September’s Best Finds, Unfiltered
Some months hand you a theme without asking. September, for Refinery29 Lifestyle Director Susan Devaney, turned out to be about escaping – physically to Greece, mentally into a memoir, and briefly into a basement spa on Oxford Street that had no business being as peaceful as it was.
What follows are three picks that came out of that month: a book that earned its bestseller status the hard way, a Lush spa treatment most people walk past without knowing exists, and the ongoing, maddening search for a work backpack that doesn’t look like you’re hiking to base camp.
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The Memoir That Made Greece Better
Devaney went to Greece for the first time in September with one specific goal: find a book good enough to disappear into. That’s a particular kind of pressure to put on a novel or memoir – the vacation read has to hold up against heat, wine, and the general temptation to do nothing at all. Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden cleared that bar.
The book centers on Burden’s experience of discovering, after more than twenty years of marriage, that her husband had been having an affair – and then watching him leave the family entirely. It’s the kind of subject matter that sounds like it could collapse under the weight of its own grief, but Burden’s NYT bestseller status suggests she found a way through it that readers actually want to follow. Devaney is deliberately vague about the rest, which is the right call. A memoir about betrayal lives or dies by what you don’t see coming.
What makes a vacation read work isn’t just the writing – it’s the timing. Greece, a first visit, a book about starting over after something ends. There’s an accidental symmetry there that probably made Strangers hit harder than it might have on a Tuesday commute.
The Spa Hiding Under a Lush Store
The Oxford Street branch of Lush is not a quiet place. It sits on one of London’s busiest retail strips, draws constant foot traffic, and has the sensory intensity you’d expect from a shop that essentially sells bottled smell. Which makes it genuinely strange that, one floor below all of that, there’s a spa.
Devaney found it in September and booked The Highlands, a Scotland-inspired hot stone massage running approximately 60 minutes. Being Scottish herself, the choice was less a decision than an inevitability. What she didn’t anticipate was the tarot element – before the massage began, she was given a card reading and pulled The Eye, which carries the meaning of new adventures or new beginnings. Whether you take that literally or treat it as a pleasant frame for the hour ahead is up to you. Either way, it’s an unusual pre-treatment ritual for a high-street spa.
Throughout the session, the soundtrack was Scottish Gaelic music. The scents, she noted, were familiar – like home. For anyone who has ever lived far from where they grew up, that particular combination of sound and smell does something specific to the nervous system that no amount of ambient nature recordings can replicate. The treatment is bookable directly through Lush.
The broader point worth noting: most people who walk into that Oxford Street location have no idea the spa exists. It doesn’t advertise itself the way the fizzing bath bombs and towering product displays do. You have to go looking, or stumble down the stairs by accident. That kind of discovery – the thing hiding in plain sight – tends to stick with you longer than whatever you actually went in to buy.
The Backpack That Doesn’t Look Like a Backpack
This one is incomplete, because the source article cuts off mid-sentence at the point where Devaney begins describing her search for a work-appropriate backpack. What’s established is the problem: finding a bag that functions as a proper work carrier without broadcasting “I am wearing a hiking pack to a meeting.” It’s a real and underappreciated design failure in the bag industry.
The tension between utility and aesthetic in everyday carry is something most bag brands claim to have solved and very few actually have. A bag that holds a laptop, fits under a desk, survives a commute, and doesn’t make you look like you’re about to summit something – that list of requirements narrows the field considerably. Devaney was, apparently, still looking.
What does it say about the state of work accessories that a lifestyle director, whose job literally involves finding good products, still hadn’t cracked the backpack problem by the end of September?
