Celeste L. Hollyns

The Little Book of Icks is an observational collection about the small, often difficult-to-name moments that make women pause. It explores the point at which something feels slightly wrong before it can be fully explained: a flicker across a table, a shift in tone, a phrase that lands badly, or a behaviour that reveals more than it intends.

In the book, an ick is presented not as disgust, but as a form of recognition. Across thirty-nine entries, the book examines familiar patterns: the man who has done a great deal of work on himself, almost none of which has involved other people; the one who tops up a wine glass as though autonomy requires supervision; the one who says "only joking" just after a remark has caused discomfort.

The entries move from sharply observed comic situations into more reflective territory. Early pieces focus on recognisable social and romantic behaviours, including the podcast personality, the midlife guru, and the man who arrives at a midweek pub dinner in a full suit with a prepared explanation. Later sections, including Quietly Devastating Realisations, consider emotional diminishment, self-abandonment, accommodation, and the gap between knowing something is wrong and being ready to act on that knowledge.

The book is not framed as an attack on men. Instead, it uses specific male behaviours to examine broader human patterns: the distance between self-image and conduct, the ways people justify themselves, and the subtle effects of being repeatedly asked to absorb, excuse, or minimise discomfort.

As the collection develops, the focus shifts increasingly towards the woman doing the noticing. The later entries concern self-trust, clarity, experience, and the moment when a woman begins to recognise that her discomfort may be information rather than an overreaction. In this sense, the book becomes less about the individual men described and more about the process of learning to trust one's own perception.

For any woman who has sat across a table and thought there it is, and laughed about it afterwards with a friend, a glass of wine in hand, both nodding slowly, this is a book of recognition. You were never imagining things. You were noticing.

The Little Book of Icks is available now in paperback and eBook from Amazon