240. READ. LOOK. THINK.
Ideas and fancies, painting a chair three times, AMA (Ask Martin Amis), radicchio not roses, and the drug of choice for 'London’s cool mums'
READ.
‘For many girls, best friends are their first loves. [...] When I was nine, my best friend was 30-year-old ingenue Lara Flynn Boyle.’
‘To put a child character in danger is in a way to honour them – to believe in their capacity to rise to meet it – and the child reader, in their self-identification, is honoured alongside.’
‘Every single moment is so full of information that you could spend a lifetime surveying it. So what we do is look for patterns, for whatever can be fitted into a stable structure. It is a way of managing reality: we must be able to pull out a chair and sit without expending time on the chair itself. And why should we spend time on a chair, anyway? What point would there be in taking a closer look at it, in seeing what it is really like? In 2020, [Celia] Paul painted the same chair three times.’ Karl Ove Knausgaard on Celia Paul.
‘Someone has to believe in me and my powers in order for me to make a living. When no one believes in me, I disappear.’
I love it when authors share how they wrote a book! Here is how Hanna Thomas Uose wrote Who Wants to Live Forever (which I loved and blurbed). Novels I’ve also loved and blurbed recently: Nesting by Roisin O’Donnell (I blurbed the Australian edition), The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji (just got a rave in The Guardian), and My Other Heart by my book-friend Emma Nanami Strenner. My Other Heart isn’t out til July but it’s giving major Little Fires Everywhere/‘probably about to be optioned by Reece’-vibes so I want to publicly associate myself with it early.
As a result of reading Martin Amis’s Experience (everyone is doing it) I revisited the Elizabeth Jane Howard bio by Artemis Cooper. Apparently she invited Amis (her stepson) round for a drink and presented two book ideas, one of which was a 5 part family saga. ‘Do that one,’ he said. Luckily!
LOOK.
Should you blow up your life? Miranda July advises on Substack.
Advice on starting a blog.
HACKS 3 is finally available in UK on Now TV!
I loved this from Eva Wiseman’s Substack.
THINK.
Why mushroom oil has become the drug of choice for London’s cool mums.
‘What is it about our lives now that make us so desperate to essentially be intoxicated in one form or another?’
‘There are many good reasons to accommodate budding dictators, and only one reason not to: Anticipatory obedience is a key building block of their power. [...] But once an autocracy gains power, it will come for many of the people who quite rationally tried to safeguard themselves and their businesses.’
Using exercise to cope with another Trump presidency.
You can’t post your way out of fascism.
‘It’s just that… how useful is any of this to the average reader? If you had fallen into a coma on December 1st and woken up at Christmas, you would be no less informed. In fact for most of the month you would have been better informed, by virtue of being unconscious.’
‘Focused on the essentially literary task of seeking better and better descriptions of what it is like to be alive, this kind of irony has been profoundly motivating to me both as a novelist and as a citizen. It requires turning a rigorous attention on the world and on others’ experience; expanding our imagination for what it’s like to be alive, both individually and as members of a collective; and applying skepticism to our own subjective biases.’
‘So are we progressively liberating people by cultivating new ways of being, or are we finding ever more fine-grained ways to squash them? My answer is: both.’
MY BOOK.
(Consider Yourself Kissed is a love story spanning a decade in East London, set against a backdrop of… reality! It will be published in the UK and USA in May.)
Also! CYK just went to the printers in Australia! It will come out with Text Publishing in fifty days — that’s so soon! (I always read other authors Instagramming that a pub date in 100 days… 50 days… two months… is soon, and I think no it’s not. But I get it now!) Please pre-order from your favourite shop! ❤️
Jess
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