230. READ. LOOK. THINK (and some news!)
Joys, lusts, indignities, mundanities and horrors. Formality, yearning for Tavi, "No!" she replied. "Here are mine!" And my new novel, coming 2025, CONSIDER YOURSELF KISSED.
Hard to describe the past two months of my life. The novel I’ve been working on for two or three years (a love story with jokes and devastation) was suddenly whirled out into the world by my agent Lizzy Kremer, and things have not settled down yet. It will be published in Australia by Text, the UK by Hutchinson Heinemann, in Canada by Doubleday, Germany by DuMont and in the US by Riverhead. (Luckily I had not known Sarah McGrath was reading or I would have dropped dead.) CONSIDER YOURSELF KISSED takes its title from Mary McCarthy’s The Group. It’s set in Hackney and ranges across a woman’s entire thirties. It will be out in less than a year! More details of course as still to come, here on email and on my Instagram.
READ.
‘Criticism is a relationship with an object, and as such it involves all of the regular psychic drama—idealization and fantasy; avoidance, hostility, and disappointment; the desire to know and a fascination with what is unknown; displacement from our own life onto the object. The person writing criticism has to always be on guard that the irritations and frustrations of writing do not get taken out on the object under review. Even pieces that begin in love and admiration can end in resentment and hate. I have noticed that after writing a review, I often lose interest in the author or resist reading their next book. If reviewing is a way to know something deeply, it’s also a way to say goodbye.’
‘It might be time to know, again, the interiority of men, American men, in all of their joys, lusts, indignities, mundanities, and horrors. What is ticking inside the American male of the mid-2020s and what can novelists tell us about that?’
‘Perhaps formality—and this is another tic of the formal writers, by the way, the hopping, birdlike, never-settling perhaps—perhaps formality is simply a symptom of a writer seeing depth and gesturing toward it, but not really plumbing it, which would be messy, and uncertain, and risky. Not yet.’
'For years, the writer Annie Hamilton yearned to get close to Tavi Gevinson. When she finally found an opening, her history of self-sabotage […] threatened to derail the relationship before it had ever really started.'
'I know people won’t be able to get the ratio right of fiction to me, but I think it will bring joy to the book; I think it’ll bring intimacy and pleasure.’
'I sent her a pic of my milk-filled new breasts in the negligée I bought to make use of them. "Was that too much?" I asked. "No!" she replied. "Here are mine!"'
Currently reading: Naked Portrait A Memoir of Lucian Freud by Rose Boyt.
Susie Boyt’s night at the Freud museum.
‘I have a great job and family, but I really want to write novels.’
'When you get positive feedback from strangers, print it out and put it in a folder that you keep nearby, and open the folder when you get negative responses — to remind yourself of why you made the choices you’ve made.'
LOOK.
Halfway through putting together this RLT I received India Knight's free Food email from her Substack and jumped up to make this Ottolgenghi aromatic olive oil mash.
There's something beautiful about Cath Kidston's houses, there's always a modern or plain thing for every old or decorative thing. House and Garden / Bible of British Taste.
Tour of stunning iconic Cairo flats in Melbourne, small, perfect living spaces.
I watched Under Paris (a shark is loose in the Seine) and I was actually laughing it was so surprisingly good.
The author Sophie Mackintosh shared on her stories that it's possible to have your draft bound and printed like a cheap paperback - I wish I had known this! So much easier to carry around and edit.
The artist Atta Kwami's terrace house in Loughborough.
THINK.
Research as leisure activity ❤️
A 'political culture that is OBSESSED by wheezes and plots, that fetishises 'seeing six moves ahead' and 'being a brilliant strategist'…
If everyone would just appreciate this tweet.
The creativity and vibrancy of MLE.
Towards the end of the trial, James Bruce, the barrister for the prosecution, challenged Dr Patrick Hart in cross-examination by asking ‘Is your position that the ends justify the means?’ Dr Hart replied, ‘If by ends, you mean preventing the collapse of civilisation and entire ecosystems and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, and by means, cracking a few panes of glass, then yes, I would say the ends justify the means.’ Jury refuses to convict medics who broke windows at JP Morgan.
‘Amid the actual violence of Israel’s assault on Gaza, why have so many writers treated pro-Palestine speech as a threat?’ / Superlatives.
Jess
X
PS. I am back on Twitter to share book news and deal out my customary 15-25 Likes per day — is it dead there?