232. READ. LOOK. THINK.
Better than invisible, preserving your integrity through loneliness, a spectral voice, a tiny drop of red food colouring, 🔮, SABS-ing, a patchwork of love.
A special hello to everyone who was pointed in this direction by Stephanie Danler! (After I shared my admiration for her memoir Stray — I love her autobio writing on her Substack and elsewhere.) READ. LOOK. THINK. is an email newsletter for readers and writers I’ve been maintaining, on various platforms, for more than ten years. But I hardly ever write introductory chat like this! Aside from sharing updates about my new novel, Consider Yourself Kissed (coming in 2025), this email newsletter is all about the links:
READ.
I posted briefly about the novels that inspired my forthcoming one on Instagram.
(One of them was I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. I was fascinated to read about Smith’s collapse after its success: ‘The book’s popularity confirmed her greatest fear: that, for all her effort, it would be received not as a literary work but as middlebrow. The critics who mattered had passed it “over as lightweight and unimportant.” She stopped eating and retreated to bed.’)
I read the new Alan Hollinghurst Our Evenings, feeling (at first) a bit wrong-footed, before I was swept up, and (before long) devastated. A beautiful book I wish could go on forever. An extract.
On holiday I read Claire Messud’s A Strange Eventful History and loved it so much. A key POV character, a novelist-in-training (age 7 at the time) muses ‘I am trying always to be invisible but better than invisible, if that makes sense’ — a goal I share! I will always read Claire Messud because of how much I loved The Emperor’s Children.
‘Through loneliness, she preserved her integrity, her individuality.’ The solitude of Emily Dickinson.
‘Now you think I’m crazy. Sorry, neurologically diverse.’
“Some people will be horrified by that.” / “People who are writers or artists, or people who are not?”
‘Somehow I shrink from a spectral voice. If a visit becomes possible, fine; if not, that’s OK, too. A pleasure shouldn’t become an obligation.’
‘… all I can feel is fear. A fear of doing too much. Being too bold. Being too direct. Being too on the nose. A fear of the melodramatic. Of the plainspoken. A fear of saying how people and things are, and can be. We fear it for a great many reasons—reasons of taste, reasons of commercial success, reasons of political persecution, reasons of privacy—but we do fear it just the same.’
Ditching the New Yorker voice.
‘I didn’t need very much real life; it’s strong, like a tiny drop of red food coloring.’
The best ever book promo essay?
LOOK.
Two friends have started Substacks: 1. my mothers’ group friend (and genius writer and artist) Dale Berning Sawa; 2. my — how to describe our now very long friendship?! — favourite Australian fashion journalist (and twin soul reader) Annie Brown.
I’m going to re-buy old these picture ledges I used to have in my writing shed, perfect for propping photos and small things up.
Leopard rug??? Not affordable.
THINK.
‘Imagine you look into a crystal ball. You see that you’ll find your dream partner in, say, 10 years — but not before then. What would you do with that intervening time?’
‘More radically, I’ve begun to ask: what if the cracks are the very thing that give a stepfamily its power, if it’s the patchwork of love, individuality and experience that make it special?’
‘I am all too aware of my flaws; I don’t really need my friends to remind me of them. Rather than demand I be better, I would rather my friends accept me as I am. Isn’t that the kind of mother we all wish we had, too? And no, you don’t need to be a mother to treat your friends to the mothering they all need. Mothering transcends the biological — every chosen family knows this.’
‘At no point did I feel as if I wanted to end it all, but my identity had shifted into something unrecognisable.’
‘There is a nuance here that some people may not wish to acknowledge: in prison, the identities of victim and perpetrator are not always distinct. Most of our prison population qualifies as both’. (I enjoyed Gwen Adshead’s The Devil You Know, a compassionate insight into the minds of dangerous offenders.)
‘Recent moral panics, whether about race, nationality or gender, whether they are obsessed with asylum seekers in ‘five-star hotels’ or ‘bathroom predators’ or a supposed ‘man’ competing as a female boxer, share a sense of borders and boundaries eroding, of people being where they have no business being.’
Why was the media response to the UK riots so classist?
‘Maybe "the center" is just whatever no man's land currently happens to occupy the space between the worst atrocities we can imagine, and however far we've travelled toward those committing them to try to get them on our side, a journey we undertook so that we won't have to do the work of opposing them. [...] Such a center is a center that will make itself comfortable with any atrocity, because comfort is its only goal.’
Go ‘Twitter Last.’
Jess
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