newsletter felt like a chore and she was ready to stop it altogether. She couldn’t keep up with her advice column and book club while also balancing life. “The newsletter used to be something that was finished by the middle of the month, but I was down to the wire those days,” Williams says.

Her solution was to include slowmaxing, or her version of living slowly. Every month, Williams compiles a list of all the media impacting her. Scenes from television shows, song lyrics, poems and works of art. She is still finding the balance between consuming to gain something and consuming for enjoyment, and questioning why enjoying media can’t count as gaining something from it. 

The next time we meet is a Sunday morning. I spot her quickly in the crowded Williamsburg café. Her hair, once again, tucked into a red scarf that matches her red shoes and purse. Her glasses sliding down her nose as she tips the barista. Williams smiles when she finally turns around and finds me. Despite the early-December air, we decide to sit by the waterfront. “I grew up by the beach. I don’t mind the cold,” she says before thanking the man that holds the door for her to walk through.

She grew up in a town in Connecticut, raised by working class parents who somehow created three children all destined to be artists. “No stability in any of their bloodlines,” Williams says with a laugh. She calls her siblings her best friends and explains their relationship as “adults who really care about each other.” Without stopping to think it over, she tells me she’d drive across the country for them even though she’s only ever driven on a highway once in her life.

“All of us being artists means there is a legitimate object of our existence together,” Williams says. “My brother has drawn portraits of us. My sister has taken photographs of us. I’ve documented us.”

In the middle of answering a question about why she still chooses to live with her twin sister at the age of 25, she recalls a saying that one will have enough material to write for their whole life if they live through childhood. Williams says she finds it difficult to write about her family and their upbringing because it was full of “deep love and acceptance.” 

Though she doesn’t always write about family, the newsletter itself has familial roots. Williams posts on the first Friday of every month to keep up the tradition of “Starbucks Fridays.” Williams, her sister and their mom would stop at Starbucks every Friday on their way to school as an excuse to spend more time singing to the car radio.

The indie magazine publishing her book is giving her free reign over its content as well as the physical look and feel of the book. “My hope is my brother will do the cover and my sister will take my author portrait,” she says.

Without divulging too much, Williams tells me the book is a sort of “chronology of healing.” It begins in her 20s when she was dumped by her high school boyfriend. It then moves into a two year long relationship with someone new, which she refers to as her “situationship,” and its aftermath.

“It’s the healing journey of adult cruelty that exists in mature relationships and what happened when I leveled the playing field,” Williams says.

After things ended with her high school boyfriend, she became hyper aware of how her friends and family were showing up for her. “When you’re 16 and the only thing you care about is having a boyfriend, you’re closed off to what it means to feel boundless, deep affection for other people in your life,” she says. Williams had a similar experience after her second break up and is relearning to accept that boundless love in her life again. 

The December newsletter is titled “For The Long Haul.” Williams explores why she loves taking the long way home and where her need to slow down comes from. As the last newsletter of the year, it includes an elegy to 2022 and her resolutions. In 2023, Williams will be reading big books and taking forever to finish them, drinking her morning cup of tea slowly and trying to not shame people for what they have and haven’t done. 

A line in the newsletter reads, “I’m not afraid to admit I can be an asshole!” But I don’t see that in Williams. When the baby she watches is crying, she builds a block tower and wonders aloud who will come and knock it down. She laughs with her brother over the sound of their dad’s dresser handles clanging against the old wood for reasons only they understand. She sometimes sleeps in the same bed with her twin sister if they’ve spent too much time apart. She pays for my latte at the café and smiles gratefully when I mention I read her latest newsletter.

Follow Chloé here and read Chloé in Letters here