You know those moments where you mess up and you drop something clumsily, or you make a tiny error in judgement, a miscalculation, and you comically shout, ‘GAH’?

Well, that’s what you do when you fuck up driving and stare into the face of your own extinction. Even when you can see a woman and a kid in the front of the car you are about to collide head on with, maybe a twelve-year-old girl, and a few smaller kids on the backseat, you are still yourself. You still make a ‘dumb old me’ face. You still go: ‘GAH!’

I am a really careful driver usually, so I should have been able to judge the distance between the truck and the oncoming car. I don’t know what happened.

It was a small error but I found myself saying, ‘no no no no nooooooo!’ as dread dropped to the bottom of my tummy and lay there like a cold hard gray flat stone, like slate, like a roof tile, like a flagstone floor, making me feel like I wanted to take a poop.

It was only a second. Time didn’t slow down, because it never does, but my brain sped up, and I even had time to be amazed by how many thoughts it could manage at once, particularly because I’ve always thought I was a little slow.

My brain realized I had three choices: I could drive forward into the oncoming car, and kill that whole family, or at least the Mum and eldest daughter, I could veer left into the lorry next to me and maybe kill that driver, or I could pull right—into the concrete wall.

I also had time to think about how it was a really bad design, to have a concrete wall next to the road. I wondered what was on the other side of it that necessitated such a structure. Was it a nursery school, with the playground right next to the road? Someone’s living room? Another road?

I hadn’t driven on that stretch before, and I had thought, prior to pulling out to overtake the lorry, that I was still on a dual carriageway.

Emotionally, I was a little annoyed and on edge, which was why I had decided to drive over to the factory for my meeting, rather than take the train. I wanted to be alone so I could cry and yell and scream really loud.

I knew I was going to die and with that choice taken away from me I felt strong and brave, because I knew I was going to do the right thing. I am usually so unsure of myself, but I was sure about my decision in that moment.

It felt great. I felt almost cocky. Sacrificing myself for a young family was a good option to have, if I had to die. My parents would be so proud.

As my left hand (inexplicably) reached out to turn off the radio, I felt my whole body relax. My hand returned to the 10 to 2 position on the steering wheel. My right hand went to the top of the wheel, gripping the leather. I pulled the wheel hard right, until it locked, and drove the car, driver’s side first, into the concrete.

I thought I had been killed instantly.

An Introduction

My name is Hayley, and I am the creator of a character named Kiyokoma. You might have heard of Kiyokoma. Zie is getting quite famous. Kiyokoma is a cross between a fox, a cat, and a small bear. Zie is neither a boy nor a girl, but everything and nothing. Zie is very joyful, and likes to help hir friends with their problems. Kiyokoma is ten years old, and lives with hir family in Puff Puff Land, which is on the clouds high above Mount Fuji. Zie has never been down to see the mainland, but dreams of what Japan might be like.

Kiyokoma has hir own television show on the Kiyokoma! Youtube channel, and a series of novels. I call them “novels”, but they are novels in Kiyokoma’s world, meaning they are quite short, and have lots of illustrations. The words are generally not a story, more advice and funny thoughts. I think of the pictures and words as snapshots of Kiyokoma’s days. The best selling “novel” so far is, predictably, about love.

For Kiyokoma’s television show, I use 2D animation. Stylistically, I like a clean look, lots of pastel colours, and kind of a childlike simplicity to the actual drawings. I’m a big admirer of San-X, the Japanese stationary company responsible for Mamegoma, Rilakkuma and Afro Ken. I started out animating with Toon boom, but now I use TVPaint, because it’s everything in one piece of software. I couldn’t afford it when I first began playing with the idea of a television show, but a few months after I launched Kiyokoma I had saved enough to buy it.

I still get excited every time I open it to work, which is every day, since Kiyokoma likes to do an episode every week, and I do two seasons a year of the show, in spring and autumn. The episodes are only one or two minutes long, but they require a lot of work on my part, with Kiyokoma dictating what to do and then relaxing most of the week while I slog away.

I publish the videos via Youtube on Kiyokoma’s website, and also promote the show on Snapchat, Tiktok, and Instagram. In summer and winter, Kiyokoma likes to write novels, which I have been publishing every couple of months, although now I’m in hospital obviously there has been a bit of a break.

Oh, and me. I am pretty boring compared to Kiyokoma. I am 5 foot three inches tall, with long (dyed) black hair, and blue eyes. I am petite and lucky to currently be skinny, although this is because my muscles have been wasting away in the ICU in the hospital for two whole months while I have been unconscious and then, for another week, delirious, and then for the last week, okay.

I was pretty pleased to be skinny anyway, but the nurses think it is not such good news. I have lived in San Diego, in the States, in Germany, in the United Kingdom, both in England and Scotland, and also in Hong Kong for a year, when I was eleven, which is where I developed my love for Japan, which might sound weird, but kawaii is very popular in Hong Kong, especially Hello Kitty.

Kawaii means cute. I loved the idea that these funny, cute characters came from Japan all the way across the sea to entertain me and be my friends (because I didn’t have any in real life).

As a kid, I always drew made up animals. In Hong Kong, I started to copy the Japanese manga and kawaiistyles. First, I traced the characters I liked out of comics, but I soon started to make up my own. I came up with Kiyokoma when I was thirteen. By then, we were living in San Diego, on the military base.

I always had a problem making friends, I guess because I was shy. By the time I had psyched myself up to talk to the other kids in my school, we were moving to another country, so I never quite got the technique down. I always hoped that Kiyokoma would become an international brand like Hello Kitty and then people would know me and Kiyo and want to be our friends, and I promised myself (and Kiyokoma), that I would do anything in the world to make that happen.

As we moved from place to place, and my loneliness grew, my longing became desperate. I had to make something of myself. Everybody had to know Kiyokoma, because then they would know me. Because then someone would remember me, and that I was here, and I lived in the world.

I have a secret. One I don’t tell, because I know people will say I’m arrogant, self-centred, vain. But I tell it to Kiyokoma, because zie is so young and sweet zie doesn’t have the words to take me down yet.

Here’s my secret: I want to write and draw about me, a plain, boring girl of twenty-three, but I feel unworthy. My story isn’t an epic adventure, a journey across continents, mastery and conquering and living alone in the wilderness. My whiny, high, girly girl voice isn’t brave or noble or true. It wavers in pitch and a lot of people say I sound really immature and annoying. My critics (for instance, the youtubers who troll Kiyokoma’s channel) say Kiyokoma doesn’t have any depth. They say that hir innocence and niceness is almost Nazi-like, like if zie ever had a bad thought, I, the creator, would punish hir and delete it.

Not Dead Yet

Waking up from a coma is like climbing out of your own eye sockets. I felt like I was very far back inside them, and I couldn’t reach to open the lids to get out. I could see that the muscles of my eyes were trying to made them blink. It was like my contact lenses had grown into the back of my eyelids and onto my eyeball, sealing the stupid things shut.

‘What the fuck is wrong with my lenses?’ I say.

I hear Mum mumble tiredly, ‘don’t swear’, before she realizes I am awake and she stands up and shouts for a nurse. I can hear her from somewhere very far below my eyes, which are sore.

‘Quick! Please! Come quickly.’ There is also the sound of footsteps; my Mum’s, which are very indecisive, and another set of feet which runs towards me. ‘She said something. Is she waking up? Is she okay?’

I am here, swimming in the sound of her voice, in the smell of my own bad breath, in the grease on my skin. I am have swum up close to my eyelids now. They are stuck together like glue. I try to pull them apart with my hands, from inside my head. They are the hands of my brain. I didn’t know my brain had hands before now. Water is rubbed on them from outside with something that feels large and pokes me. ‘Ow.’ I open them.

‘Her eyes are open!’

At first I see only white. I wonder where I am, then realize I’m probably in Puff Puff land. ‘Kiyokoma?’

‘That’s the character she draws!’ exclaims my Mum. Why is she so excited?

I blink some more, and when I open my eyelids from one blink, the whiteness coalesces into a hospital room, the end of a bed, my hand, a television monitor, a nurse, my Mum.

‘Hayley? It’s Mummy. How are you feeling?’

‘Umm.’ I can taste something awful in my mouth, so with my tongue I explore my teeth. Instead of the slick wetness of jewels, they feel rough and caked in dirt. ‘What’s in my mouth?’

‘Nothing, sweetie.’

‘That’s just her teeth,’ the nurse says. ‘With her mouth shut all the time.’

‘My eyeballs ache.’

‘You’ve got an eye infection, but we’re giving you drops to clear it up, darling.’ That’s the nurse again.

I try to move my left hand but something pulls on it, and something like a needle moves in the skin on the back of my hand. ‘Ouch.’ I use my right hand instead to feel myself underneath the blankets.

‘Try not to move your shoulder, sweetie,’ Mum says. ‘You broke it.’ As I feel around, she tells me, ‘You’re wearing a pot on your left foot. And you have a plaster on your thigh from a hip operation.’

‘Hip operation?’ I mumble. I feel upwards. I blush. I’m not wearing anything underneath my gown. I look down at my chest, and pull the blankets up over it. Mum helps me, and I shrug her off. I’m wearing my own nightie at least, my old favorite from Hong Kong with Strawberry Princess Moshi on it.

I frown. There’s some part of me I’ve missed checking. I realize. ‘Is Kiyokoma okay?’

‘Oh dear,’ the nurse says. ‘Hayley, who’s the prime minister?’

‘She’s not cuckoo,’ says Mum. ‘She’s just very involved in Kiyokoma’s life. Kiyo’s fine Hayley. You’ve been in a coma, so we got one of your friends to put up a message on your website.’

‘My friends?’ I say, dazed. I don’t have any friends. ‘What message?’

‘Just a message so people know you’re not posting.’

‘Me?’ At this I try to sit up, and the nurse holds me down and dissuades me. I lift my head off the pillow and shout at Mum. ‘It’s not supposed to mention me at all! I’m the secret creator! Otherwise it’s like Kiyokoma is fake!’

‘Oh for goodness sake, Hayley.’ Mum looks at the nurse, embarrassed.

‘Tell me what it says exactly.’

Mum tuts. ‘Erm, it says, Kiyokoma is going on holiday! Wish me bonnes vacances lovely Kiyokoma fans!’

‘Hmmph. Well at least it doesn’t mention me. Is the printers still taking orders?’

‘No, we stopped that for a bit. We didn’t know what was going to happen.’

‘What? That’s how I make money! It doesn’t even need me to be there, it’s automatic when people order Kiyokoma’s books! Who’s been paying my rent?’

‘Daddy took care of it all.’

‘How long have I been asleep?’

Mum looks at the nurse and the nurse says, ‘You’ve been in a coma for two months, sweetheart. Your Mum was really worried about you.’

‘Oh, no!’ I wailed. ‘Two months! What if all our fans have forgotten us?’

‘Hayley, you’re being really silly. It’s much more important that you’re well – ’

‘Is it Mum?’ I say, sarcastically. ‘Is it really? Shit, that means it’s almost Kiyokoma’s birthday, and we were starting to get attention from real Japanese character creators, talking about collaborations and having Kiyokoma promote other brands and stationary. But two months with no posts! Crap!’

There is a beat of silence, and the nurse looks at Mum. ‘Well, she seems fine. I’ll get the doctor for tests.’

‘Wait! How long will I have to be here now?’

‘I’ll wait for Dr Williams to say, but probably a few more days in the NICU, and then I should think with your injuries you’ll need physical therapy as an inpatient.’

‘How long will that take?’

The nurse shrugs. ‘Probably a couple of weeks.’

‘Urgh,’ I groan. ‘Can I have my laptop in here then? I need it.’

‘No,’ Mum and the nurse say, at the same time.

‘What?’ I cry, dismayed. ‘What am I supposed to do every day, lying here?’

‘You won’t be here for long now,’ Mom says. ‘You’ll see. It’ll go in a flash.’ She starts to plump my pillows, and sit me up, which hurts my back.

‘Can you stop doing that? It’s making me feel awful.’

She keeps doing it.

‘It’s just a fortnight, Hayley, that’s good isn’t it? You’ll get your strength back, and then you can be an outpatient!’ The pitch of her voice rises, as if this is so exciting!

I lie back on the now uncomfortable pillows and sulk. Waking from a coma sucks.

The ICU Psycho

I’m not a totally ungrateful, terrible person. Before the accident, I was always nice. I wouldn’t say I was friendly, because I kept myself to myself, but I was unfailingly polite.

To the point where I would still be thanking shopkeepers when they had already moved on to the next customer. To the point where I let the boy of my dreams stand me up over and over and over again (eight times in total) before I suggested that maybe he was too busy right now to spend time with me. I phrased this so he knew there were no hard feelings, even though I cried and barely ate anything for two months afterwards. To the point where I would generally stop speaking before I made my point because I was aware the sound of my voice might be annoying someone.

But over the next few days in the NICU, I find I can’t keep swear words inside my mouth. I’m sarky and unpleasant to everyone. I’m mean and bitter.

I apologise, and the nurses tell me it’s normal. They call it ICU psychosis. Patients frequently hallucinate both when asleep and awake, and when they are fully cognizant, their personality bites. One nurse, Sarah, tells me most ICU patients are really bitchy and indifferent. They often ask for things and then say, ‘oh, whatever, I don’t care’. They complain about everything, as if they are in a hotel and expect room service; some of them even hallucinate they are in a hotel. The nurses think it’s to do with not seeing the sun at all, for months at a time, in these rooms without windows; where everything beeps and flashes all night, and the dark is never fully dark.

I don’t think that’s why though. I think in all the car door metal and glass that scraped into the skin over my skull and created that big, juicy, subdural haematoma that almost killed me then gave me seizures during the coma as it dried and broke away and itched at my brain, also cut away a layer of acceptability about me, a polite membrane that covered the other, darker stuff. A lobotomy of my ability to lie.

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The highlight of this month’s reading is, perhaps embarrassingly?, obvious. I read Normal People by Sally Rooney for the first time, having committed the cardinal sin of watching the TV series first, a couple of years ago.

I enjoyed both the reading experience, with my “I’m just an innocent reader, nothing to see here” hat on, and, with my writer hat on, the wicked confidence of a young woman writing about what she knows, skilfully and, dare I say it, with artful calculation.

You can read my essay, which is not strictly an explanation or review of what happens in the book so much as musings on craft, third person, and writing intimacy from a distance (which I’ve just had another thought about—writing intimacy in the third person is a form of literary edging).

Buy the book here.

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney

Whilst we’re on the topic, Sally Rooney’s follow up to Normal People, set amongst a similar milieu of middle to upper class educated Dubliners, but not with the same characters, also edges, literarily.

I didn’t think it worked as well. Ordinary World is twice as long as the international bestseller and has a looser structure, but hews to the same formula as NP, with two couples, this time, misunderstanding each other for chapters upon chapters.

The reasons for the misunderstandings—inherited traumas of one kind or another—are both less compelling than in NP and less clear. Particularly, the choice to reveal one character’s poor early life family dynamics later on in the narrative (in NP, we learn all is not well in Marianne’s household in the early parts of the book) leaves readers guessing as to the cause of characters’ reticence to attach for the first half of the book.

Beautiful World’s secondary flaw, in my opinion, is that the cast are 30 to 35, so I just ended up thinking, oh for god’s sake, tell them you like them, be happy, and split rent, because otherwise it’s hubris and I don’t feel sorry for any of you at all.

It’s difficult to read that kind of book when one has real problems, and when it should be achingly clear that one’s handsome, clever, left wing best friend telling you that he really likes you, and you being a touch too tired to repress all emotion about it, is not a real problem. Eileen, particularly, encounters this level of trauma repeatedly.

BW was published in 2021, and so Sally Rooney was 30 years old when drafting it, or younger. I glean from the internet that Rooney last began a romantic relationship age 20/21, with the man she then married at 29/30. Barring polyamory/ENM (I don’t want to assume), that could mean her experience of romance is frozen in this era of early 20s, and provide an explanation for the recurring ‘mutual confusion’ storyline in her work.

But is she writing about herself? Maybe, and maybe not—is the objective voice evidence that this pattern of relationship is observation rather than experience? Olivia Sudjic’s Exposure, amongst others, questions a societal tendency to see women writers in their fiction, and not men.

Personally, knowing certain facts about a writers’ life helps me better analyse and enjoy their work. Are they from immense privilege for instance? Does that affect their world view and story? Of course it does. Why not address their humanity, when novels are so much more about our humanity, our hearts, than words?

Rooney, too, questions novelists’ motives and perspective in BW.

Alice, one of the novel’s four protagonists and three narrators (in that epistolary parts of the novel are written between Alice and Eileen; the rest of the book is in the third person), is a novelist, with a backstory that closely resembles the wild success of Rooney’s own career. In letters to Eileen, Alice discusses her own circumstances, that her writing focuses on romantic relationships, and whether her novels add anything to the cultural dialogue.

Here, Rooney offers readers her self-consciousness, but what does that self-consciousness offer the reader? Confession alone? Complicity, if we accept the confession? Is it okay for Alice/Rooney to write entire novels about people getting together or not, as wars rage, as long as we know that she is self-conscious, demure, a little apologetic? Does Alice/Rooney think so?

Honestly, I’m uninterested in this debate. Having experienced great loss, I know gentle entertainment of any kind can make life worth living when other reasons are hard to come by. People who escape wars need books to distract them, to relate to, to write. This dialogue undermines the novel for me, and breaks the fourth wall, as if the author is rejecting the book as she writes it.

I do, however, enjoy Rooney’s writing. There’s something very interesting about the distance with which she writes, and how she lingers on what modern life is—the dust motes and the powering down laptop noise of it all. Also, I like her illustrations of the ways money divides people and creates our divergent quotidians—how some of us go to work and come home to grey silence, some of us live in beautiful places and don’t work too hard, and some of our hands bleed from labour and we feel bereft and desolate that this is what we are and do.

But does she believe in her own writing? By Beautiful World, it feels to me like the bloom is coming off the rose—for Rooney, not her readers. She is unimpressed with herself, and even these casual little descriptions (the dust motes) feel too light, too careless, and the dialogue between women about the pointlessness of writing about the minutiae of relationships is… too on the nose to say anything further about.

Like the lauded debut crime fiction from last month’s book stack, this book was loved, and recommended to me, by one of my very best friends, both wonderful, unique, very clever women, with excellent taste. I, however, found some good things in the crime debut and in this book, and then ended up speed-reading the two last halves.

But I’m trying to embrace having different tastes and not worrying that I’m a curmudgeon. I do think it’s worth talking about what we don’t like as much as what we like. I always feel bad, that I might be hurting the author’s feelings (or alienating friends) but just as, in writing my own novels, I try to satisfy myself, I would sincerely hope that Rooney doesn’t care what I think.

Buy it here.

Female Loneliness Epidemic by Danielle Cheloskey

“I wanted to be digital and controlled by someone realer and bigger than me.”

I’m currently employed for two days a week as a development exec with literary heft for a director; specialising in intellectual property, finding her books that are cool and cult and contained enough to adapt structurally and visually for cinema, and suit her style, voice, and previous body of work.

So this reading was for research. I picked it up at Artwords on Broadway market. I selected it because of the title and my impression that the stories in it built a kind of a thesis, each compounding the casual tragedy of the last, declaring: today’s young women are lonely because of today’s young men.

I was reading it on the train, when the woman next to me (19-24) asked about it, and whether I’d seen the Louis Theroux documentary on masculinity. We spoke about her impressions, and she confirmed other reports I’d heard that it was depressing viewing for a young woman, given how little it went into the topic and how basic the information was, and how it made one think, doesn’t everybody know this already? Exactly my thoughts during me too.

Back to FLE. The stories reminded me of Lucia Berlin’s collections, in that the narrators all feel like one protagonist, in mildly different professions and timeframes. Each first person protagonist goes unnamed, each is a woman circa mid-20s. She has casual sex or relationships with many men who don’t care about her, feels unhappy, and contemplates suicide. She is (at times) an artist, but we don’t learn much about this.

During the first half of the book, I had my misgivings. I surmised it probably accomplished what it aimed to achieve, but what didn’t work for me is that it didn’t feel like it said anything new. The structure of the two or three page stories, mostly interior thoughts and sex acts, was plain and unchanging, with her unhappiness rooted in the pursuit of aims highly valued by straight culture—to get a boyfriend, to be wanted, to be seen as “pretty” in a particular way, to be thin.

There was something about it that felt old fashioned, because I think some women have come to understand that being with a man might either be just one facet of a wider, fuller, fulfilled life or, even, less than they should reasonably aim for. There’s the South Korean 4BB movement, in which women followers do not date men, marry men, have sex with men, or have children with men. There’s my lived experience—in two out of three dates I go on with women, they tell me they’ve recently stopped dating men.

But FLE grew on me. The second half of the book slowed down a little, the stories lengthening, with more space on the page to understand her days, the economic pressures, the overwhelm of New York City, the tenderness she notices that others don’t.

I think my empathy for the book ebbed and flowed with my empathy for the character. I thought, could it be that the original thesis changes, that instead of loneliness being pinned on poor treatment by men, the writer concludes that today’s young women are lonely because of themselves? Or, is she saying that it’s the city, modern life, the lack of time to think, the ugliness of American capitalism?

I felt the character wanted to become, and was searching for herself in men. Strangely, the last three stories were in the third person—what is the writer doing with this? I felt like the final story, Bodies, is the same character a year or two on. She’s found purchase in the city. She’s turned herself from a muse for men into an artist. She’s rendered versions of herself on canvas and let those younger versions go. A young woman points at a painting. “That’s me.”

Is she saying, if only we could let go of the patriarchal dream of a man to provide the other half of everything, we could make good feelings, good art, instead of making bad feelings? That maybe we could find love, tenderness (the tenderness with which Esme seems to regard this young woman in the art gallery), in the forms it arrives to us, rather than the forms we expect it in.

Buy it here. Note the long dispatch time.

March in conclusion

I love to be drawn by whim when choosing what to read, but I also need focus. If excited about a new hardback, I should get it, as soon as it comes out (like you can, from independent bookshops, at this link, supporting me at the same time, at no extra cost to you). If I want to read the precursor to my Christmas classic, and I put it on my bedside table, it shouldn’t linger there for three months waiting for me to whittle through whimsical acquisitions.

Too many times this month, I found myself speed reading because I had realised I wasn’t enjoying myself. I don’t like to do that, because I like reading—and food, life, a desk set up, an hour, a nap, etcetera—to be truly delicious; hedonistic, orgasmic, an utter delight. Definitely reading novels should be, because we read fiction for pleasure, more than we read it to know things.

Also, when I read fiction that brings me joy, I write work that is true to me. Good books, like To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage, and Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley, inform my work.

I could be avoiding this error, because sometimes my whims are like going to the supermarket hungry—I know in the moment when a book is not going to hit the spot, but I buy it anyway.

I’m now doing three things which I think will help—using the library, planning my reading (a current focus is reading certain authors’ entire oeuvres), and buying the new hardback I am so excited to read. I’m doing one thing that will hinder me, which is reading at least three books for podcast and film work this coming month. Damn it. I’ll just have to read more.

Buy my novels, Flick, Golden Boy, and Dead Girls, from indie bookshops here.

Links to buy novels in this essay:

Normal People by Sally Rooney

Beautiful World, Where are you by Sally Rooney

Female Loneliness Epidemic by Danielle Chelosky

To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage

Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley

Every sale supports both independent bookshops and my work, as I earn commission on them at no extra cost to you. This is true, too, of all books linked in the body of this article.

If you liked this, you might like…

Thank you for taking the time to read my writing. If you enjoyed this post, felt like it spoke to you in some way, please share, like, or leave a comment. I really appreciate the support and your continued readership.

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I even wrote and directed a short film based on it, which helped me get more work in that field (some stills from that film at the end of this post). I imagined the novelised version of the story as a trilogy (I enjoy trilogies) or duology.

At the time, I was in a reading group with three other writers. We read short stories, and sometimes wrote and shared stories together. I wrote ‘Eel’ for this group.

Frankie

The call came in around six thirty in the morning, and the captain and I went to investigate. An eel man, Johnny Hawkspur, had been fishing for lunch when he found her. Eels were once a staple food in this area, and there are still a few eel men who work the river banks, up and down the Bain and the Witham. When my family moved here eels were used to pay rent. Fishing for them is banned now. The locals ate them until there weren’t any left, the fools.

We came expecting a body, but after we tramped across the field Johnny showed us a bloody shawl and some lace from her petticoat, caught on the brambles by the river as if torn off the body on its way downstream. The shawl was stuck in situ, on a tree root that pointed into the river and rested just above the clear, icy water. The captain wrinkled his nose, stood back, on the bank. I peered over the edge at the shawl. Eels teemed beneath it.

The eel is a snake-like fish. It begins as larvae, drifting in the surface waters of the sea. Under a microscope it is beautiful, transparent, with a skeleton like a sculpture made of wire wool. It feeds on small particles, before shape-shifting into a glass eel, the gills and heart now red with blood. Finally, the skin mists like a window, becoming opaque, hiding and protecting those delicate bones.

Sigmund Freud dissected hundreds of eels, looking for the male sex organs.

“There’s nowt here, John Hawkspur.”

Johnny bit down on his pipe, which was empty and unlit. “Tha’s blood on that, Captain.”

“Maybe so, but from what? Human? Dog? Teenagers mucking about?”

Every eel that ever lived came from the Sargasso Sea, in the Caribbean. Passengers on the Gulf Stream, they wind up on the Continental Shelf in spring and change shape, rattening out, gaining a dimension, going from two to three. They let the tide wash them into the river mouths. If there’s bog or fen they will travel over land. They pick a river bank or a quiet pool and stay. They don’t breed there. They only live and feed.

“I can’t investigate a shawl,’ the Captain is saying.

Johnny makes a little grunt, stares disconsolately past me. I look too. It’s pale and strange, this garment. Made from something unbleached. Hand-woven, with technical ends. But why blood? “Why blood?” A good detective might be thinking. “If found in the river?” Because a good detective would realize a river is something you drown someone in. Or somebody drowns in. If you were to beat someone over the head to get them into the river to drown, their shawl wouldn’t have time to become bloody.

This shawl - if it belongs to a dead woman - must have been bloodied for some time. So is it body disposal? Or a knife wound? There are none in the shawl. Was it used to staunch blood flow? No, because the pattern would show creases. This stain is even and round edged. A good detective would be thinking all these things. Say these things.

Wouldn’t even need to be that good. But I don’t say ‘em, do I? So what am I?

The Captain is spinning a story now. A report about some teenagers, shrieking heard.

He tells Johnny he thinks someone sorted them out. Perhaps one of them cut themselves on a beer bottle. He’ll look into it.

“Bag it anyway, Frey,” he calls to me. “Let it not be said the local force doesn’t take these things seriously.”

Nodding to Johnny, he adds, “We’ll find out who it belongs to. But don’t worry. There’s usually a reasonable explanation for all manner of odd events.”

I stumble back up the bank, holding two evidence bags, with the shawl made by the witch’s hands and the lace from the girl’s petticoat. The Captain claps me on the back, and we walk with Johnny out of the field. He still looks uncertain, but he gives us a nod when it becomes clear Captain expects Johnny to leave first, before we get in the Landrover.

As Johnny turns, the Captain salutes his back and smiles, tilting the skin of his getting-old face up to the sun. We were lovers once, as children. It was written by fate that we would be together. The trials predicted it. The witch foretold it. But I could not be with him. He felt slippery, like an eel.

Eels are ambush predators. They wait for their prey to pass by, then dart and seize it in their teeth. They are the python of East Anglia.

We climb into the car, me behind the wheel. I don’t start the engine for a moment.

Captain reaches for his coffee, spiked with some of last night’s brew. His swallow is proud and takes up space. His presence takes up space. His smell.

“Maybe those eels did it,” I mutter.

The Captain clears his throat, winds the window down, spits onto the dew-fresh grass.

“That’s what we’ll tell the paper then, when they notice she’s gone.” He takes another sip of his hangover-buster. “Yes. Strangled by eels.” He glances at me and grins.

We start to laugh, and I can’t stop.

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It took the other half of the equation—writing a book that is something like it; a relationship that jumps forward in time—for me to pick the novel up. Even then, it had to be in the library for me to find it, as I hadn’t planned on ordering it. (Thank you, libraries.)

“For a few seconds they just stood there in stillness, his arms around her, his breath on her ear. Most people go through their whole lives, Marianne thought, without ever really feeling that close with anyone.”

From page one, it was obvious that Rooney is an uncommonly skilled writer. The opening scene is basically porn for the literary young woman, with a shy, brutish young man who barely speaks pitted against a bookish, oddly direct young woman.

Is rape culture the reason we prefer men who seem shy? Are they less scary? Have you read Wuthering Heights? I, typical of a 15 year old girl, fancied Hareton Earnshaw, gunsmoke-smelling brute, who mumbled when he spoke and wanted to learn to read from bookish, direct Catherine the younger.

Normal People’s prose is beautifully sparse; the focus refuses to widen. Rooney has the confidence to hold space only for the physical truth of this one relationship, and to trust that she can tell a story via exterior movements and slight asides related to character and motive alone.

In my opinion, it’s Rooney’s confidence that makes her exceptional. It’s not easy to write like this, but it’s more about being sure of yourself than it is about literary ability (of course, she has that, too). Authorship is this—holding authority.

One glaring mark of confidence is that Rooney tells a story about intimacy without the insight into interiority that first person brings.

A good contrasting comparison for Normal People is Megan Nolan’s debut, Acts of Desperation. They were both Irish writers in their mid-late 20s when they embarked on these works, and both novels are about intimate partner relationships in Dublin. For me, the similarities end there.

Apart from two divergent treatments of the lead male characters—namely that Nolan’s is a massive prat and Rooney’s is a massive prat who is then (quickly) forgiven as he (slowly) redeems himself—the works differ in that Nolan’s novel, in the first person, delves into the complexity of young female interiority under patriarchy, while Rooney’s, in the third person, takes a more distant view of the long dance of one coupling, revealing dynamics that might be affected by social-economic issues including patriarchy, domestic violence, class, wealth, domination, control and submission, but can also be seen as purely the story of a particular, very idiosyncratic couple.

Is it ironic, that between these two works, interiority, for me at least, engenders more universality?

Rooney’s third person perspective creates more authority — so toxicity in the narrative seems smoothed over by an omnipresent non-character narrator who believes the two should be together.

The relationship is sanctioned by the narration; the reader is dissuaded from drawing parallels, interrogating behaviours, relating to sociocultural themes.

Or, maybe not. Does third person instead render the work more Brechtian, more ‘stepped back’, in order so that we may see the universalities through the relative calm of our emotions? (Acts of Desperation being tonally more desperate, heated, confused, because our narrator is, and we are inside her head.)

The playwright Bertolt Brecht promoted this way of creating work in theatre, wearing masks, breaking the fourth wall, playing parts (‘the shy brute’, ‘the bookish, direct girl’) so that the audience might engage in critical thought over emotional immersion.

Third person can be cold, medical, investigative, but it’s appropriate for this story. It’s not written for or marketed to teenagers; it’s for adults looking back at their younger selves with more objective eyes.

I suggest third person can be a way of breaking the fourth wall, a Brechtian move. How many of us carry around a narrator over our heads, who also watches the life of our lover? If there’s an omniscient voice, it’s indicative of a work of fiction.

Nevertheless, the experience of Normal People was emotionally immersive for me—perhaps not as wrenching as Acts, but poignant, and with a lot to relate to.

An uncomfortably personal side note: I was the smart, too-honest girl in school, who was relentlessly bullied, never understood social dynamics; fancied a brooding, quiet, but probably nice lad who played on the football team, and experienced (verbal) abuse at home.

“In school the boys had tried to break her with cruelty and disregard, and in college men had tried to do it with sex and popularity, all with the same aim of subjugating some force in her personality.”

I mean, is this everyone reading? It felt weirdly personal, but it’s so popular I assume it must be weirdly personal for everyone.

What I imagine is universally personal is the experience of the bizarre stage of life the characters begin in, where you are primed more than ever to want to initiate closeness, and yet terrified of closeness that in a few years will seem commonplace. The crippling, shaking, embarrassment of feelings is so true, and so rarely seen in literature—except in a wry, winking, self-conscious way.

But this isn’t the journey of the protagonist—and to be clear, the protagonist is Marianne, because her desires align with the narrator’s and propel the plot towards its conclusion.

We never get inside the head of our protagonist. Rooney occasionally sums up what Marianne is thinking but much, much, more often we watch her from Connell’s perspective and are left to wonder. We never really know Marianne. But we root for her, regardless.

I think part of the genius of Normal People, if you’ll forgive me for being this calculating, this much of a working novelist, is that it’s a clean book. It’s sparse language and that lack of a widened world view and the quiet, unburdened presence we are held so adeptly in, in scenes between lovers, creates a reading experience with no speedbumps, no cliffhangers, no question as to whether they’re meant for each other, no ethical query about Connell’s lack of curiosity for Marianne’s perspective, no frills, and no doubt.

Rooney’s confidence is like a solid thing, that seems to turn away edit notes and the inevitable suggestions of love triangles and fleshing anything at all out more than absolutely necessary. Nope—I’m doing it this way, and everybody will like it. Like the submission that Marianne finally receives, we the readers give up to what Rooney gives us, and what she won’t give us, because she knows what we want, even if we are not so sure.

I never use third person when writing, and Rooney’s prose is the first to make me interested in attempting it. I tried it, but I can’t do it. I’m all about interiority, especially female interiority these days, what with writing autofiction and wrestling with the fact that I couldn’t write in an adult woman’s voice (including my own) until I was about 30. But I’m glad I finally read the novel and can appreciate the distance, all the same.

“For the privacy between himself and Marianne to be invaded by Peggy, or by another person, would destroy something inside him, a part of his selfhood, which doesn’t seem to have a name and which he has never tried to identify before.”

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One valuable lesson I have learnt over my time in the industry, and my five years out, is that success in publishing novels is above all determined by consistency. No publisher—and this is very understandable—will invest in growing a writer’s audience if they don’t trust that writer to respect and retain that audience with their next work.

If writing is purely a hobby—pinball away! If one cares about repeatedly getting published, it’s necessary to repeatedly target the same audience. Or, use a pseudonym, which I would absolutely consider—after all, I love writing, and I also love a time-limited challenge, so separating my time between two different novel projects, say, over a year, suits me.

Onto the text. If you’re into speculative dystopian fiction, this one is for you.

Terry’s Prologue

White winds ran across the land, taking the dust off farmer’s dead fields. Rain drowned ice sheets. Sea water surged through streets, destroying houses built on river banks and flood plains. Towns disappeared under water. People lost their money. They got sick and died. Their kids got sick and died. There was a nuclear incident, a cutting off from the mainland, and then the rich left and the poor had to stay. We got poorer. The teeth rotted out of hollow faces. Now there’s something going on with the government. It’s all falling apart. All day in the factory, the whole neighborhood, the whole town, builds this junk; these plastic phone parts. My hands move like the drowning tread water, fast and constant; I think about her, and wonder how she’s doing.

BIRTH

May

I can see his house from here. Can almost smell the deodorant. Teen boy deodorant. Deodorant mingling with post-pubescent sweat. Deodorant and beans he heated on the stove for me, his Adam’s apple bobbing with his nervous swallow. Deodorant and the hot taste of his hidden parts. It had one of those teen-boy-deodorant-y names, like “Power” or “Truth” or “Freedom”.

Funny. We never had any of those things, but we learned their names from aerosol cans.

I bet he’s still there, in that tiny, terraced house, built for workers back when there was work. Ten to one, he’s lying on that single bed with the blue coverlet, daydreaming.

But, no. I’m thinking of a teenager. That was a long time ago.

From the disused bandstand, through the canopy’s draping branches, I spy on the grey town in the valley below and the blue sea beyond it. Leaves whisper in a light wind. Soft purrs and clucks of wood mammals and insects and birds tell the time, almost twilight.

Low sunlight lands on red-brick houses, on broken windows of abandoned dock warehouses, on a strange, vast cement building where the Victorian town hall used to be; a grey cuboid dropped on Town Hall Square. Long green entrails are wrapped around and over rooftops, burrowing under tiles, bursting through rafters, corroding pipes; turning darker, as birds nesting in them whistle out quick lullabies. I think I can make out the shape of ornamental ivy, dog roses, honeysuckle; the colors of orange Black-eyed Susans, lilac potato vines, the lively pink of bougainvillea, fading to grey in the dusk. A herd of wild bison drift slowly through a suburb.

I lie down on the warm brick. I can hear a wolf pack nearby, howling to each other. Trusting the trees, the night, the woods, the wolves, I close my eyes.

It was just after the Children’s Pandemic, when we became good friends. Dad had been moved to a smaller house, after Mum left, and the house was down his street. At first, I had all the little kids to look after, and then I didn’t. I was alone, as I have been since. Noah spoke to me first. Well. No words, exactly. A thrusting behind the shuttered library, and some tweaking of nipples. I got mine. I had that kind of confidence then.

Noah and Terry and Frank and Leila and Sammi hung out together because they had lived on our street since it was desirable, since houses were bought instead of moved into with the locks kicked off. I think they had had some younger friends, but they died. The CP took anyone under ten. The adults were really upset, but the kids weren’t. We were survivors. Thought we were hard, fought over who had cried the least. It amazing how the brain makes the worst things seem okay, as if really they weren’t the worst things. That’s how we started to think, like, life was shit and what did you expect? Don’t be a pussy. Get your head out the clouds. We used to call the lefties that came round with food for us while our parents were out working “Dreamers” “Silly Libs” “Babies” because they used to cry sometimes when they saw us, skinny and waiting for the undertakers to come carry away a dead brother or two laid out on the kitchen table.

Obviously, it sinks in. Maybe that’s not obvious, to you. But it sinks in with the years. You sort of settle back into your body, and find it full of grief and a breath you held a decade ago for someone who was here on Earth for less time than it’s taken you to miss them.

It’s not unusual now to see people my age suddenly weeping at bus stops, or in the queue for the loo at a camp. Feelings surprise them, these adults who were once kids that didn’t care. Nobody comforts them, but you can’t blame us. Comfort’s also a brand to me. Toilet paper.

Of the six of us, the girls were harder. Leila had been the first to join the Fascists. She wasn’t white, but they took her, because she was so zealous and cruel. She used to stand on the corner with them, flipping her Swiss Army knife around in the air and catching it without looking. Beside her, the lads would be writing earnest graffiti about how they hated everyone. “Immigrants are cunts” “the Poles are cunts” “the cunts took my job”, etcetera. None of them had ever had a job. They weren’t old enough.

Sammi used to nick things with her older brother, before he was shot in a demo. He was an anarchist. Into smashing the state. The anarchists were all boys; no girls among them, not even Sammi. They were too crazy. Teenage boys discovering their physical strength, wanting to fight, excited about maybe coming back with a scar on their face. The demo had started peacefully. A woman had been strangled to death by her police officer boyfriend, and the lefties were there first, holding candles and signs about defunding the police outside Town Hall. The anarchy lads swarmed, filled the streets, threw Molotovs.

“Don’t you fucking dare go,” Sammi had yelled. Noah, Frank, Terry, me, chewing gum on someone’s low garden wall, watching. None of us had phones. This was after the inflation madness and before they started handing them out for free. So we played games outside or hung around and watched drama unfolding in the street.

“He killed her Sammi, he fucking killed her!” Her brother was a good-looking lad. Tall, clear skin. Deep brown eyes. Shoulder-length dreads and pillowy lips. “You should care. You should all fucking care!” He turned and met our eyes and we all got busy, looked off into the sky, picked our nails.

None of us were fans of the police. But they had stopped Sammi’s boyfriend when he chased her in his van and taken away Frank’s mum’s partner when he wouldn’t leave. They didn’t bother the Fascists when they were dealing weed. Those were the things we wanted then. To relax and to hate things in an abstract way and for someone to haul away the angry men that made our lives worse.

In the end, it didn’t matter that we didn’t go. After the demo, where the police had opened fire, the government decided they were too much hassle and replaced them with the Army. Sammi loved the Army, who were friends with the Fascists. The girl soldiers wore chic little cherry berets and handed out sandwiches. We all loved sandwiches. Sammi joined up shortly before I left, along with Frank, who had always gone along with what everyone else was doing.

I had a soft spot for Noah. We had sex with a few times. I think he wanted to be my boyfriend but didn’t want to seem like he wanted to be my boyfriend. He never asked, but I would have said no.

It was Terry I always loved.

A pigeon calls. I open my eyes to starlight, sighing. A reply arrives, fainter, from near the beach. Each a short call, followed by a trembling sentence. A Wood Pigeon and its lover.

I cup my hands to my mouth. Hu-hoo. Hu-hoo-hoo. Hu-hoo-hoo.

Not exactly the same. My call is deeper than theirs.

The Milky Way is bright tonight, in a way it never was when I was a child. My favourite constellation is Orion. He follows me wherever I go. I look at the middle star of his belt, where ancient civilizations thought gods came from. I can imagine it. There’s a lot in my world, but few things that can’t be turned over and touched and reckoned with. Who knows what other people are out there, living lives, oblivious to our small problems. Perhaps they will reach this planet one day, when the particles that make up my body have parted and collected elsewhere to build other things, when this civilization is over, like the many that have gone before it and were then tourist attractions and are now abandoned in a quiet Europe that no longer thrums with throttle sounds or hums with electricity, only with the sound of workers headed to factories and back and to factories and back.

I shift onto my side, making a space between my knees and chest. I slip my arm around nothing, imagining.

There was a game we used to play here, in the open space in front of the bandstand, before the line of trees where the hill drops sharply away. We juggled glass bottles—we always collected them, for the money you could get if you took them into the newsagents—and then one of us would yell UP and whatever you were holding had to be thrown into the air, as high as it could go. We had been playing it for years and by the time we were fourteen we could throw the bottles as high as the treetops. The trick was to get your bottle up into the sky in a perfectly straight line, so it came right down to where you were standing, ready to catch it, but the fun of the game was to dodge the falling bottles. You had to have a good eye to spot the transparent glass in the grey sky, throw it high enough to give yourself time to move; you had to have spatial awareness to make sure you were standing either ready to catch a bottle or between them all so you didn’t get hit, and speed, to get out of the way in time. If that all failed you had to have enough wits about you to have your arms or jacket above your head and the strength of character to live with the welts on the bones of your wrists, which would last a week at least. We had so many games like that. Madcap games. Mean games. Pinching games and dare games.

After the schools closed and the jobs dried up, we went to the woods. First to play, and then, to live. Leila, Sammi, Frank, Noah, Terry, and I, together. I can’t say why. It might have been practical, a way to get away from our parents’ sadness. But I don’t know. The woods seemed to make sense in a way urban life didn’t. There was a rhythm to the wilderness that was missing from what was happening in town. Each dead rabbit was replaced by another rabbit. The chill of winter begat the warmth of spring. And sure enough, as towns and cities fell apart, that rhythm continued.

With my cheek on the bandstand cement, I watch our teenaged ghosts laugh and shove each other in the way of falling glass. Who came up with that game? I can’t remember a time I didn’t play it. Kids everywhere of our generation were like us, tough and unsupervised, hanging out in grave yards or waste lands or woods, making up fun, fucking, learning about survival. I can’t lie. It was fun. It felt like fun, at the time.

With another sigh, I stretch my body out, feeling the tendons, the muscles on the backs of my legs, and then I swing myself upright, and hop off the bandstand.

The night sky is a deep, clear blue. The line of the galaxy and the half-Moon bright. I don’t need to squint to find my way through the undergrowth, half-sliding, half-walking down the sharp drop, which isn’t a cliff, but a steep slope of tree roots and soil. I grab at grass and set my soles in sideways, stopping once to pick Bramble leaves, stuffing them in my pockets for a tea in the morning, and a second time, to eat all the softest fruit off a wild strawberry patch.

I pace, pace, excited.

Now I’m in a meadow, that used to be farmland. Moths tickle my forearms and reeds tower over me. Crickets sing so loud my ears are full. A new river has burst the man-made banks that channeled it away from people and taken up the path of the old river, winding through the meadow. A mallard quacks sleepily. This is what I have watched happen in many places. After the maintenance stops, things go back to the way they used to be, rivers finding the lowest point, where farms and villages were, and not caring.

I shy away from the field where the bison sleep. They are a recent addition to the landscape here. European Bison, once native, a longer-legged version of the American buffalo. They were reintroduced down south, on a nature reserve, back when nature reserves were managed. When the cars stopped running, the grass grew over the roads. Last year the Bison lumbered up the A1, the main arterial road north. I saw them once, watched them from the roadside. They were graceful, but their shoulders reminded me of bulky “Big Man” types who loiter around town centers, spill out of pubs, grab at passing women, haul my sleeping body from the sidewalk to show their dominance with a grope of their stubby fingers. I hung back, in the shadow of the tree line, waiting for one of them to charge, show a clapped-out car who’s boss.

The bison didn’t go all the way north. Here, at the edge of the sea, where the climate is warmest and driest, they stopped. They browse soft shoots in the un-tempered hedgerows of meadows where once crops grew, molt their soft fur onto heather and tufted grasses, cavort and lamb in the fens where the water is abundant. I can’t see them, but I hear their breathing, almost feel the heat spilling out of their enormous bodies. I whip by, running to meet the road.

My feet slap tarmac, loud after the tall meadow grasses. In the suburbs, everything has changed. Obvious that it would. It’s been fifteen years. The houses here, detached, set back from the road, are abandoned. I spy the white flanks of goats sleeping in once-tidy gardens. Plum trees with cracked, bare arms, leant upon and coiled around by Brambles and Elder, lean to touch the overgrown grass. A fledgling blackbird roosts on the handle of a rusted lawn mower, half-hidden beneath a crab apple tree, bushy head tucked into a shoulder. The streetlights are out. Better for the birds. Artificial light suppresses their circadian rhythms. I pass the chain-link fence of an old school, Hawthorn wildly leaping over it. Further, further into the suburbs. Now the houses are semis, identical, Edwardian, mock-Tudor. The first set of traffic lights, still running on some state electric line, perhaps more expensive to disconnect than to leave on. I stand in the middle of the empty junction and watch them blink green to amber to red. I breathe in the night. Look left and right down the empty roads. Grass, in electric green, orange, then red, bursts from the verge. Broken tarmac, potholed and patched, recedes into darkness.

The trees thin out. Birds and squirrels can’t bury acorns and chestnuts in impenetrable concrete and tarmac. Instead, weeds shoot up through the paving slabs, although I think it’s mean to call them weeds, to imply that they are “weedy”, these hardy plants that fly far from their parents and thrive in the least-caring of places. On, on, past a bus stop. Now rows of Victorian terraces, the kind that we lived in, the layouts all the same, so I can think, “I fucked Terry in that window”, “I ate Terry’s dad’s fish and chips in that kitchen”. This is quite fun; this trip down memory lane. If I suppress the panic at being near people, if I do it in the dark, when they are unsuspecting. Still, I’m almost at a jog, heart beating fast, eyes on the look out for a tall frame leaning in a doorway, the red flare of a lit cigarette end. As I reach the center of town the Victorian terraces become pebble-dashed and more run-down, but inhabited. Almost all of them are inhabited. A dog barks at me, chain around its neck. Curtains are drawn. Doors closed. The locks often replaced, bare wood around them, the rest of the doors in flaking paint.

Just before the high street, the houses give way to a church. In the churchyard, the graves seem dark, emptied pits, but as one moves I realize there are people sleeping on them, wrapped in dark sleeping bags. There is a soft, flickering light coming from the entrance. I steal behind a tree to watch. A woman sits on a bench in the vestibule. Candles decorate the wall behind her, emitting the light. She is dressed ordinarily, in slim trousers, a thin jumper, flats. Cropped, silver hair. She looks peaceful, at ease, as if she is waiting to enter a shop. As if she belongs to another time. Suddenly she turns her head and stands and leans over the candles, revealing a box of matches in her right hand. She strikes a match and relights the wick of a candle. She sits down again, almost smiling. I wonder what she is thinking. I wonder what other people think all the time.

Terraced houses again, except no gardens, and the frontage is different on the first story, all clothing stores and coffee shops and restaurants. In the dark, I can imagine them open, rich people wandering in and out. I imagine my mum as I saw her in photos on her old computer, gold jewelry and thin tattoos and a happy smirk, carrying a coffee in a tiny, lidded cup the size of her hand. I step over the glass from their windows, pretending I am striding out of them, knowing what their cuisines taste like.

“An-huh dowww,” I read off a sign, then clutch my chest at the sound of my voice and swing my head around anxiously. No one. But go. Go, go, go.

I mouth other signs, hearing the sounds in my head. “Six-hillsss ak-a-tics. A-and-D car-pets and vin-ills. Caa-law shop. Pizz-ah and keh-bab. Fruk-toh-lin-ka. Lad-brokes. The nyew gol-den brid-guh.” Terry liked reading. I used to tease him about it, and it was one of my favorite things about him. That may seem like two opposite thoughts, but sometimes that’s how the truth is.

Another junction, larger this time. “Woh-men’s a-i-d,” on the corner. In the near distance I can see the dock. It’s quiet, boat-less, walkways and the dock itself under water, but a lone warehouse and the long, black column of the dock tower pierce the shallows and rise to break up the sky. I look down, to the road. Corporation Bridge is submerged. The road rises out of the water, but I can’t see it. The sandbags are stacked high. Mid-way up, their color darkens. I wonder how long it will be before another surge. The town that way, to the west of the dock, the beach, the marshes, the football stadium, is all submerged. Sometimes I imagine these underwater towns and cities as ancient, mythic, made of stone, but the same things are there that are here, on this side of town. Pedestrian crossings. Streetlights. Shopping centers. Car dealerships. The Truck Stop-and-Wash. Wickes.

More homeless people now, in doorways. Why don’t they move into the suburbs? More closed-down kebab shops. More faded coffee signs and dead plants in windows. How much kebab washed down with coffee did these people consume? Charity shops, charity shops, charity shops, and finally the center. The enormous grey cuboid. The squat council building, opposite.

The streetlights are lit here, in pink, the same color as the lights on the cuboid. It’s supposed to be hip, modern, I think, although I’m a bit out of the loop of what’s in fashion.

I stay pressed to the fronts of the buildings, dipping into the alleyways between them. I step on someone, they emit a moan, I excuse myself in a low breath, and scurry off.

I press myself into the recess of a window in the council building, slipping up onto the ledge, folding myself up small, small, until I am as I feel, an unassuming speck, a shadow over a window frame. I watch the grey cuboid.

There are many buildings like this, in other towns and cities in England. Part of the bailout. I didn’t imagine it had happened at home. I imagine the feel of the cement, rough, careless. But the building is also stylish. Tall, wide windows with translucent glass that shows dark, diffuse shapes as people walk past it inside. Steel overlapping doors running almost the entire length of the ground floor that open altogether, receding into the walls to let many workers flow in and out at once. Colored lights line the bottom of each window pane, emitting that cool neon pink. Earlier, before I slept, I saw the lights from the woods, and then they were the tropical blue-green of the edge of the sea in early summer. I prefer the blue.

I turn back, satisfied with my recce, but detour, into an area that is dilapidated, litter-strewn, onto a cul-de-sac with tiny, terraced houses. Victorian red brick, blackened by the first industrial revolution and broken by successive failures, flooding, accidents. I am shocked by the extent of the dilapidation, although I shouldn’t be. The roof of Noah’s house has caved in. He must not live there anymore.

I come to a house in better shape than the others. One window has been patched up with wood, but neatly, the wood painted in a color the night conceals. There are plants in pots in the small front yard; a new door, made from reconstituted planks. I actually walk up to it, touch it. It’s pine. Soft and unvarnished and grey, it smells fresh as just-split bark.

I should go. I don’t know the rhythms of this town. The sky is brightening. Perhaps there will be a shift change at the factory at dawn. Perhaps the door will open.

I put the delicate whorl of my ear’s flesh to the wood. Inside there is a low, hollow tick-tick-tick, an old clock. I don’t remember a clock.

My hair, then my skull touches the door. I didn’t realize I was moving, but here I am, leaning, resting, whispering. He’s in his thirties now. We both are. What kids lie in that little bed? Is his wife naked in the sweat-damp sheets beside him? Are his parents dead?

“Terry?”

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Nevertheless, I do think I had a quality month for reading, if not a quantity month, and it’s picked up in the last week or so (on the downside, because I got into an accident on my Lime bike and have been attempting to rest between family time and various appointments).

Even the novel below which was not for me, I felt did have appeal for certain readers. It’s strange to say this about a book I didn’t particularly think worked, but I was glad that I read it, and I write about it below so that if you like the sound of it, you can read it too.

Perhaps it’s not that strange. I enjoy going to art exhibitions I don’t like, simply because the conversation afterwards in the cafe is always meatier. Tastes are different too—or how would we complement each other? The friend who recommended this book absolute loved it.

My reading experience of the undersung debut below was an odd one, because it was just such a good book all the way through that it reminded me of being a child and exclusively reading good books (I’m not entirely sure why this is; perhaps because the children section of the bookshop is much smaller and populated by tried and tested books? Case in point, I went into my local today and there was an entire shelf of Michael Morpurgo).

As then, I treated this book unappreciatively, not worrying about picking it up too often, because I knew that I’d like it and it was there and I could have it any time I wanted it. I didn’t savour it the way I did with Deep Cuts last year; instead I sort of pootled along with it for the first half of the month and then sank the rest in a day or so. Maybe this says more about my mental state than the book—but I suppose it’s true that, although I really enjoyed it, I didn’t love it as much as Deep Cuts.

The Zack Polanski / Green Party campaign video about running chimed so much with me. The financial pressures of my life currently stem from baby loss but also economics (and to a smaller extent various — three! — torn tendons). Perhaps that’s the reason for my slump. I find myself worrying what to add to the trick pony of work to make it actually work, and, in amongst all that bother and fuss, my mind doesn’t calm down enough to sink into a story.

[A thought: if the work that makes you money doesn’t make enough money to work, can it be called work? Note from editor—take this out, not “dreamy novelist vibes” enough. Replace with something about a bookcase, a smoking jacket, and the smell of pine in the morning.]

Speaking of work, my third read, which comes highly recommended, is set in Depression-era Copenhagen. Interesting, right from the start, as a social history as well as a reading experience.

Although I felt like a bad book lover for not finding a way to treat the debut I mention above right, I did both finish and like it so much that I added it to the pile of inspirational books I keep on my desk, which I’ll share soon. I keep these particular books close to remind me of what I want to write over the next few years. Without them, my thoughts are at risk of being lured off track by the scruffy multitude of culture that pours into my brain via my phone, confusing the issue of who I am and what I’m doing (I’m sure many of you can relate?).

I wrote early last year about my struggles with my phone. I went back on Instagram recently but I’m finding myself spending more and more time on the Discover page, and realising that it does make me feel bad to compare my life to other people’s. Who would have thought…

But should I get off it entirely? (Apart from for work, which is rewarding.) Have you slowed down or put limits on your phone consumption? I find that it doesn’t help to tell myself to put down the phone. I have to find ways to fill the negative space. What helps most is to fill life with reading and writing, friends and family.

Confessions by Catherine Airey

My friend Coralie has commented in the past that I choose which novels to read in a really random way. I could blame being uneducated—and I’m sure that’s part of it. But truthfully, I’m wilfully uneducated, because I didn’t want to become institutionalised, even if it were by a fancy uni with really cool dorms, and I didn’t want to imbibe only establishment texts. Seventeen-year-old me sounds like a bit of a commie, doesn’t she? Well, I haven’t changed much.

I think there’s enormous value in questioning the given line. Who gave me this line? Who decided this was the line? Who wrote the line? Typically the answer is: rich, conservative, ignorant, white men, and as we continue to learn, over and over again, for some reason with shock, men who are pedophiles, sex offenders, abusive partners; at the least, corrupt people who got rich off the backs of people with less (economic and/or social) power.

Burroughs killed his wife. Rousseau abandoned his children. Norman Mailer stabbed his wife. Lewis Carroll took suggestive nude photos of children. Roald Dahl abused his wife. Hunter S Thompson and Bukowski were assholes. Fitzgerald was abusive to his wife Zelda. JD Salinger abused his wife and groomed an 18 year old aged 53. Social reformer Dickens was also a racist who had an affair aged 45 with an 18 year old actress and slandered his author wife Catherine. VS Naipaul abused his wife. Ted Hughes was emotionally abusive to Sylvia Plath. So many abused wives it reminds you why: feminism.

You never hear anything about the Bronte’s do you?

Social media is another kind of establishment institution. As much as I appreciate books bloggers — and I really do; I particularly like negative reviews that help me avoid wasting money on novels I won’t like, which are useful and feel bold in a landscape built on likes and false hype — other people’s opinions are another kind of line we walk. I want to walk my own line. I want to see other people walk unique lines without suggested I should do the same. It’s odd, that idea. We didn’t used to suggest everybody do something our way. But algorithms prefer persuasive posts, and that has changed online dialogue and tone.

And the establishment continue to be pedophiles and sex offenders. David Walliams (providing us with a “well that was obvious” moment) is accused of behaving inappropriately with junior female staff. Neil Gaiman is still accused of multiple sexual assaults. Junot Díaz faced accusations of sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour in 2018. Michael Chabon faced allegations of inappropriate behaviour toward women in literary settings. Foster Wallace faced allegations of stalking and harassment, particularly toward his former partner, the poet Mary Karr, at whom he allegedly once threw a coffee table and another time attempted to push her from a moving vehicle. Cormac McCarthy, then 42, had a 17 year old girlfriend, who he (I think this is what happened—the internet is so full of articles excusing his behaviour it’s hard to discern the exact behaviour behind the excuses) whisked away to Mexico with a stolen birth certificate in order to remove her from state foster care and f*** her.

What is patently clear is that the establishment continues to protect, nurture, and reward sex offenders with £millions in publishing contracts, film options, and an abundance of platforming and legitimising — at least, until the bad publicity forces studios and publishers to renege.

Perhaps walking into a bookshop, browsing, and deciding what to read based on your own whims is a revolutionary act that centres the female gaze, egalitarianism, and choice. Perhaps letting decisions get made for you by establishment institutions is a betrayal of Catherine Dickens, Sylvia Plath, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Mary Karr.

This is how I found Confessions. In October, just before my last birthday, I walked into a bookshop with my parents and my mum suggested I pick myself out a few books for them to buy me as presents. Bizarre to say, but how twee this felt! What was this odd feeling of picking up a tome without already knowing the content? I so enjoyed it, and the two books I read, see here, that I did it again for Christmas, picking up this novel and the final book I read in February, below.

Sorry to be a basic b*tch (clearly, from the above, I’m not—sorry, that is), but I liked the cover. It was on the hardback shelf in Lincoln Waterstones. I liked the colours in the title font. The simplicity of the photo. How charming and chic is this woman’s short hair, her cat on a string? It was clear from the first page or so that I would enjoy the voice, and the setting. It opens on the moment the narrator realises her father must have died in the twin towers attack on 9/11, something I remember vividly. I hadn’t seen it anyway on Instagram, and every time I posted it to stories someone else would tell me they loved it and hadn’t seen it anywhere on Instagram either. (How does that happen?)

I like to read about things I don’t know, and people living at the centre of global, political moments, as in one of the birthday books I picked up, I will die in a foreign land. So I thought it would be about 9/11. And it really wasn’t, but I particularly enjoyed this first segment in New York, and the subsequent section in New York, and, after a while, the first section in Ireland. It’s a multi generational novel, but what is different about this conceit in Confessions is that all these generations live in the last fifty years (not unusual in terms of my own Irish family, with a tradition of having children young). I enjoyed reading life after life this way, and about modern people, with modern politics, and how they confronted the circumstances of their lives, which weren’t so dissimilar from my own experiences and those of my contemporaries (including, I imagine, you). There’s a forgivable downside to this structure, in that when you’re really into one character, you suddenly switch to another, and can feel cheated. It’s almost like you notice the author’s hand, stealing you away from the storyline you’ve just begun to love—HEY! What are you doing? I was enjoying that.

The novel opens with Cora, watching 9/11 on television. Losing her father and becoming an orphan sends her into a kind of shock. She wanders New York, not looking for him—there is no hope—but being amongst people, fed by street vendors. When her aunt Ro writes from Ireland, she must decide whether to go. We then switch to an earlier timeline, meeting Cora’s charismatic artist mother, Maire, her quiet sister Roisin, and their friend Michael, in Ireland. We learn about Scream School, a game Roisin and Maire play. Later, we follow Maire to New York, to study Art. From here, we unravel the story of their family, who is conceived and who is born and who falls in love with who, and why and how and where.

This novel didn’t necessary draw blood or tears, or elicit my deepest emotions. The experience of reading was a gentle and captivating one. I would often find myself picking up the book to read one chapter and only putting it down after many. It’s a thoughtful book. It doesn’t try to grandstand, but perhaps to meet the characters where they are, without judgement.

I’m keen to talk about this one with other people, because I want to know your best bits. It’s always notable when a book is undersung and truly loved. Why isn’t it getting the attention that other, less deserving, books are getting? It made me wonder whether, when a debut feels so effortlessly skilled, the writer is treated similarly to a novelist who has been publishing for a while. Is there just not much to say about good book that you enjoyed reading? But then, upon considering this, I realised that perhaps what a publisher might consider less marketable about this book is that it doesn’t have a particular hook. I like that. I hate hooks! I want to read a novel about humans and I want to read a novel about somebody going through something very relatable. That doesn’t mean I read solely within the bounds of my own experience, but I’m not really interested in something that happens once, due to a curious set of circumstances. Writing the biography of an illusive heiress? No, me neither. Was your party host found dead in a ballroom? Maybe for some of you not since Cambridge. Know a middle class woman who’s an atrocious mother, father somehow great? A dynamic I’ve encountered rarely if ever.

I’m not boring, but I might be tired — both personally and of the hooks that for me remove the fourth wall, and suggest this was bought by an editor who thought the marketing campaign would write itself, rather than by one who thought this would be an excellent reading experience all the way through, and take somebody who has paid £16.99 or more for a hardback away from their troubles or mundanity for a few days in a small but profound and kind of magical way.

Again, I won’t go too much into plot, because that’s so much of a book. But I will say this book contains a kind of video game (written, and sadly not on a CDROM attached to the inside back cover; how cool would that have been?), which is a conceit I love as well. Art within art. Fake narrative within a “real” fake narrative.

There were a few coincidences in the novel that I could forgive for being so coincidental because it was an enjoyable reading experience. If you like books set in Ireland or New York, this is one for you. There is a bisexual character. (These are just all my other thoughts.) Perhaps the only thing I didn’t like so much was that I found the final character, who narrates the close of the book, the least interesting. I think she is well drawn, because the child of this lineage might in fact be a quiet and thoughtful person (there were so many personalities and the stories that preceded her), but she was just not as interesting a voice for me to read as Cora, Maire, and Roisin. I didn’t dislike the character… but I did feel her voice wasn’t quite as distinct as others, and in a sense Confessions confers, as part of her storyline is about breaking away from the stories of old and trying to tell her own.

Childhood, Youth, Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen

I feel it necessary to note, given the age of this book, in fact a trilogy, that I hadn’t read it before. I picked it up in a bookshop because a car had rushed me off the road and I’d fallen off my Lime bike, smashing my teeth. I read almost all of it on the train back and forth from fens to London, to attend a hospital appointment.

Buying myself a book is my way of saying, “Don’t worry, life is real, I promise it’s not a Sisyphusean nightmare some maniacal god has purposefully trapped you in; look, have this book; there, there, try not to scream.”

As I’ve said, this is how I come across books—at random, in bookshops, in physical form, and sometimes bought to do no less than save my life, for the meantime, while I can’t do it myself.

Second to note, the review quotations on the back of this book are ridiculous. Why does the Observer reference the “darkest reaches of human experience” if not to put off readers who would enjoy reading about a young girl’s life in Copenhagen and to disappoint readers hoping to read about hell?

I think the quotations and general hype around this trilogy are the reason I waited to read this book for so long. I thought it was going to be the aching howl of a literary it girl junkie; a life doomed to the grave, full of needles and gutters and sewage and gonorrhea. Joyless and over-written. I swear to god, that’s what I thought it would be.

But no. The trilogy is a memoir following Tove, protagonist and author, who is born and lives in Copenhagen. Tove is a romantic who loves writing and wants to get married and have a baby. She’s different and an outcast because she’s writerly and doesn’t feel much with men. At a teenager, she balks at stability but desires the stability of a room to write in and alleviation from the necessity to sell her time (ie work). She’s a leftist, but she’s not out in the streets. She wants to date but talking about boys all the time is boring, and she doesn’t feel anything with most of them. She likes going out, but its draw pales compared to a warm room to read in and a typewriter and the thought that she’ll be published. She’s a dead ringer for me, and many other women besides, writers and non-writers, and I should have known this the first time I picked it up, when I thought, “gosh, there will be too much in this about going out late and shooting up. Maybe I’ll read it when I’m not feeling so in need of softness.”

More words used in the blurbs on the cover that baffle me and suggest a completely different tone: stiletto, marginalised, agonisingly compulsive, troubled girlhood, fatally wounded, thrilling.

Here are some more honest words that one could replace the above with: brogue, depression era, short, thoughtful girlhood, innocence lost, contemplative.

I’ve seen this referred to in places (including the cover image above, swiped from the internet) as The Copenhagen Trilogy, though not in the volume I have. I had it in mind to read, because I am gearing up to write the next book in my own trilogy.

Each of Tove’s three volumes (they are bound here together) is 100-130 pages and follows Tove as she grows up, from around the age of 6 into her 30s, and gradually her childhood and the innocence of youth slips away from her (but please don’t mistake, in my saying that, any implication that by the end of the trilogy she’s crawling along in the gutter holding an empty meths bottle).

In Childhood, each chapter centres on one topic or another, taking a tender, almost loving perspective on little Tove, focusing on dynamics of the family and the small world of the home.

Youth was my favourite of the three, simply because it was interesting to see how young people in Copenhagen at the time lived, and interesting to compare to Women In Love, which I wrote about last month, in terms of the romantic liaisons and social mores; these characters are the same age about 20 years later in Copenhagen, merrily shagging, divorcing, shacking up, sprogging up. Honestly apart from all the men drinking so much it sounded quite nice—certainly nicer than any modern unhoused, casual, family-less, or stay together for the kids vibes. And not that dissimilar from contemporary Copenhagen… although maybe everyone is a few years older when they have kids (internet says about 7).

Youth is also when her writing career appears in full force. Like me, she became a writer young, and she does so in a milieu of close knit literary professionals and friends (should remember next go around to marry into the fold), although mostly she just loves writing. This was so much fun to read about.

Dependency “chronicles her descent into addiction”—read simply. For me, this was such a classic story about entering into a controlling marriage (state sanctioned or common law) from a place of need (“everybody wants to use each other and that’s okay” is an idea repeated in the earlier books), where the man isolates the woman and then makes her so much less than she was to assert power over her. It was absolutely classic that a woman used to being free wouldn’t understand it as it happened, and the painkillers were only a small complication in a situation that seemed to happen all around me as I turned 30, like flowers blossoming all at once in spring.

Other Tove books translated into English: The Faces, Vilhelm’s Room, The Trouble with Happiness: and Other Stories; in older editions The Umbrella and Early Spring, and a selection of poetry (I dislike this sometimes — I’d like to buy the original collections with the authors’ choice of poem order) called There Lives A Young Girl In Me Who Will Not Die, which I have. Early Spring sounds the most interesting to me, about growing up in Denmark (the books still in print in English seem to be mostly about unhappy marriages).

Whidbey by T. Kira Madden

This is the debut novel from the memoirist of Long Live The Tribe of Fatherless Girls—a beautiful book. I really like the writer, too, as a person (I only know her from following her online) and so I wanted to love this book more than I did. (If the writer is reading this, I apologise—but this review is just about my taste, and my bestie loved this!)

Firstly, and this is a deeply self-serving thing to say, if like me you want to read crime fiction about sexual violence against young girls / women that has joy anywhere in it at all, read my novel Dead Girls. I didn’t add funny bits or a quirky main character to be perverse or flippant about a serious subject. I do think if you’re asking somebody to read close to 500 pages about really dark topics then you should provide some levity, not only for the reader’s mental wellbeing, but because life features levity, even if soaked in tragedy. And it’s really important to tell the truth to people as a novelist. (I should write an substack post about this. It’s kind of the modus operandi for my womanhood trilogy.)

I remember hearing Madeline Black, SA survivor and author of memoir Unbroken talking about how it’s so important to hand women narratives where rape and sexual assault and abuse is survivable. Not only survivable – but something that doesn’t have to claim your joy. This was one of the things I was thinking when I read this book.

My understanding is that it’s based on the author’s experience, and I do want to be mindful of that. If you’re reading this, you probably know about my own tragedy, and obviously there are times in life when it can be difficult to see any light. But as the novel isn’t from one person’s perspective and I do think the reality is that the light is there in life, alongside grief and pain, even if the survivor can’t see it, I wanted to see that in this book. Other readers will disagree with me. And that’s why I am writing this review—to recommend it to those readers.

The novel follows three women, and for a short period of time a fourth. Birdie is escaping to self-isolation in a cabin on Whitby island, where she claims she is hiding from the man who abused her as a girl. Mary-Beth is grieving her son, the abuser, who has just been killed in a hit and run that was clearly intentional. Lindzie, another survivor of the same man, is promoting a book about the experience after telling all on reality TV.

I think the point of the book was to talk about how it is to be a survivor, and secondarily to show how unscrupulous types can use SA victims to make money. I think it did a good job of that second point for me, because I hadn’t seen anything like Lindzie’s story in contemporary fiction. I didn’t take as much away from Birdie’s story. At first I really enjoyed reading her parts of the book however, her move to Whidbey didn’t propel plot and I didn’t feel she changed during the course of the book.

Mary Beth’s narrative was, imo, much better handled. Her character was clear to me. I understood the world she lived in and how she spoke and acted with people, so considerate and protective of her son and so despising of her sister, aware at all times that she is looked down on as someone whose life skirts the line of poverty and accessibility. I did see how it might feel to be her, a mother of a person who did the things her son did, which I appreciated. Her situation was immovable, and even if her belief in her son’s innocence was far-fetched, it was believable how she would feel as she did—ferocious and denying. She had no real other choice. It’s very hard to give up on your children. Mary-Beth’s sister was also a fantastic character. No holds barred, I felt they were both very well drawn. I understood why they did what they did and who they were to themselves and others. There was a lot of plot in this part of the story, and I appreciated it. Both women were active in the story, too, and so it was interesting to read along, wondering what action would slither from their twisted worldviews next.

Cal, Mary-Beth’s son, was less defined as a character for me. One novel that sketches a perpetrator really well is Winnie M Li’s thriller Dark Chapter, based on the author’s own experience of a stranger rape in Ireland, in which alternate chapters tell the story of survivor and perpetrator, from their point of view. Highly recommend that one. More commercial than literary, it’s a smart, well-written page turner.

Lindzie’s character is seen first in the novel through the eyes of Birdie, so it’s no surprise that when we switch to her chapters the character completely changes. However, this was really jarring to the read, particularly as they were in touch as children. It seemed to me that if Birdie knew her well she should have known that Lindzie could not write that book. She did not appear to be a very articulate person, and yet the sections of the book that Birdie reads early on in the novel read like investigative journalism from an SA survivor turned activist.

The following comment is both a recommendation of sorts and why Whidbey didn’t completely work for me. It is beautifully written on a sentence level. Literary readers in it for thoughtful writing will not be disappointed. But when the character was not distinct, this meant I couldn’t see beneath the beautiful writing to find out who they were.

Birdie comes from Florida and doesn’t seem remarkable well to do; she’s a cinema projectionist, and yet her voice, her narration, is never casual. The language she uses is always worthy of the best of literary fiction. Her chapters were well-written—but she struck me as an emotional and erratic person, and I would have liked to see her rendered in colour rather than the one-note, somehow detached version of her we get. I think it would barely have made a difference to the wording of the chapters had they been in the third person, and, to me, a character’s voice is so distinct, their perspective so unique, that using first person should change not only how things are perceived and described to the reader but what happens. I felt I couldn’t see who Lindzie was either—she was brushstrokes but not a whole painting.

One thing missing from this review is a discussion of the plot. There was a decent plot there and given the plot is a large part of crime, I just won’t give anything away by talking about it. Take it from me – there is plot! Stemming, of course, from the hit-and-run that kills Birdie and Lindzie’s abuser.

I do wonder whether I would have enjoyed this much more in my late 20s. Then, I was completely into crime fiction, listened to true crime podcasts all the time, and watched every Scandinavian crime drama going (still do that last one, can’t miss some gorgeous blonde in a cuddly jumper swing her hair about, act moody, raise a child alone, and be better than everyone else at detective work for no reason). I think before I lost children, I wanted to read about pain. That sounds so raw to write, but it seems to me that there is an impulse when one is young to want to look deep into the dark. And then sometimes you find yourself in an era when life itself depends on reaching for the light.

That’s my experience. And of course it doesn’t negate the author’s, or anyone else’s. It’s not entirely true either because I know that sometimes you have to feel, and reading about fictional people who are going through the things that have happened to you can be really helpful, in helping draw out tears that need to fall. What I’m trying to say is that if you’re reader that loves dark crime fiction without joy, you may well love this book (the ceaseless pain reminded me of A Little Life, which obviously was a ginormous bestseller). If not, read Dead Girls (by me) which I did write in my late 20s true crime era and which I did not make solely about the dark—but, I suppose, about fighting it (and which wasn’t a bestseller; not even close).

Sidenote, I also think this is coming out at the right time for a renewed conversation about SA — partly because of the release of the Epstein files and partly due to the upcoming ten year anniversary of #metoo.

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As a mid-career writer, I wanted to talk about strategy. I had a trilogy ready (which Abi had read) but we agreed I needed to signal a change in my work and offer publishers an easier sell before sending them the trilogy.

We planned a memoir pitch and a slim novel about recovery and football. I researched and wrote the memoir pitch over June 2025, and Abi sent it to publishers in mid-July. As of writing, it hasn’t sold but it’s very meaningful to me. I thought I’d share the opening here.

In the first year after I lost my daughter, a woman on a helpline told me I should get angry; that I wasn’t angry enough.

Angry at what? I asked.
At nature, she said. At the world that took your children from you.

carrying you

December was strange. I slept only when my body couldn’t remain awake. I was delighted. “I have a daughter!” I would say, pacing beside the sink waiting for the kettle to boil, and then I would tell the empty kitchen your name. I held you in December. I held you for the last time in December. I was four times the size with love and bemused no one else commented on my rotundity. I was in so much pain.

We had to go home, to pack up. We were moving out of the flat by the sea. It felt like the whole place had betrayed you. The sewage in the water and the rubbish strewn streets and the maternity unit under investigation for mother and baby deaths were harbingers of an environment that was not interested in sustaining life. There was a sense of failure, whether it had failed us or we had failed. I felt animal, early human, refugee; moving on from where we could not find purchase to somewhere we might. I had a sense we were looking for an island, for our whole family, yourself included. Another sense that we were walking your path with you, and this was part of it—getting us to dry ground.

I sat in the packed car on the kerb outside and counted our blessings. Goodbye to where my children lived. Goodbye to the me who lived here. To the times I walked in the snow with your older sibling. To the bed where I rested with them on the 2nd anniversary of the Covid pandemic. To where I lost them, in late March 2021. To the couch I sat on every day for a full month, crying and putting together their memory box and watching Greys Anatomy. Where I saw evidence of you, full-throated, irrepressible, insistent You, on a pink and white test in June and nodded, Yep, because you should have been here already. Because I had already known you were there.

People say a lot of thoughtless things. This too shall pass. Everything for a reason. Time heals. One thing people say, when you give birth to a child you’ve lost, is I’m so sorry. Their faces contract with sadness. No one ever says, congratulations. On becoming a mother. On becoming a parent after years of trying. On having a child to love.

I have a daughter. Her name is—!

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“Remontada is a poignant and life-affirming read, exploring what it means to make your own way after unimaginable loss with raw honesty, openness, and warmth. A vital story of rebuilding, of queer awakening, and of finding community.”— Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure, Blue Ticket, Cursed Bread, and the forthcoming, Permanence.

“Remontada is an unflinching account of a person rebuilding their life after baby loss. While acknowledging the weight and heft of grief, it offers hope by exploring different ways to understand and inhabit womanhood, motherhood and personhood. Abigail Tarttelin interrogates the ways in which heteronormativity and patriarchy can placate and bind us, reaching towards a different way to love; complex, messy and free.“ — Jessica Andrews, author of Saltwater and Milk Teeth

“Abigail Tarttelin has turned her fiercely feminist lens to a gentle story of healing and finding yourself in chosen family. A novel for those looking for the first peachy streaks of dawn after a night that has felt too long.”—Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Costa-shortlisted author of Harmless Like You, Starling Days, and The Sleepwatcher

Thank you to all the writers, booksellers, and industry professionals I’ve reached out to so far—I’m so thrilled you have ALL blurbed the book!

It’s early to be reaching out, but I felt after five years away from publishing it might help publishers feel extra confident in supporting Remontada.

Having recommendations from other novelists is so helpful—Matt Haig, Emily St. John Mandel, Rachel Shukert, and Lorenzo Carcaterra, blurbed Golden Boy, helping it find readers globally. I’ll be reaching out to more writers, soon.

I so loved that colleagues within bookselling and the industry were keen to read and recommend the book also—no one better than those who handsell physical novels or work with rights to judge how a book can reach readers!

Thrilled with these blurbs…

“Remontada is a dazzling gut-punch of a novel that delivers a brutally honest, visceral and ultimately hopeful portrayal of living with grief after tremendous loss. Abigail Tarttelin’s beautiful and sparse writing sparkles with joy, and Dylan’s new journey into 5-a-side football and queerness is a vivid, exciting foil for the darkness she’s battling. For fans of Coco Mellors and Margot’s Got Money Troubles, this novel will stay with me for a long time.”—Henna Silvennoinen, Audiobooks at Spotify

“In Remontada, Abby Tarttelin deftly explores the complex grief of baby loss alongside a somatic experience of playing football and the transformative possibility of queer community. She weaves pacy dialogue and action with profound internality as her protagonist figures out how to love after trauma and how to return to your body (and the world) after grief; in doing so she gifts us the magic of hope made possible by connection. This is a raw gem of a novel to devour in one sitting.”—Jo, Manager/Bookseller, Pages of Hackney

Thank you so, so much to everyone who has read Remontada so far. I’ll be back soon with more news on when you’ll be able to get your hands on a copy!

“Remontada is a jewel of a book about coming back to oneself after shattering grief. Devastating, hopeful, and ultimately a love letter to the things, small and big, that make a life.”—Coralie Colmez, author of Math On Trial and The Irrational Diary of Clara Valentine

“As gentle as it is fierce. Remontada is a hopeful invitation to find your teammates and rediscover yourself on the pitch. For anyone who’s ever had to crochet their life back together with love, friendship and vulnerability. This story is a beautiful homage to bodies and the remarkable, sweaty, painful things they do and endure. A heartbreaking celebration of the beautiful game and beautiful lives.”—Fran Bushe, screenwriter, playwright, author of My Broken Vagina

News on a publisher for Remontada soon… and sending love to my footie mates—gutted to be nursing a torn ACL at the moment. Miss you all!

Thank you for taking the time to read my writing. If you enjoyed this post, felt like it spoke to you in some way, please share it via the button below or leave a comment. I really appreciate the support and your continued readership.

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This was after a few credits for additional dialogue with Handel Films and Zeitgeist Industries, two small but mighty producers here…

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On New Year’s Day, I met my friend Harri at Old Street tube stop and, after a quick detour into a cafe for lattes to go, headed to Hampstead Heath. The Heath, for those who have never been, is one of the largest public green spaces in London and, naturally, remains common land only due to the efforts of ordinary people, who clubbed together to defend it from private interests. We celebrated New Year with a frosty walk so long we wondered if we had strayed into the Home Counties, and, then, a Bun Cha Ha Noi (tradition) at a Vietnamese place on Dalston High Street. Afterwards, I walked home by the light of a nearly full waxing moon to begin the debut novel from Lidije Hilije.

Do you like the cold? I didn’t used to, but something came over me last winter, and now I love it. It’s very strange—I have even rejected summer. Too hot to function. Typically a compliment, but not to summer 2025. I think I preferred it when I lived by the sea and could cool off twice a day with a swim. The winter feels like someone breathing sharply against my neck or touching me—the negative space around me so filled by a cold so visceral it feels like being held. I was thinking about this the other day, a lack of touch. Gripping the wooden bannister as I descended the stairs and trying to think of the last time I have been hugged for more than a few seconds.

In Slanting Towards The Sea, Lidija Hilje writes about how we need seven hugs a day to live. As minds go, this leads me to mentally replay the scene from Practical Magic, when Sandra Bullock writes to her sister (played by Nicole Kidman) on a night bright with moonlight, “I feel there is a hole inside of me. And emptiness that at times seems to burn.” The letter ends, “there is no man, Gilly. There is only that moon.”

It seems like all of the books I have read recently, and will recommend to you, talk about emptiness, unluck, and living with the hole that’s left in a life where love goes unfulfilled. Even my last recommendation, an Ursula K. Le Guin essay on writing theory, published as a slim volume by cosmogenesis in 2024, is about how to write about life in a way that helps and heals.

I’m curious about you, reading this newsletter—what was your first read of the year? Have you read any of the following books? Would you?

Mother Mary Comes To Me by Arundhati Roy

Firstly, let’s make sure to note that this is one of the most physically beautiful book I have ever owned. Published by Penguin, the edition I read was a red hardcover, slightly wide format, with a lovely slip of white paper around it (like… a quarter of a dustcover?) with black and white photos of a past and then present Arundhati Roy.

The memoir doesn’t focus, as you might expect, on her career as a writer, but the life she has lived around it, the two novels featuring as unusual blips within the narrative of her ‘usual’, which is to say an interesting, political, thoughtful life.

I had no idea Roy was such a provocateur in her own country, nor that she had received death threats for some of her published articles. I’m not going to pretend that I understand the politics of 20th-21st century India however, after reading this memoir, I know much more than I did, and I enjoyed that! (Remembering any of it is its own issue.)

Arundhati comes across as a very honest memoirist. She doesn’t leave much out and because of that it feels like you’re getting the truth of a life—in some years, not much happened, and she will mention that. We walk with her. We don’t leap over portions of life, dragged by an insistent, dictatorial authorial hand. The narrative she chooses to build this work around is instead a rather static one—that her mother is a difficult person who was wilful, harsh, dismissive, in their relationship; who didn’t love her as other mothers love.

Complicating the issues, her mother is also brilliant; the founder of a school which transforms education in Kerala and seemingly worshipped by many who encounter her

What she’s saying is, you think I’m extraordinary, but I’m going to show you how I’m the type of sapling that grows out of this crazy kind of muck. Basically, “this is how you raise a writer like me, and I’d advise you against it.”

Reading this book made me feel tender towards Arundhati. Because what I took away from it was that, through everything she went through with her mother, Roy still has so much heart for her. So much compassion and love.

My mind is wandering again. Have any of you seen Robert Redford’s adaptation of A River Runs Through It? Based on the novel by Norman Maclean, who writes of his alcoholic brother, played by Brad Pitt at peak cute:

“But we can still love them. We can love them completely, without complete understanding.”

Other notes: Delhi and Kerala are the main settings (I really enjoyed the busy city setting of Delhi). Roy has two bestselling novels I’ve never read (tell me—should I?) called The God of Small Things and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. The former won the Booker Prize in 1997.

Women in Love by D H Lawrence

I have a tendency with classics to dismiss them before imbibing. I remember doing this with Breakfast at Tiffanys, a delightful film which ranked in my top five of all time for years.

Note for the physical book nerds (is there a word for this?): my edition of this book was borrowed from my dad (I thought it was from my pal Coralie Colmez, but I was mistaken. It was so her, and she always gives great recommendations). This is a Penguin paperback, 1969, and I think my reprint of it dates to around 1973 (I’m writing this in London and it went back to my parents in Lincolnshire for Christmas and stayed. Penguin 70s-era paperbacks are like that—they have attitude and they’re cosy). I truly love pocket paperbacks and this was such an easy read specifically because I could carry it everywhere, easily, in my long coat or the inside pockets of my denim jacket. Why aren’t all books this? Hardbacks can be beautiful (they can also be ugly and pointlessly, prohibitively expensive) but it’s so much easier for me to enjoy something if I can stay hooked in the world, riding on the romantic countryside vibes, on the bus, in the park, on my bench drinking coffee, etc. I realised reading this that, also, the paper is thinner than in contemporary novels. My edition felt the size of Golden Boy or Cleopatra and Frankenstein; as a modern reader, I estimated it about 110,000 words, however, it’s actually about 180,000 words and printed on thin paper. More bang for your buck.

So, to the read. I cannot explain how bizarre this reading experience was. Written over 100 years ago, by D. H. Lawrence (D for David), the social mores could be 1980s. The novel is about two ‘old money upper class’ men and two ‘new, educated middle class’ women, all living in a village just outside Nottingham, most of whom bop down to London for a shag now and then.

Here’s me on Instagram with the sections that explain the whole book for me:

Also: I loved the setting, because it’s near where both sides of my family hail from and it made me realise I so rarely see the midlands in contemporary novels. It made me think if this was written now, it would be set somewhere else, somewhere known and aspirational. Like Cambridge.

David, the author, from Nottinghamshire, was born 11th September 1885. In the first photo of him that appears in an online search, he looks exactly how I imagined one of the two male characters in the book, Birkin (who I lowkey hated).

I’d like to plan more time laid on a sofa reading all day long, as 2025’s holiday reading session in front of the fire marked the second consecutive yule holiday I’ve added a book to my favourites list. Last year’s was Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe by Fannie Flagg, this year’s was Women In Love.

Slanting Towards The Sea by Lidija Hilje

“ I cried because I was only 19 and I was already so tired of carrying around that jagged grain of loneliness on the inside that always threatened to cut me if I made a wrong turn. I cried because I had all this love inside me, and it had nowhere to go.”

Speaking of reading all day long, this is the first book I have read in a day since Christmas day 2024.

I’m sure you’ve seen it around bookstagram. It’s been a runaway hit on both sides of the Atlantic. Both versions of the cover are gorgeous. The Croatian setting was unique (in terms of my own reading, and rare amongst popular books) and it was interesting to learn about the changes there as the country developed over the lives of protagonists Ivona and Vlaho. But for me, this is a book about a topic close to my heart; one I struggle with and am writing about in my most recent books. How do we live, when we are wanting? How do we cope, when we know that wanting is permanent. Ivona is 38. My age. She cannot have children and she cannot have Vlaho, the love of her life, who is married to another woman.

Another theme developed as I read—convention interrupting fate. But what was unique here was that Hilje explored that convention through the characters psychology, illustrating how they inherited that psychology from the circumstances of their childhoods, family grief, small c conservatism, and parent dynamics. I’ve been talking about parent dynamics and inherited internal narratives in therapy for the last two years. Suffice to say, this chimed with me.

So as not to give more away, let me just add the Daunt Books blurb:

Ivona and Vlaho meet as students at the turn of the millennium in Zagreb. Everything smells of freedom and possibility. Red Hot Chili Peppers are pumping through the speakers of a bar in the city centre and cheap beer is overflowing; newly democratic Croatia is alive with hope and promise. They fall in love instantly.

A decade later, Ivona has returned to her childhood home in Zadar to look after her ailing father. She and Vlaho are divorced, yet she finds herself welcomed into his family life by him and his wife. But when a new man enters Ivona’s life, the trio’s carefully curated dynamic is disturbed, forcing a reckoning for all involved.

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin

This slim volume was lent to me by the folk musician Elanor Moss, who also grew up in Lincolnshire (although we met in London, living together in a ramshackle house we were forced to flee when the situation with the landlord proved too unstable). It’s £6.89 so, unless you’re flush, I wouldn’t urge you to buy it. If you are flush… fabulous! Support a small publisher and order it online.

This is an essay by the famous sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin, in which she discusses her theory of written work. There ended up being a lot in there that I’ve always thought (for instance about endings), and it was nice to read my own percolations and ponderings articulate in such a succinct and clear way.

“The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story,” she writes, adding, “a novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”

This is exactly what I like to challenge myself to do these days, both in sense of theme and construction method. Thematically, my work is about how to go on living, how to restructure life, when things haven’t worked out the way you wanted them to, whether through tragedy or trauma or just the great incomprehensible trundle of living. Building the novel, it’s very important to me to find a structure for each particular book and then to start adding things to the ‘container’ of the novel; described above as a medicine bundle and, in the title of this volume, as a ‘carrier bag’. It’s the juxtaposition of ‘things’ that creates magic. Like an orchestra, it’s the confluence of disparate sounds that builds a symphony that is unique and moving and clarifying.

Extra, extra, read all about it: On Hardbacks.

I walked into Broadway Books the other day and picked up the new John Green hardback—and put it straight back down again, because it was £21. This is a book about the history of tuberculosis and healthcare inequity. Isn’t the point of the book itself that people who are not rich read it? Or is it aimed at the rich, who may be moved to make things more equitable? Surely people who are not rich also deserve to read about tuberculosis? Surely a book on communicable disease should be itself also be communicable, rather than prohibitively expensive? Do publishers really think a £21 rrp will help sell hardcover copies, resulting in large numbers of pre-orders for the paperback version from bookstores? This is almost 3x the minimum hourly wage for under-18s. I thought reading was in crisis? Do we not think maybe we’ve made it too expensive, and we should return to the Penguin pocket paperback era, where the paper was thin, the books were portable, and the rrp was cheap, so that we might perhaps choose between picking up a coffee… or a book? I know there are publishers and writers who follow this Substack (hi! Thanks for sticking with, while I find my stride!). What do you think? And, most importantly, how about you, readers? Would you buy more books if you could get excited about new releases and immediately go buy them without breaking the bank?

Buy Slanting Towards The Sea and Women In Love from independent bookstores (and earn me affiliate £) here.

Buy Mother Mary Comes to Me and The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction from independent bookstores here.

Thank you for taking the time to read my writing. If you enjoyed this post, felt like it spoke to you in some way, please share it via the button below or leave a comment. I really appreciate the support and your continued readership.

Buy my novels from independent bookshops here.

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If you’re an outsider to publishing you might wonder what is meant by those words in my title—‘out on submission.’ I thought I’d explain here.

But first, I should say what this means to me. I’m struggli…

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I wish now that I had known to keep going, because I think this was a step towards the kind of novels I really wanted to write. It contains so many themes I find interesting now and is also narrated by the kind of deeply flawed but also quite funny character that back then we were talking about a lot—the unlikeable woman.

The novel is set in Maine and NYC in 2012, and it’s about adults, comphet, greed, love, sex, complicity, and about getting older without kids and with a lot of money. I saw it as a thick, rich book, literarily meaty but also a page turner, with a voice smart but almost casual, even sleepy and sundrenched; Ann being the cat who got the cream.

It’s so much fun to dig through the archives. I’m so happy to be back to writing all the time. It’s sad to see the gap between 2019 and this last year. It’s very obvious that loss led me to lose hope, and how hope for me is signposted by many, many hours at my desk, writing.

EMMA

My earliest memory of Ann is of her hair in sunlight. She is leaning over me, and it is such a bright day, and I am so taken with her, that I am almost blind. My impression of her today is rich with detail (the freckle on her neck, the confluence of veins a palm’s width below her wrist, her sigh in the morning), but the feeling is the same.

I want you to fall in love with her like I fell in love with her, because without that you won’t understand.

Like Jess cannot understand. Like my mother would not understand if she found out, or when I tell her.

When she calls me, the words I speak down the line throb on my tongue as if that muscle were having a clitoral orgasm. When she does not pick up her phone and texts me “with Jeff” and I imagine them in a restaurant, possibly bickering, possibly laughing; his hand sliding over hers in the way that I have watched it slide possessively over hers for the better part of my life; that smug grin on his face even as he is derisive about her job, her ethics, the breadth of her cultural knowledge—damn it.

When she texts me “with Jeff” and I think about what it means, the frustration and pain circulating inside my body presses outwards everywhere there is a border between what is me and what is air, but nowhere so much as on the back of my eyeballs, as if my emotions will force them out of my head.

I think Ann does not know what she does to me, so I tell her, down the phone line, “You don’t know what you do to me.”

“Do you know what you do to me?” she asks, and somehow we get to having phone sex.

SUMMER

ANN

He sits on the edge of the bed and beckons me closer. I walk over obediently and he turns me around.

“Sit on me,” he says, simply, but as if it is imperative, as if he wants me so badly he can’t wait.

I pull down the seat of my jeans and watch him apply lubricant to himself. He turns me around and wipes a surplus on me. I sit down slowly onto him.

“That’s it, he encourages me. “Look at that. I’m in you to the hilt.”

This is what it’s supposed to be like, I tell myself. I’m drunk and without thought. I’m loving every minute of it. I’m aching all the time. I’m chanting these thoughts in my mind. Concentrate, I tell myself.

Concentrate.

“Milk me,” he commands, so I ride up and down on him. I feel tears at my eyes. I’m overwhelmed. My cheeks are hot. I am trying.

He fumbles with his hands at my clitoris, not inexpertly, because he is forty-four and an experienced, educated, feminist, progressive Democrat, but without much effect.

I shut my eyes on his concave chest with the pube like hair that crawls between his nipples.

“I’m-close-are-you-close?” The demand.

“Yep.” The perfunctory response.

Think of something nasty. Think of something wrong.

I put my hands over his eyes so I am free to mouth words without him asking what I was thinking about afterwards. He thinks I’m being dirty and he grins. “Oh-hoh, yeah.”

“Yeah,” I say back, irritated by the sound of his voice bringing me back to earth. “Shh, I’m close.”

“Oh yeah!”

“Shh.”

A catalogue of pornographic images cycles through my brain and I alight on one that tickles my fancy. With a grimace I depart from the present. I’m in the scene.

In the distance, I hear Jeff groaning with ever-pressing urgency. I put my other hand over his slobbering mouth and finish myself off.

He gasps and struggles out from underneath me. “Did you come?” he says, with a smile that used to imply sexiness but on a man of forty-four is only perverted.

“Yes,” I smile and as soon as his back is turned, I clean his sweat off my breasts with a wet wipe, put my glasses back on, and pick up Lolita.

New York suffocates this time of year. In the morning the taxi arrives to take us to the airport, and we leave the windows open in our apartment, with the bug shades down. No one would ever break in. We are so high up and so overlooked.

“Where you wanna go?” says the cab driver.

“JFK, Terminal 4, please.”

He nods. “Okay.”

In a minute he will ask how to get there, but while we wait, I try to see the sky through the window, craning my neck up over the skyscrapers

“Is it stormy?” Jeff says.

“I can’t see,” I reply. “I can only see a sliver. It might be blue.”

We take each other’s hands automatically and sigh together, feeling the impossibility of fresh air and a full lung on close streets that funnel heat, every car vomiting exhaust fumes, every apartment spewing out hot air—energy from the air conditioning units inside.

“Wait-which-way?” snaps the driver almost incoherently.

“Whichever way you think is best!”

“59 or BQE?”

“Um, probably BQE from here.”

“Is this road?”

“Yes.”

“Did you call to tell Alice what time we’d be there?”

“No,” Jeff says, not to me. “I said yes, take this street!”

We both watch the street entrance as we pass it.

“Never mind. Yes, I called ahead.”

“Cool.”

We sit back and wish we were asleep.

Sometimes I think relationships are like businesses. We even have a contract for them. Each relationship has a profit and loss in terms of happiness. For instance, a year with more unhappy days than happy days, or even a year that breaks even, is a sign of a dysfunction that requires redress, or a hint that your company should dissolve or refocus. Your cash flow is your contentment, and that needs constant attention, such as weekends away, taking each other to dinner and compliments, however dishonest. Run out of contentment and you can’t continue to work. You reach a passive aggressive, miserly impasse where assets are split with great contention and blame is hurriedly thrown at each other, like maniacal sailors bailing out two sides of one boat into each other’s side. Each relationship also has an agenda and these are addressed continuously over the years. Where in a business the agenda is looked over at board meetings in conference rooms, in coupling the agenda—be it the struggle to strike a balance between responsibility to each other and sexual freedom or the question of who contributes more to the household income or compromising on different values and life goals—over years becomes several grand themes and these themes affect, underpin, and sometimes offer complications to the plot of a particular relationship. Truly, we argue about nothing else. But the grand themes of our love are hotly debated, over and over again, during fights under the covers late at night or drunk and tersely in cocktail bars or in the early evening on the sidewalk outside Bed, Bath & Beyond.

There are certain things you want to address in a relationship. They are usually based on personal inadequacies you think you can ameliorate by using someone else’s talent or input.

Jeff wants children. He pouts about it, like a baby.

After work yesterday, we met in a bar near the apartment. I had already packed; he had yet to. He got annoyingly drunk and misty-eyed and it came up as he held my hand and told me I was beautiful.

“Imagine those huge eyes on a baby.”

I withdrew my hand. “Imagine those huge welts on my stomach.”

The check had been waiting on the bar while we lingered over a whiskey and ginger and a vodka tonic. He paid it aggressively then, making a point of adding a huge tip. I earn a lot more than Jeff. You wouldn’t think it would be a problem for him.

He fumbled with his jacket while putting it on, as if his fingers were trembling with emotional trauma, which I’m sure is what he was thinking, too, but not sarcastically.

“You know,” he practically spat. “You don’t have to be so cavalier. It’s important to me. It’s not funny. You’re denying me the opportunity to be a parent.” Jeff loves to make scenes in bars.

“We’ve been over this a lot,” I murmur.

“Yet I still don’t understand why,” he says petulantly.

“You want me to go over it again?”

“Yes. Please. Please explain it to me.”

“There would be no one to take care of it during the day.”

“One of us could stop work.”

“Neither of us find babies interesting enough to stop work.”

“Daycare.”

I stop myself from asking who would pay for daycare. “Don’t you think the idea of having a baby only to put it in daycare from eight until six is a little immoral?”

“Everyone does it.”

“I find it immoral.”

“Then stop work!”

I laugh. “It always comes down to me stopping work! Why wouldn’t you stop?”

Jeff used to be in digital media at CNN, but had an epiphany five years ago on a sailing trip to mark his Dad dying and switched careers. He is now in a much more lowly position than he would be otherwise. And who would pay for everything??? I add silently, knowing that this does not need to be said and would only lead to a bigger, more thematic argument.

“Because I’m a writer’s assistant. I have to work up to staff writer, then head writer, then showrunner, then successful showrunner. Then I can take off work occasionally.”

“And I’m...”

“You’re established.”

I nod. “And...?”

“I don’t understand why this needs pointing out.”

“It clearly does.”

“You hate your job.”

I shrug. “I don’t hate it.”

“You despise it. You bitch about it all the time.”

“But I like having money.”

Jeff turns away and downs the last of his Ketel One, crunching on the rocks. He ignores this idea. Jeff often thinks my ideas are less important than his, as if being a writer means he knows what is truly valuable and operates at a higher level of emotional intelligence than I could possibly understand, being a cold, calculating, capitalist number cruncher.

“You act like you’re single,” he says tiredly. “Everything can’t be your decision all the time. It’s selfish.”

“It’s my vagina,” I point out reasonably.

“Oh!” he exclaims. Her hates it when I sound reasonable. “That’s so…!” And then he leaves without waiting for me, and I have to pace to catch him up on the corner of Mercer and Canal.

In the cab, we both stare out our respective windows. I don’t want to break up with another one. I’m tired of breaking up with people. I got tired of it ten years ago. Perhaps I’ll stick with Jeff, and his occasional halitosis and wild mop of hair.

We have the same taste in literature and want to watch the same films. He isn’t embarrassingly quiet at group dinners. He is only semi-arrogant. We are married. It would be a lot of trouble. It might be a lot of alimony. And while I wouldn’t mind being divorced, having to date again would be a terrible fate I don’t think I deserve. I’ll just stay here, in this cab, holding this hand, and hope he starts to work out and discovers floss and quits his job on Saturday Night Live and gets a teaching position at a public school, something I can’t roll my eyes at. Maybe he’lI have a mid-life crisis and it’ll suddenly all fall into place.

I wonder if Jeff is thinking similar things, and then I realize I know exactly what Jeff is thinking. Jeff likes to globalize, but hates to do anything about it. He loves to bitch about his life. His inner monologue is a list of names and complaints. This evening, for Jeff, was a success—material, in fact, for the memoir he is always masturbatorily writing in his angry little man mind. Death for Jeff would be a perfect day.

When we get past security, we stake out a place to put our bags and split off, keeping an eye on the bags in shifts. Jeff tuts when I reappear after ten minutes shoveling fistfuls of hard candy into my mouth and smoothes down his sweater so I can be admonished by the sight of his stomach, which is slightly less of a bulge than it used to be due to a fairly lax interpretation of the paleo diet. I immediately turn around and head for the bookstore.

I stand in front of the chart and stare at it. Jeff and I used to stand together and stare at the chart in airports.

I can sense him, in the way you do after a decade together, sat behind me, frowning intently at the latest Haruki Murakami as if he gets it more than other people would. He doesn’t even like Murakami. I like Murakami. But Jeff will read anything over 500 pages long, I suspect just to hold it in airports and feel superior. I crunch candy, look over my shoulder, and grin childishly. Here, surrounded by Hispanic families headed off on vacation, he hasn’t pulled it off. The effect is a little classist and inappropriate, this middle-aged, middle-class, caucasian hipster with Bose headphones and an iPad charging beside him, dressed almost exclusively in clothes we ordered online from a Swedish boutique, an irritated expression on his face, pointedly ignoring small, brown children playing nearby.

As if he wants a baby, I snort, turning back to the books. I select an Amy Tan. What would he do with a child? Order it seared squid and bok choi at Macau’s? Sit it on a bar stool and talk over it?

I add a notebook and pen to my purchase and walk back towards our gate just as they call the first passengers, feeling sated. I love spending money. I love a transaction. It feels like sex. Or how sex should feel. Sex should feel like buying something. I hold my contentment in a plastic bag on my middle and ring finger. I gave something. I got something.

We are frequent flyers, so we get on first. Jeff sits next to the window, reading his book. I watch the flight attendant in her little suit, sniffing at people bitchily as they stuff suitcases in overhead lockers.

I read my ticket. New York, JFK, to Portland, Maine.

“Excited?” I ask Jeff.

He pulls a headphone off an ear. “What?”

“Nothing.”

He puts it back on.

“Me neither.”

We pick up the rental in Portland and Jeff insists on driving, but lets me back it out of the garage before he takes the wheel so he doesn’t hit anything. Jeff is the consummate New Yorker, one of those rare creatures actually born in Manhattan and so, although he lived in Dallas for a year for work and did pass a driving test, he has never owned a car and only ever driven rentals on vacation. After he passed his test in Dallas, he spent a year driving Texan cabs from the back seat, before returning, boasting proudly to anyone who would listen that he had survived the South and managed to not be eaten or killed by the KKK or Christians.

Jeff’s family belongs to a certain strata of society that exists above the common New Yorker but below the Rockefellers and their extended group. It’s an astonishing but delightful truth about the post-war States that our parents’ and grandparents’ generations really could start off as small town wait staff and end up owning large, beautiful suburban homes and various parcels of land in distant corners of America. Even on what I eam, I could barely buy in Manhattan now but Jeff’s father, who climbed on the corporate ladder as a travelling salesman and ended up as vice-president of accounting at Bergdorf Goodman, retired at fifty-nine and has lived in a five-bedroom apartment on 70 and West ever since. When he dies, or when we get pushed off our lease in Tribeca, we’ll probably move in with Jeff’s Mom. In any case, that’s what I’m doing and Jeff will most likely come along after some protest about staying in a ‘young’ neighborhood and not wanting to move away from Macau’s, where we eat and drink at least once a week. I have tried to explain that it’s only twenty minutes on the N, but New York City is Jeff’s landscape. It’s his entire world. Uptown is the Arctic. Jeff won’t ever leave Manhattan, particularly because we have a loft apartment in Tribeca that still has Jeff’s hippy grandmother’s name on the lease and has been rent-controlled since 1983. That’s fine by me. I grew up in Bumblefuck, Ohio, with Alice.

I actually had a crush on Alice in middle school. She was a tiny, pretty girly girl where I was a tall, gangly, awkward teenager with no breasts, a deep voice and a propensity to call everyone dude, which made me instantly unappealing to nice teenage boys looking to treat me like a princess, and relegated me to buddy status with all the bad boys, who I often smoked weed with down behind the school’s indoor pool. The only difference between us was that, while they skipped class, I continued to attend and score A grades and a 4.0 GPA before ditching them forever to go to Sarah Lawrence. I still see them sometimes when I go home, pumping my gas or working the counter in diners. We exchange banter easily, because despite my earning power, I’m still emotionally a fourteen-year-old boy, and so are they. It’s clear from our behaviour when we see each other that their wives and Jeff are enabling us.

Alice and I went to the same kindergarten and junior school, but she didn’t come into her own until we were in eighth grade. Suddenly she grew these little, pert, overturned-tea-cup breasts and her legs developed a curve to the calf muscles, and when she walked past me and the boys and her cheeks went bashfully pink, I would think about sticking my hand up her skirt and bringing out the color a little more.

I thought it would feel powerful. I never quite understood why girls like Alice blushed at dicks with greasy hair and yellow teeth who farted in each others’ faces and said funny-but-stupid things in class but I loved the idea of it and for a while acting like a dick held a really strong appeal for me.

Our friendship started out like this. In a way we were great sidekicks. Alice helped me into middle school girl world and eventually into the upper echelons of high school popularity. She was accepted to be cool because she was skinny and beautiful, and she made me cool because she thought I was. In return, I would protect Alice from guys, and drag her home when she was drunk and lie to her parents, and she could revel in the dumb, teenage side of her that wanted to see what would happen if I spat off the footbridge over the highway onto the windshields of passing cars, and then hide her laughter behind the safety of shouting,

“Ew! Gross!”

My initial attraction to her disappeared quickly and we became best friends, exchanging love notes and homemade bracelets and boyfriends like younger kids swapped stickers and chicken pox.

While I left Ohio for good at eighteen, Alice stayed, attending Ohio Wesleyan University and undertaking a Bachelors in Liberal Arts that eventually translated into her running a relatively successful small business, a craft coffee shop where her clients are exclusively middle-class housewives and their children or Liberal Arts students, who come in to make photo collages and concertina fanzines while drinking expensive nonfat mochas. Alice met Todd just after University, while temping as a receptionist for a non-profit. He went to Oberlin and has worked for various charities and doomed public service projects over the last twenty years. Now he works for the Democratic National Committee in Ohio, which in its own way is also a doomed public service project. They never come to New York. We visit them on a schedule that rarely ever waivers. Every two years we take off work for a week and come over for election season, going door-to-door volunteering, or working in the DNC call center alongside Alice and Todd. Jeff does this more enthusiastically than I do at this point, because those few days make him feel like he’s on the side of righteousness, the United Nations, peace, love, puppies, charity, and all that is good in the world. That week is like our atheist Rosh HaShanah.

Other than that, I see Alice every summer in Maine. We missed last year because of Jeff’s work, so I won an argument and instead of a long weekend, we’re here for a whole week, Sunday to Sunday. Luckily Saturday Night Live can spare a lowly coffee-fetcher for that long without falling apart at the seams, although Jeff tells me it was almost a given that they could not carry on without him, almost.

“It was very hard to get the time off,” he tells me again in the car, after we have stopped for supplies and got back on the road.

“What? Turn the music down, I can’t hear you,” I say.

He shakes his head. “You’re going deaf.”

“You’re going deaf,” I reply childishly.

Jeff is a good driver, but too fast. We veer along country roads in the lengthening shadows of evergreens. He plays the new Youth Lagoon album. We stop to take a picture of a swamp and Instagram it. The lake is a glassy, silver line. A foot above it, a parallel line of bugs hovers like a heat wave in the last of the light. The sun throws up a ray like a saluting hand above the conical tops of some kind of pines, dark and tall. Jeff gets back in the car, adds a filter to the photograph and tags me in it.

The car shoots through a small town. Every year the tiny, one storey, wooden shacks take me by surprise. I expect buildings to look eternal and gigantic, to run for entire city blocks and require an uncomfortable neck movement to regard their full height. These look so impermanent, like a strong wind could blow them away. We pass the town and dirt tracks start to appear, leading to campsites and a trailer park and then the lake houses.

“Where’s our road? Is it this one? I always fucking forget.”

“They all look the same,” I agree disinterestedly, my head tilted back, looking up through the open window, watching the sky become cold and clear. “The sky looks like an iris.”

“What?”

“A blue one.”

“My eyes are blue.”

I turn to him and yawn. “So?”

“You should say the sky is like my eyes.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Why?”

“You’ve already admonished me for not doing it. It would sound ingenuous.”

Jeff huffs through his nose. There’s a moment of silence and I wait for him to say, “Do you think it’s like my eyes?”

I lean forward and look into his eyes. Jeff’s irises are blue, but I don’t feel the same way about them as I feel about the sky. They’re not beautiful. I don’t feel like men are beautiful.

“You shouldn’t have to look at them,” he says irritably. “You’ve been talking into them for ten years.”

“No.”

“Ok, thirteen years.”

“I mean, no, the sky isn’t like your eyes.” I point just ahead. “That’s the turn off.”

“Fuck!” Jeff shouts, and pulls the steering wheel harder than necessary down to the right, so we bump onto the track at high speed and the back wheels spin and kick up dust from the forest track. “Fucking Maine,” he grumbles, braking harshly and then crawling down towards the lake, not yet visible but just ahead of us, through the trees.

“Why are you going so slow?”

“These stones scratch the damn paintwork. I want my deposit back.”

When Jeff pays for things what he is really buying is the opportunity to point out to me later that he put money down for something.

“You want to drive?” he snaps.

“Sure,” I say affably.

He ignores me. There is a silence between us, filled by the rumble of the Hyundai’s engine, and the crunching of wheels on an occasional stone, into which Jeff injects another “fucking Maine.” We pass the tennis courts. I press a button and the electric window opens fully. We finally reach the turn in the track that leads to the cabins. Jeff almost shuts the engine off, but decides to drive the car down to our cabin to unload the bags. I can see the cogs turning in his slightly balding head.

I want to do what I used to do when Alice and I learnt to drive as kids, which is to slide my torso out the window, grip onto the top of the door and sit my butt down on the hard edge of the window frame. In summer we would take turns to drive as fast as possible, while the other would hold on tight, feeling her hair ripped away from her skin by the wind, and the cool air caressing the sticky summer sweatiness on the back of her neck.

I lean forward in my seat and watch the cabins grow larger in the windscreen. Some of the cabins on Cobbosseecontee are winterized, turned into modern wood and glass lake houses that look like settings for slasher movies. I don’t necessarily love the look, but the potential for rental yield appeals.

Alice, Todd, Jeff and I own our two cabins together. They are twee and tiny and haven’t been modernized since the 1950s. We have talked about scaling up, but the others are not quick-buck capitalist yuppies like me. It’s true that every year I grow quickly used to the kitsch and living outside and the shabby mustiness of the rooms and leave for New York vowing we will always keep them the same, and we will even shell out twenty thousand to get the floors renewed so we don’t keep stumbling through the kitchen along the thirty degree slant.

Jeff’s and my cabin is the first to come into view. We stay in the same cabins every year, on account of Jeff’a and my childlessness. It works out entirely to our benefit, as Alice and Todd get the larger cabin set back further from the road, which has the fatally uneven floor, a grimy family bathroom, and the only living room, dining table and kitchen and hence all of our trash and leftovers after heavy duty evenings of wine and poker. I’m certain the smell of uneaten pizza and stale beer must drift through to the tiny bedrooms in the night. Also, all the beds in their cabin are bunk beds.

Our cabin has three sections. The first is a square entrance with a bench seat and desk, overlooking the lake.

It’s a great little office, and Jeff often writes in there and banishes me to the bedroom to read, even though it’s got great light and a beautiful aspect. The bedroom has a gigantic bed we inherited from the last owners and thoroughly scrubbed down. The last third of the cabin is split down the middle into a bath and shower room with original dusty pink tiles and bath suite, and a now-brittle MIDF closet, taken up mostly by Jeff’s aspirational wardrobe of fishing waders, wellington boots, tennis whites, and mosquito net hats, that linger here to be eaten by moths over the winter months.

It’s all coming into view now, with the low sunlight filtering through the deciduous trees on the edge of the lake and playing with the shadows and placing of the kids’ old toys. There is Alice and Todd’s car, there’s our cabin, and now their cabin. There is a kayak on the driveway in the middle of repair, there is the tire swing, and the porch, with the dock tucked just behind it. There is the lawn and the willow and the lake.

And there, suddenly, is Alice, clattering through the screen door.

I grip the dashboard.

There is Alice, with her pert teacup breasts, her small, checked skirt swinging mid thigh, her fine blonde hair in those old loose waves before she started shoving it mindlessly up, there is Alice, coming down the steps to meet me, with her parting lips, and short, pearly teeth. She calls out my name. She waves one hand, her arm rising up and excited, and her breasts point out towards me and lift gently underneath her thin t-shirt. The sun is behind her. It passes around her as the car moves. I turn to stare out the open window.

There is Alice, as I knew her. Alice blows me a kiss. The sun moves out from behind her and exposes her features, just in time for me to see Alice’s cheeks as she blushes that sherbet colour, that old candy pink.

But it’s not Alice. It’s Emma, her daughter.

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It occurs to me that whether you have experienced or heard of a book very much depends on age, gender, and circumstances at the time of publication.

These are all feminist classics, but I think only the first is well-known enough that everyone will have at least heard of it. Still—I encourage you to read it, if you haven’t already!

These are also solid gift choices for intellectual killjoys, and you can order them smugly from independent bookshops via my affiliate site.

1960s

To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

What I enjoyed about this was its righteousness and freshness. It feels fresh, even rereading now, although the story is about a lawyer in 1930s Southern USA who defends a black man accused of raping a white woman. When I was young, this book made me want to name a child after Atticus, the lawyer; reconsidering now, perhaps I’d prefer to name a child after the narrator—a young girl called Scout Finch. Harper Lee wrote it in the late 1950s; a much better guide to anything happening at the time than contemporary historical fiction. Good to read for context and to understand how someone of that time thought about life. The injustice at the heart of the novel and righteousness of its best characters feels contemporary and has much in common with our times than you would think. After reading the novel, you can watch movie with the deeply dreamy Gregory Peck.

1970s

The Women’s Room by Marilyn French

Moons ago, I was thinking about how women and men are made different by lived experience. How living as a woman in a society where the male gaze and rape culture are present can shape how, e.g., cautious one becomes. This thinking led to me writing a novel called Golden Boy. As I began to write that book, I was also reading this one. I went to a small park next to a church in Camden, where I then lived, practically every day, and read. The Women’s Room follows a woman who leaves her husband and enters Harvard in the first year women are able to attend. What I loved about this book is that it doesn’t shy away from the disappointment of finding freedom that is limited. Of meeting emancipation with joy and then realising it’s not as extensive as the emancipation other groups of people have been offered. Of depicting progressive men who consider themselves feminists but still treat women like citizens of a second class. It doesn’t offer neat answers. Perfect reading, I think, for frustrated women in their late 20s or 30s today, and particularly for any contemporary reader who finds out that, within her progressive workplace or equal relationship, there are, actually, deep inequalities. This is not as well known as other important feminist texts however, it’s unmissable if you care or want to know more about feminism, and much more readable than most.

2010s

Patsy by Nicole Dennis Benn

I loved this novel so much. It was sexy and sweaty and fun and sad and lovely and clever and informative. The perspective was so unique in terms of the marketplace and not just because it’s rare to have a female, black, Jamaican, new immigrant protagonist/narrator but because of the detailed and authentic way Nicole writes about class or what I’d rather term ‘lack of money’, and the grind of living somewhere rampantly capitalistic; a place that, whatever it gives, also takes and takes and takes without end.

The Oneworld blurb did a good job of describing all the intriguing interwoven storylines, so here it is: “When Patsy gets her long-coveted visa to America, it’s the culmination of years of yearning to be reunited with Cicely, her oldest friend and secret love, who left home years before for the “land of opportunity.” Patsy’s plans do not include her religious mother or even her young daughter, Tru, both of whom she leaves behind in a bittersweet trail of sadness and relief. But Brooklyn is not at all what Cicely described in her letters, and to survive as an undocumented immigrant, Patsy is forced to work as a bathroom attendant, and ironically, as a nanny. Meanwhile, back in Jamaica, Tru struggles with her own questions of identity and sexuality, grappling every day with what it means to be abandoned by a mother who has no intention of returning.”

A chunky book, for those who love hefty pageturners.

2010s

Things to Make and Break by May Lan Tan

Published by a small press and so well loved and respected it was republished by Sceptre. There are few short story collections I really loved, but this is one of them. My tastes are ‘literary but make it readable’. I want to want to turn the page. These stories were delicious and strange but also fun and visual; I couldn’t help dreaming that they were quiet, quirky indie movies. You may have missed this collection if you delved into the world of books after 2020. If you are interesting in writing, reading, or working in literature, it’s unmissable.

“A motorcycle courier finds a cache of nude photos in her boyfriend’s desk. The daughter of East German emigrants encounters her doppelgänger, who has crossed another cultural divide. Twin brothers fall for the same girl. When a stripper receives an enigmatic proposal from a client, she accepts, ignorant of its terms.”

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PROLOGUE

Aged 25, Paris, 4 AM.

Dark waters of the Seine. Cool stone pavement. Barefoot, heels in hand. Making out, slow, sexy, practised, passionate. You lift my legs. Wrap them around you. Make it perfect, make it smooth. I squeeze your sides with my thighs; it always makes you sigh. Charming.

You drop me. Unceremonious. Come on.

What? Where? Delight in my lips as they bud together, tweak at the corners. I’m not afraid of you. I’m young, aren’t I? I skip after you. I bounce.

You: easy smile, gregarious, handsome, movie star-like, wearing sunglasses under lamplight. I booked us a room at the Chateau.

No!!! I squeal and a male voice nearby shouts, ta gueule, putain! (Shut up, whore!)

We cackle wildly.

Ever been in love with your best friend?

Happy birthday. You kiss me. Prince of Paris. Adored. Semi-famous in a local sense. I’m just a girl from a field. Country girl.

What’ll you do for my 30th?

Something even bigger, of course.

Ha! I bet. Can’t wait.

Grand. It was grand. In Love. It all ahead of us. On the Escalator. I don’t believe in God, but sometimes I get on my knees and pray to get back on that path.

PART ONE

29 AND 3/4

That summer, my new doctor finds a lump in my left breast.

“Have you noticed it before?” she says.

“No. Does it feel like cancer?” My mum had breast cancer when she was 47. Stage three. Thankfully, she survived. Of course, it’s made us both a little paranoid. But just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean anomalous cell-divisions aren’t after using up your glucose.

“Do you regularly check for lumps?”

I explained I had tried before but I had not found any area of my tits that didn’t feel like a tumour.

“Well, there’s a lump there. I’ll refer you for an ultrasound. You’ll get an appointment within two weeks.”

“Two weeks?”

“Yes, two weeks.”

“That seems quick. As if it were serious.”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m sorry. I was raised to ignore bad behavior. It feels like giving the lump attention encourages it.”

I walk away from the clinic, through a car park, alongside a housing estate with laundry drying on balconies above me. Hear summer sounds: families and flatmates living half-outside, the day nowhere near end at 5 PM. Leave the estate; enter a path between a disused pub and a chain-link fence. Through the chain-link: an old piece of railway line, green bushiness, buddleia, birds. Exit the path.

The pub’s boarded-up windows, empty eyes, clock me as I cross Downs Road at the north-east corner; step onto footpath, then lawn, feet relieved at the give in the ground, stomp of dust, whispery crunch of dried-out summer grass. I enter Hackney Downs, a park in East London.

A down is a gently rolling hill. It comes from the Old English word, dūn; a hill. Just a tidbit. My mum says everyone likes learning something new.

To my left, a small road slips past the church to the grocery store and another small park; this one with benches around a pond and a little arching wooden bridge where I sometimes squat by the water and watch grandparents and toddlers, tired men with building dust hands eating sandwiches staring at nothing, very full ducks. London is the second-greenest city in the world (#1 is Tokyo). Most evenings I walk the parks, dream, think, wonder about getting a little something, usually a coconut milk hot chocolate from Palm 2 to drink by the pond, before heading home past My Neighbours The Dumplings, past the Round Chapel, past the tacos and margs bar. Other days I head home south-east from Hackney Downs, past Black Cat Cafe and the house that made me move to Lower Clapton, where a woman my age-ish with a honeyed, moneyed accent showed me around her terra-cotta-tiled kitchen/living room, her lovely garden, her supper club stews with names I didn’t know, and her boyfriend, who liked me too much, as her eyes narrowed and I knew I wouldn’t get to live in her spicy, earth-colored rooms. From her road, I can get home via Amhurst road, curving past the camera shop, Hackney Public Baths, the bus stop, the local offie where we buy Coronas and limes, and then crossing the street, to the PVC door that never quite closes.

Hackney Downs is mostly green grass, mown low for sports. It has a little playground. I like to go on the swings when there aren’t kids around. My favorite part of the park is an area of long wild grasses, with fallen logs, where nature has been allowed a little freedom and you can hear crickets at night in the summer. Dogs like that part, too.

It’s a wide park. It opens up the sky in a way that’s rare in the city. Where I grew up, the sky is literally half the world. It’s a dome, and it comes all the way down to the ground, in a miles-wide circle with you at the centre. I always notice it when I’m driving in. There’s a lot of blue up there.

In Hackney Downs, it’s not the same, but it’s a big sky for London. The open space of the park allows the sunlight a decent shot at the buildings on the park edge. At sundown, the facades are orange and the sky is a very chill, very peaceable blue.

I walk and think about the lump. I am twenty-nine. I wonder if I died within the next two years, what three things I would like to get done beforehand. I think I would get laser eye surgery, write a book, and live in a houseshare that has, not just a kitchen to hang out in, but an actual living room.

Jas is home, in her room, studying. I take her Jasmine tea and walk a steaming cup into my bedroom, where I sit on the edge of the bed and slide my legs under the desk, which is jammed between the end of my bed and the wall. It’s not that comfortable. Mostly, I write in bed.

I open my laptop. Close the window with Buffy The Vampire Slayer open on it. I have committed to writing about turning 30, for an alternative lifestyle magazine, but I keep getting nowhere. My pitch was that turning 30 is not a big deal and that any age- or milestone- related panic results from internalized sexism. It will be a positive! and upbeat! article about how life starts at 30! and the best is yet to come!

And it is, right?

The backyard neighbours are having a screaming match again. I look out the window, checking that their kids aren’t out there with them. I rub my eyes. I squeeze the lump. I’m tired. I miss…

…

My mind goes blank, like a computer erasing files, and the thing I miss is gone.

I sigh deeply, sip my tea.

Life used to be easier than this.

But this tea is lovely!

So there’s that.

30! I remind myself, drawing my attention from the yard. I raise my arms, trying to gee up enthusiasm. Woo, 30!

I stare at the screen. Close the file. My 30th birthday is in October. I have a while to write the article. I pick up my phone, look up, “nearest laser eye surgery”. I open my Spareroom account back up and pay the monthly subscription. I open a new Pages document. Type, Things to do before I die.

The surprise of a Steinbeck bleaching in the sun on heartlikeahouse’s Instagram; a write-up by of a 2017 novel by an author whose 2025 memoir I’m reading. Ambler’s thrifted finds.

Is it the cost of living? Are new hardbacks losing out to the second hand market? Am I annoyed when I splash out for a hardback and then it’s not the best thing ever, as advertised? Am I bored by seeing the same new books online? Are you?

Inspired by the trend, I’d like to share some of the books I have on my shelf that you’d be lucky to pick up in a second hand store. This new series, Classic Reads, is an opportunity for me to do that.

A few notes on what to expect:

I’m a voracious curator—I cull everything I don’t love. So, I can promise quality. I’m also eclectic—expect literary fiction, comic novels, detective series, fairy tales, queer romance, anthropology, true classics, and translated picks.

This is a good moment to mention—although authors don’t earn money from thrifted books, we do earn from library loans. I get a sizeable cheque every year. So, please, dear readers, find these gems at your library.

Let’s get started.

1800s

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

No sooner had I thought to write about this, than I noticed Jess at the aforementioned Unseen Review is doing a reread. Wuthering Heights is—my controversial opinion—by the most talented Bronte sister.

Emily wrote poems, and this one novel, and then died. The reason I prefer her writing (poems too) over the other Brontes’ is that it’s savagely passionate. Sex is barely mentioned—think of the time of publication—but it’s all over the pages.

In Cathy’s anarchic haunting of Heathcliff and his wild, moaning, desperate search for her out on the moor, of course, but also in the descriptions of gunsmoke-scented Hareton who tramps out of the fresh air and heather into the younger Catherine’s heart—and she’s passionate too; a milder version of her mother.

There’s also a vaguely sub/dom aspect of Catherine and Hareton’s relationship. For some reason, the scene where, seated beside the fireplace, Catherine (bites own hand) teaches a mardy Hareton to read. It’s giving fragile male ego, but it’s also giving eros. Boy, sexuality was, and is, so confusing before, and after, feminism.

Other notes: medium length; set in North England; ‘wuthering’ refers to the sound of the wind.

1900s

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

I used to think old books and films would feel old. I learnt by reading and watching classics that, indeed, some are dated, however, those that alight on the truth of the human experience feel as relevant and present to me as any contemporary work.

In fact, The Age of Innocence seems more relevant now, in the age of social media, phones, and covid socialisation, than when I first read it, in or around 2010.

And yet, Edith wrote in her memoir that writing this novel represented, “a momentary escape in going back to my childish memories of a long-vanished America... it was growing more and more evident that the world I had grown up in and been formed by had been destroyed in 1914.”

Why do I think it captures something about the zeitgeist? The Age of Innocence is a social tragedy; a love story that struggles to happen because of the age’s societal norms. A wealthy man in 1870s New York is engaged to a woman who has not much else to offer but beauty and a similar amount of wealth and societal standing.

When her divorced and clever cousin appears, despite the values he holds, he falls for her. But propriety keeps him away—she is divorced (scandalous); he can’t break off his engagement (more scandal); what will Manhattan’s high society think? Etcetera.

His inability to compute his feelings or act on his emotions, due to norms of the time, call to mind contemporary headlines about people having less sex, rules of online dating, and maybe too much questioning about what is right, what is acceptable, what creates fallout, as we all deal with the fact that we are watched and judged online by strangers.

The setting is incredibly interesting and, unlike in historical fiction, this isn’t a fantasy or based on research—the author grew up during the era in Manhattan and so this is a history of place and manners as much as it is a thoughtful novel with, basically, a will they-won’t they plot.

Other notes: won the Pulitzer(!), deals in restraint versus passion, medium length, cosy, Wharton’s family (the Joneses of Manhattan) are rumoured to be the family referred to in the phrase, ‘keeping up with the Joneses’.

2010s

Goodbye Vitamin by Rachel Khong

This book has stayed with me through the years. I’ve always thought it was a very special book.

Like many authors, Khong went for it in her second novel, Real Americans, i.e. wrote a much more sweeping book which sought to accomplish more things. Im sure some of you have read and loved Real Americans. It was really well reviewed. I can’t believe I actually haven’t read it yet, but I see the release date is 2024, and I had a period of years, coinciding (obviously) with baby loss and covid, where I didn’t read much fiction at all. It was like I could not compute fantasy worlds because I didn’t live it one. I lived in a very real, dark place, as many of us did during the pandemic. So, if any of you have read this, please tell me what you thought of it in the comments below 👇

Back to Goodbye Vitamin. I wanted to say that Real Americans is a big book (word count 119,000), and like many authors, Khong wrote a short, sweet, more contained first novel (word count 49,000). (Me too.)

The novel follows an Asian-American woman called Ruth, who moves home temporarily when her father receives a diagnosis of dementia. That’s really all you need to know. It was perfect. I know, if I had written this, I would feel I had achieved what I set out to do, and I’d be satisfied with the result. I hope Khong feels that way.

I reviewed this, back when I was originally posting film photography of books to Instagram, so I’m going to share with you my original thoughts (and oddly enough I read it around this time of year)—

“Goodbye Vitamin kicked off my holiday season, put me in such a good mood, and popped like a curved-edged, sugar-coated pill. Thank you so much, Rachel Khong. You did in such a small space what few achieve in any space. And you spoke about memory and family and moments aka, all that is valuable and what alone is valuable. I lost my Nan last month and we were very close and I spent a lot of time with her after her dementia diagnosis and you could have called it “taking care of her” but it was also “spending time with her” and as much as it was a shock it was also a gift. This is what you captured so beautifully and understatedly in GV. And I loved Ruth. I wished I were her, or that she was my friend or lover.”

Early 2020s

Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia

Who else here is hot for structure? Warm for form? Jazzed about juxtaposition?

Structure is what I loved most about this book, although (this is a theme of my literary taste), again, the setting is intriguing.

This novel opens in a factory in Cuba, where somebody is reading the workers Victor Hugo’s letter to Cuban independence leaders, as they roll cigars. Maria Isabel is the only female worker.

Shortly after this scene, her life is changed by the start of what will be many years of fighting for freedom from Spanish rule.

Since AI companies have stolen from me so much in recent years (I’m getting a pay out from a class action soon!), I’ll paste the Google AI description of the structure here—

“The novel is a multi-generational saga that jumps between different time periods and characters, weaving together a complex family history.”

It jumps forward in time to Miami, where Jeanette is taking care of Ana, whose mother Gloria has been detained by ICE, and Jeanette’s mother Carmen, from Cuba, will not discuss her past.

There’s a theme of how Cuban and immigrant women in the US are tossed around on a sea of circumstance, unable to gain purchase on their lives.

But my favourite thing, as I mentioned, was the structure, and how telling stories in small, detailed ways, juxtaposed with other intimately told stories, could uncover a larger picture which would not be revealed without intimacy or juxtaposition.

Let me know what you thought about these books, or if you think you’ll read them, below in the comments!—Abby xo

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This is written with compassion for the wonderful friends of bookish people or authors, like me, who wish to connect with their friend’s bookish passions. I always appreciate a book as a gift. It’s my favourite present to receive (small present I should say—not wanting to jinx away holidays, pu…

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Abigail is an award-winning author, political commentator, podcaster, and storyteller on page and screen. Her novels include Golden Boy, developed by BBC Films, published in nine languages, and beloved by readers.

Her early works, a triptych of novels exploring gender, sought progress, intersectionality, and non-binary representation. Alongside works of other esteemed writers and artists, they contributed to a cultural conversation in the 2010s which inspired profound societal change.

Golden Boy was an American Library Association Alex Award winner, shortlisted for a Best LGBT Debut LAMBDA Literary Award, and a Booklist Top Ten First Novel.

Abigail continues to write about inequalities, including violence against girls and women, wealth taxation, journalistic freedom, work, and voting, rights. She’s written for Ache Magazine, Glamour, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent, Oh Comely, Art & Type, and was a columnist at Huffpost, section editor at Phoenix, and EIC of I Hope You Like Feminist Rants.

In sound and screen, Abby collaborated with Clear Lines Festival to produce Arts Council x National Lottery funded podcast, Writing Coercive Control, exploring control in domestic, workplace, national, and trans-cultural spheres, with today’s leading authors. Now, on politics podcast From Below The Balcony, she interviews Senators, MPs, and journalists, alongside campaigner and author Graham Smith, garnering 600,000 views on social media in just 10 episodes. In the past, she has written scripts for BBC Films and sat on the jury of the British Independent Film Awards.

Online since 2007, friends and followers from tumblr, youtube, wordpress, and instagram now catch up with Abby on Substack, where she posts new and archival fiction, reading recommendations, and news.

Her vision of young people yearning for love and acceptance in a restrictive and binary world touched hearts across the globe. After five years away from the industry due to personal tragedy, Abigail returns with two works of tremendous grace—Remontada and Ordinary Woman Turns 30.

“Tarttelin’s prose is as compassionate as it is compelling”—Interview Magazine

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