233. READ. LOOK. THINK.
La rentrée, lust, empathy’s seedier underbelly, I, I, I, an incredible novel I would implore anyone to read! Cork boards, high protein (?) waffles (?), Diane Abbott’s slight suspicion.
Hello,
Happy ‘back to school season’ (although: not in Australia — although: it is Spring)!
Susie Boyt:
The back of the year's work can be broken between September and December. I always have the bulk of the year's feelings too. It's a heady combination, an invitation to go all-out. And at the end of this supreme and concentrated effort? Christmas shimmering on the horizon as a mammoth reward.
I have been working on various things for Consider Yourself Kissed: thank God for proofreaders, right up to the final pass, I spelled Lizzy Bennet (the Jane Austen one) wrong. Imagine?! (I had it with two ‘t’s — Bennett, seemed legit).
I have incredible news. Meg Wolitzer has read my book. The other incredible news is she has blurbed it:
Consider Yourself Kissed is a smart literary love story and an absorbing family drama. Jessica Stanley follows her characters over the years as they make their way in the private, intricate, fragile world they create for themselves, and in the always-changing larger world. This is a deeply appealing and winning novel.
— Meg Wolitzer!!!
Even though CYK is not out til April (AU)/ May (UK)/ June (US) next year, it is available for pre-order: AU | UK | US.
Soon the cover will be finalised. I have seen it, and its variations. It is witty! I was charmed.
READ.
‘We take up all of the positions in a novel simultaneously as we read, so our sense of self becomes broken up, distributed in new and unexpected ways. This idea is most commonly understood as the power of empathy, but lust, empathy’s seedier underbelly, might be just as fruitful.’
‘A memoir is not merely the record of a transformation but the device for one, and the blank page symbolizes its great hope and wager. Is it the lure of renewal that drives the serial memoirist? The writer’s “I” can be a persona, but it can also be a chrysalis, a placeholder for the self in making, the self to come. Lift your hands from the keys, to reconsider, revise, be reborn. Watch the cursor blink back, patient and cautioning: I, I, I.’
‘We viewed the behavior as pathological, but he was probably instinctually trying to improve his microbiome.’
‘[Writing a] book is an amazing magically functioning instrument for emptying myself of what I no longer need, what I no longer want to think about.’
‘Shallow, rapidly swirling narrative consciousness has come to define the refugees of the Attention Span Wars, those writers whose capacity for concentration has been so compromised by the internet that they leave us not with a fragmented form – which might still have something to offer readers – but with the fragmentation of concentration itself.’
‘He needed to turn me into a stranger so that he could paint me.’ Celia Paul (I am still thinking about Naked Portrait, such a compelling book.)
‘Garten’s life represents an emphatic response to an upbringing in which she felt that few of her wishes or tastes were satisfied. “I think I was starving my whole childhood,” she said.’ I have never seen a single clip of, or recipe by, Ina Garten, but I was gripped by this profile.
The Echoes is a stunning, devastating novel by Evie Wyld — so sad, SO funny. I wish I had written it.
‘A rule of mine? I must run into myself in everything I acquire.’
LOOK.
I’m thinking about buying a cork board, although my desk is in front of a window, so would I be looking at the board enough to make it worthwhile? Option 1. Option 2.
‘THANK YOU FOR THE MOST INTRIGUING AND INSPIRING DAY, ESPECIALLY THE UNFURLING OF YOUR 2000 LOOKS, BEGINNING ALREADY WITH THIS EXTRAORDINARY KILT, FROM AZZEDINE,’
Reading All Fours, I was always like: high protein waffles? Anyway I made these (I suppose, high protein pancakes?) Very nice and a success.
THINK.
‘A part of us, I think, is always longing to go back to this, a way of being where needs are met before they can even become needs, so we do not have to experience the vulnerability and difference and aloneness necessary to recognise we are receiving something from somebody else.’
“But you’re not up to it,” the teacher said. “But I do think I’m up to it,” the 16-year-old [Diane] Abbott replied. “And that’s what matters, isn’t it?”
And extracted from Diane Abbott’s memoir, on wearing a striking outfit for her swearing in as Britain’s first Black female MP: ‘Our MP friends […] made a point of coming up to us, perhaps innocently trying to be friendly, but I always had a slight suspicion that they wanted to be in the iconic, history-making photographs.’
Stalker ‘found Japanese singer through reflection in her eyes’.
Jess
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