214. READ. LOOK. THINK.
Did it work for you? Unapologetic novelists from the upper echelons. Concealment of self. Click click click! Let me grapple!
READ.
Since 2015, the year female friendship was discovered…
At one of [Deborah] Levy’s online readings during the Covid pandemic, an audience member posted in the chat: “I’m 41 with two kids and sometimes I don’t feel I’m at home at all … Did it work for you, coming out of an unhappy marriage?” Levy answered: “It did work for me. You have to make another sort of life and gather your friends and supporters to your table”.
‘Through spending, I hoped I’d find a way to like myself more.’
‘And strangely, unapologetic novelists from the upper echelons, Rachel Cusk and Edward St Aubyn are two other examples, tend to be especially good at writing about class, I mean their own class, because they have nothing to prove, or to obscure, while most writers, I’d wager, descend from some brackish combination of social levels and do not have one consistent class identity from which to draw when building their fictional worlds. They have instead a set of contradictions and anxieties they might try to smooth out rather than explain.)’
‘What Ernaux seemed to have understood from the start is that shame is the obverse side of truth. She uses it as a map, the existence of shame at different points in her history unfailingly leading her to a concealment of self buried beneath it.’
‘…the world is just not a very safe space for anybody’s tenderness, when the tenderness means they would like the world to be different and they don’t want to experience much more loss on the way.’
‘When everything is poetry I know I am unwell.’
A good tweet thread about the biggest changes novelists have made to their drafts, from first to last.
LOOK.
Ordinary Unhappiness podcast.
Two attainable visions for gardens: ‘We don’t know where we are heading as far as our future on this planet is concerned, but we might as well go there prepared with a wide gene pool, in relation with our common folk plants and their communities, in awe of our insects, fascinated by our fungal friends, with our soils and our energy replenished’ / a multilayer food forest.
THINK.
Going to private school makes you twice as likely to vote Tory.
‘Rituals are also things powerful people invent for us. Ruling classes use them to manage our moods, to encourage us to accept social hierarchies. Elites rearrange the jigsaw of humanity into beautiful images of the world, with them at the centre. And because rituals make us feel good, we accept it.’
Extraordinarily stressed and vigilant: how racism makes people physically ill.
(Click click click Lime bike noise) who counts as a cyclist in London?
‘… if your pay is too low for you to make a full range of human decisions, you are effectively in service to someone else.’
Is It Normal To Constantly Think About Breaking Up With My Boyfriend?
‘I resent the idea that we can deem any such feeling “valid” or “normal” and call it a day. Let me grapple! Let me exist!’
‘I wonder what version of childhood, of life, offers more happiness: the one spent with perfect friends whom you never see, or the one spent with good-enough friends who, as I was, are up for whatever.’
Jess
X
PS my novel is set in a beautiful terrace in Fitzroy during a Melbourne winter. If you are entering a Melbourne winter (in real life, or of the soul) … do it with the Clare family ❤️