238. READ. LOOK. THINK.
A quest for love, a special chicken cooked by a friend, Gloria Steinem's pinboard, a fascist logic, and Mommy/ Baby/ Tyrant/ Serf.
I’m back from a beautiful trip to Australia and am just beyond jetlagged. I got up at 4am so thought I might as well send this!
READ.
'People who write books have a lot in common. They’re people who are willing to work very, very hard in isolation in order to feed the notion that they’re special and soon the world will recognize it [...] Writing is a quest for love. It’s compulsive. It’s a form of self-soothing and also a form of self-punishment. It’s an escape and also an attempt to face reality. It’s a way of broadcasting “I’m still here!” and also a way of hiding from everyone, among words that will give you love when no one else will.'
‘When winter comes, I drape my long wool scarf around her neck because she’s always cold. That’s how you can tell we’re sisters, she says, her eyes shining. My mom doesn’t even have a sister.’
‘Her devoted readers seemed to blithely accept that her stories, with their grisly leitmotifs, were the product of a saintly lady who was making it all up, out of empathy.’ Rachel Aviv on Alice Munro.
Very fascinating piece by Rachel Johnson (sister of you know who) about her mother, an artist, and the striking paintings she made while receiving long term in-patient mental health treatment. I found it on India Knight’s Substack.
On my first day in Australia I bought and read Helen Garner’s slim new book about Australian Rules Football (not about its role in society or anything, just her grandson’s team and what they’re all like). It’s called The Season, I loved it. I can see it will come out in the UK in November.
Most of my other reading is sort of private/too revealing but I am really enjoying Martin Amis’s Experience, a recc from Lisa Owens!
LOOK.
Saag paneer, but with feta.
My friend Vic Hannan (author of Kokomo and Marshmallow) cooked us this Molly Baz chicken — incredible.
I’m still on the fence about getting a pinboard (I like Gloria Steinem’s). This is a nice one.
I love these stained glass-inspired window treatments (or blinds, as people who aren’t House and Garden-pilled know them) that ‘glow in the sun’.
I watched the documentary In My Blood It Runs on the plane back from Australia and was moved by Dujuan, the sensitive, charismatic 10yo protagonist from Mparntwe (Alice Springs). It was incredible to see him come alive on his family’s traditional lands, his education in healing and his own language stewarded by the women in his life. Then tragic to see him ‘fail’ mainstream school and struggle on the edge of removal from his home and even incarceration. It’s a beautiful documentary and when I googled him I found a lovely surprise about what he is up to now!
‘I keep it simple, humble and smart, as I’m in the house of Allah.’ British Muslim men discuss what they wear to Friday prayers.
I love The Monthly’s Read This podcast — Michael the interviewer always coaxes something new out of the authors, Alan Hollinghurst and Miranda July, for eg.
THINK.
Mommy, Baby, Tyrant, Serf (a fun game to play).
‘We don’t want there to be any Annoying Queers in our midst, because we all want to get past the uncomfortable phase of identity-formation that took us longer than we wanted and involved us experiencing so much pain.’
‘Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic, because that means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth, and then what happens?’
…‘if we want to understand this [rape] ‘culture’ (or rather, this way that we distribute power) might we need to think not about the ‘monsters’, but about the gruff, decent guys, the guys we love and forgive, the guys who are ‘not like that’, for whom we silence small anxieties about coercion and hurt and trust precisely because we are so relieved they are not monsters? And perhaps also because we are worried that if we do speak up they might leave us, exclude us, react with the infantile fury we are taught so carefully to contain? Are we not, when we look closely, surrounded by these small acts of accommodation, denial, repression, evasion?’
‘Experiences of racism seem to stir and amplify the deafening voices of self-condemnation and fears of terrible danger that can be part of the alternate realities of psychosis.’
‘He, like all despots, will pass. The earth will continue, wounded perhaps, but enduring.’
CYK.
Everything is still going along okay with my new novel…! Consider Yourself Kissed will be out in April in Australia/NZ, early May in UK and late May in the US. It’s available to pre-order now! What can I tell you about it? It’s a love story, told over ten years? Set in London?
Soon, maybe this week, I will be able to share the US cover on my Instagram, and also the contents of this, one of the best emails I have ever received in my life!
Jess
X
Thank you for the Heather Havrilesky link! That was SUCH good advice about writing and being published (I think a lot of us need quotes from it printed out and stuck on our walls!).
Liane!!!!!!!!!