Back in 2017, we asked Joanna Goddard, creator of Cup of Jo and the newsletter Big Salad, about the pajamas and earplugs she can’t live without. Seven years later, we asked her to revisit her list — which you can read here — and it turns out she’s still using a couple of things, along with a few new favorites.
What she still can’t live without
I still wear these pajamas all the time and have reordered them several times. I have them in three colors. They stay supersoft and wash really well. They’re not cotton, so you know how sometimes if you have cotton menswear pajamas, they just get really wrinkly and you look disheveled and rumpled? I mean, it’s kind of cute, but these are made of a bit heavier material, so they just hang and don’t really wrinkle. They’re great for traveling, too.
And some new favorites
I discovered her pretty recently and I love her food paintings. I think they’re so beautiful and realistic. We have the bread in our kitchen. You can see the air pockets. We have all sorts of different types of art in our house, and I really like having a mix of photography, paintings, my kids’ art, drawings, and block prints. We have those Hugo Guinness linocuts too. I just love having different types of art in a room. It’s one of life’s great pleasures. I’ll switch things around a lot. You know how sometimes if you have a piece of art, you’re so used to seeing it in a certain place you don’t see it anymore? When you move it around, you appreciate things anew. And it takes two seconds. If you have a hammer and nails, you put the art up, and then you can just move it. I know people get so nervous about it, but I’m like, “It’s just a nail in the wall.” It’s not like painting a room or even buying furniture.
They’re so much better than regular Snickers. I like Snickers, but ice-cream bars are so delicious. I don’t like Milky Way chocolate bars, but the Milky Way ice-cream bars are incredible. All the ice-cream bars are so good. We have Twix, Milky Way, Snickers — whatever’s available we’ll get, and we always have them in the freezer. I have a teenage boy and a preteen boy, and they eat me out of house and home. We go through rotisserie chickens, gallons of milk, loaves of bread, boxes of cereal. They eat so much. And so we have tons of these stacked in our freezer and they’re just really easy. If we’re watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine or whatever, we’ll all have one. And they’re fun to bring out after dinner parties because everyone gets really excited. There’s something playful and childlike about it. So people are like, “An ice-cream bar? And I get to pick the kind?” People are really into it. It’s fun if you have something nice for dinner and then you have that afterward. It’s just high-low, and people love it.
I have so many pairs of Boyfriend socks. It’s really annoying to have a widow sock. You lose some in the dryer and then they don’t really match. Or you get holes in them. My underwear was the same. It was ratty old underwear, and there were all different kinds. And I was like, “I’m so sick of going into this messy drawer of socks and underwear and just scavenging every morning.” So I basically separated all of them. Then I ordered a bunch of Le Bon Shoppe Boyfriend socks in different colors and a bunch of Jockey underwear, too. So now I have tons of Jockey underwear and tons of Le Bon Shoppe socks. And every time I go into my drawer, there’s just a dozen really nice, clean choices. It makes my life so much easier. I don’t know why we haven’t all done this. I also have slightly thinner socks from Le Bon Shoppe called Her Socks — I can wear them with flats. The Boyfriend ones are slightly too thick to wear with ballet flats, but they’re perfect for sneakers.
They’re called string bikinis, but they’re like briefs. Really good fit. I got a bunch in black, but there are also three different shades of blue in a package or three different shades of pink, so I got a couple of those too. And then of course I have some nice underwear that sits in a different drawer and are unused for now, but this is my everyday underwear. It’s such a life improvement to start your day without a hassle. I discovered them on Laurel Pantin’s Substack. She had recommended them, which surprised me because she has such particular and exquisite taste, and she was like, “Jockey underwear!” So I was like, “Okay, I’m going for it.” And then I ordered a three-pack, and once they came, I loved them and ordered a bunch more.
For literally decades, I was painting my toes red or pink. I had my favorite red, I had my favorite pink, and I would do pink in the summer and red in the winter. I did it for so long. Then I just got sick of it, because especially now that I’m divorced, I have the kids 75 percent of the time, so I don’t have as much time to nip out and get a pedicure spontaneously on an evening, because there’s no other grown-up in the house. I was getting behind on my pedicures, and I’m not good at painting my toes myself, so they were always chipped and grown out. So I was like, “I’m just going to go for clear because it’ll be easier.” But I also really love it. I think it looks so clean. There’s such a difference between getting a pedicure that’s clear and just not doing your nails. With a pedicure, your nails are such a nice shape, and it looks really — I keep saying the word clean — but it just looks really clean and natural and nice.
Oh, my gosh, it’s so funny. I get so many compliments on these. They’re slightly cool. The old ones I used to get from Warby Parker were just like if you drew a picture of somebody wearing glasses — they were just glasses. They were so simple. These have a straight line across the top as well as the nose bridge, and somehow they just look cool. So anytime I wear these, people are like, “Oh, your cool glasses, your cool-mom glasses. You’re not a regular mom, you’re a cool mom.” And it just makes me laugh so much that I literally get a compliment on them every day. They’re so easy. I have a straight pair in the tortoise, and I also have ones with transition lenses that turn into sunglasses. I have a relatively light prescription, so for a long time I didn’t really wear glasses. I just had a pair in the car. But then I recently started wearing them regularly and realized that I was really not able to see. For so long, I just walked around with everything slightly blurry. I couldn’t see people walking down the street until they got really, really close to me. Was I just missing a lot of things? But now I wear them all the time and I can see everything around me, which feels revolutionary.
This brings me joy every day because, first of all, I hate having my phone in my bedroom. I don’t want my phone to be my alarm clock. Every night, I turn off my phone and put it in a different room. I tried a couple of different alarm clocks. I tried one that slowly gets brighter, like the sunrise. And then I tried another one that had all these different musical choices, but they would always go wrong. They were confusing to set and they would be glitchy. It was more of a pain than it was a help to have all the different functions, buttons, and bells and whistles. This one is, again, like if you did a drawing of an alarm clock or had a cartoon alarm clock. It’s just a little black alarm clock. It’s quite small, a square. You set the alarm, and then there’s a little up-and-down thing to turn the alarm on and off. That is it. You don’t get to choose anything. It’s basically the alarm-clock version of my underwear drawer. It’s dead simple. You can’t mess it up. With my life right now, with so many moving parts, I just want a little alarm clock that works. And that’s what this is. It looks great. And it’s small. I have a small bedside table with tons of books on it, and it just fits in there like no big deal.
Kids love this and, weirdly, so do adults. It’s very simple and it’s kind of plasticky, and you can find a ton on eBay. You put the horses in the little slots, and then you turn it on, and the horses race to the end. It always comes out differently. Sometimes it’ll seem like one horse is ahead, and then another one will take over. It’s weirdly exciting. You just pick your horse and then you play. And that’s it. There’s no strategy. It’s always on our bookcase, so the kids will just randomly pick it up and play with it. But also, if we’re having a couple families over, I’ll set it on the counter and 100 percent of the time, people will start playing with it. There are no rules. It always makes me laugh because it reminds me of that scene in My Fair Lady when Eliza yells, “Move your blooming ass!” It’s also a slam-dunk birthday-party gift for a kid. I like having little things around our house that you can just pick up. So we have a yo-yo, a Slinky. This falls into that category. You can just pick it up and start fooling around with it.
Lindy West is this really funny feminist culture writer, and she wrote this book a while back. She takes classic popular movies and does really fun recaps where she essentially eviscerates them. She does Love, Actually, of course, Top Gun, Titanic, popular American classics like that. The very first one she does in the book is The Fugitive, because she thinks it’s the perfect movie. She hates everything else in the book and judges them against The Fugitive. It is the funniest book. You can just flip through it, even if you haven’t seen the movie. What’s really funny is that if you read the entry for, say, Top Gun, and then watch it again with her recap in your mind, it is the funniest experience, because she really just eviscerates it. It’s a delight. We have it in our living room. You can just grab it and read one page. You can put it in a guest room because it’s such an easy book to pick up. I also like to give it as a gift. I just gave it to a guy friend. It’s great for men and women. I also gave it to a friend who was recently going through a really hard time. I was like, “Maybe I’ll send her flowers. Maybe I’ll send her cookies.” But then I thought she’d probably have a lot of that stuff anyway. And then I said, “You know what? I’m going to send her this book, because it will make her laugh.” She might not have the bandwidth to read a novel, but this one you can just read three pages.
I don’t have a ton of sweaters, but the ones that I have I wear all the time. Sometimes, I’ll wear the same sweater for four days in a row, and I’ll be like, “It’s European.” Often, if I do find something I really love, I’ll get it in another color because I’ll wear it for years. I’ve already worn this one for a couple years, and I’ll wear it for many, many more years. I love that the ribbing is different throughout the sweater. It makes it visually really interesting. The sleeves are a cool shape, too, and it’s not too tight of a crewneck. I am a claustrophobic person, and even a tight crewneck makes me feel anxious. It just drapes really nicely, and the colors are really good. Even though they’re simple, they’re just dead-on. I have it in three colors. It also has a really weird, interesting shape. I feel like there are so many bad sweaters out there, and I think sweater quality in mass retailers is getting worse and worse. Even cashmere; it just feels bad. Sweaters can also just be so boring. I love a cotton sweater, but it can be a nothing-burger. This one is a really great, cool, and interesting sweater.
We have a gray sectional sofa in our living room, and because it’s a sectional, there’s just a lot of it. My boys are draped all over it at all times. Visually, it’s a big block of gray, so I like to have punchy throw pillows to make it look better. We have some from Block Shop and some from Josef Frank. But recently, I saw the Molly Mahon ones and really loved her patterns and colors. She’s an English designer based in Sussex. My whole family is English, and almost everybody in my family lives in England, and it just reminds me of my aunts’ houses. They have a thousand wallpapers and patterns on everything. It looks bright and pretty, and it cheers up the house. You can buy various fabrics and things on her website, but I sometimes go through Etsy, because then it’s already made.
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