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ON WRITING: A MEMOIR OF THE CRAFT by Stephen King

Full disclosure, I haven’t actually read very much Stephen King. I may be minded to after reading this book. It’s charming and unpretentious guide to writing, mixed up with his life story, which is similarly charming and unpretentious.

Interestingly for someone whose reputation is based on thrillers, he is not a big believer in plot as the engine of the story. He says he tends to start with a setting, a theme, or a ‘what-if, and just go from there, trusting the plot with find him as he goes along. He believes you should write the first draft fast

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction, can be a difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. . . .If I write rapidly . . . I find that I can keep up with my original enthusiasm and at the same time outrun the self-doubt that’s always awaiting to settle in.

He advises when you begin at least 1000 words a day, with only one day off a week (no more; you’ll lose the urgency and immediacy of your story if you do.), though he does 2,000. He also has advice on re-writes

When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,; he said. ‘When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story’

He even has an equation for this, being second draft = first draft – 10%

Also of interest was the story of his life. He has always been a big reader, and even today he carries a book whereever he goes (“You just never know when you’ll want an escape hatch.”). He grew up working class, and worked as a high school teacher, struggling to cover the bills for his wife and the two kids he had within five minutes of graduation. This is a tough time.

If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then. I could see myself thirty years on, wearing the same shabby tweed coats with patches on the elbows, potbelly rolling over my Gap khakis from too much beer. . . . and in my desk drawer, six or seven unfinished manuscripts which I would take out and tinker with from time to time, usually when drunk. If asked what I did in my spare time, I’d tell people I was writing a book . . . and of course I’d lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn’t too late, there were novelists who didn’t get started until they were fifty, hell, even sixty. Probably plenty of them.

Then he writes CARRIE. He hopes he might get a $10,000 advance if it is accepted. He nearly blacks out when they offer him $400,0000.

He struggles with various substance abuse issues (he doesn’t really remember writing CUJO apparently), and has a hilarious take on a number of different writers, who:”largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair” He doesn’t think it is co-incidental that they are mostly alcoholics. This seems a pretty good description of the emotional environment of much of the twentieth century literature, and I never considered that is was just because all the big writers were even bigger drinkers.

YOUTH by Tove Ditlevsen

This memoir makes you glad for the invention of the internet. Tove is a working class teenage girl who is moving between various depressing and menial jobs while trying to become a poet. (Poetry obviously being the most direct route out of poverty).

Her problem is she knows no one who is even tangentially associated with poetry or publishing, so spends her time moping around cleaning floors by day and drinking soda pop with sweaty young men by night. The whole time I just felt like screaming : just google it! But it is unfortunately 1945. Tim Berners-Lee won’t even be born for another ten years.

The first book in the trilogy, CHILDHOOD, was a sadder book than this one, which covers her adolescence. Unlike most people, she was happier as a teen than as a child. She has some money of her own and no longer has to live with her parents. Some would call this exploiting underage labour, she calls it freedom. Eventually she manages to connect with someone who publishes a journal, and he publishes one of her poems. She is so thrilled that the book ends with her considering marrying him, despite him being old and fat.

I hope she doesn’t do it, but I suspect she will. The final book in the trilogy is called a Danish word which means both poison and marriage. Signs are not good. I’ll report back when I get there.

THE SECOND SLEEP by Robert Harris

I rarely read thrillers, but this came up on a lot of ‘best of 2019’ lists so I gave it a try. It was fun. The cover screams ‘book for boys,’ complete with stupid gold font for the author’s name, while the name itself sounds like it could have been created by some kind of generic best-selling-man-name generator.

It begins with a priest going to bury another priest, who was a noted antiquarian. You think at first it is set in the medieval period, SPOILER ALERT, but then when he gets to the dead priest’s house, he examines his collection of antiquities and you find it is lots of bits of plastic and glass, and one smooth and shiny box, with “on the back the ultimate symbol of the ancients’ hubris and blasphemy – an apple with a bite taken out of it.”

BOOM! That’s right, it’s not the far past, it’s the far future, and my particular favourite far future, which is the post-apocalypse. Side point, it’s interesting how no one ever calls the present day the pre-apocalypse, even though that’s clearly what it is.

This setting is so fun that it triumphantly carries us through the book. These future people are so mystified by our leavings – the concrete pillars that supported motorways; an item which:

opened like a book. A pane of glass on one side; on the other, squares of black plastic, each inlaid with a letter of the alphabet.

It makes you see the modern world in a whole new way.

That said, I can’t say the book exactly went anywhere. There was a lot of plot, but not to very much effect, and the author at the end clearly recognized his difficulties and without shame SPOILER ALERT randomly killed off everyone in a mudslide. That’s what I call efficiency in novel writing.

PRIESTDADDY by Patricia Lockwood

This memoir got a lot of good reviews, and it seemed like I would like it. It tells about the author’s family, and in particular her father, who is a very eccentric Catholic priest.. Some of it was very funny. Try this:

(My father) seems overjoyed to see me. Has he forgotten what I’m like?

And

When we came home later, my father was wearing his most transparent pair of boxer shorts, to show us he was angry, and drinking Bailey’s Irish cream liquer out of a miniature crystal glass, to show us his heart was broken

And

My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur

Though I must comment: surely everyone knows cats are Republicans. Also, why the pretentious failure to capitalize Hillary Clinton’s name?

The book was sometimes beautiful. Here is a night time drive in the American South:

Through our rolled down windows we could hear the round rattle of the palms, crickets applauding, bullfrogs belching out their personal ads

But overall I found I couldn’t really connect with it. This is partly a matter of style – it is so intensely poetic, my query would be, why not just write a poem? Example:

Tomorrow, in that church, the songs I like best will flame out their brief lives, there and then gone, while the people hold soft and slumping candles under their chins and circles of cardboard catch the notes of hot wax. They will return again next year.

I know some love this sort of thing, but for me, I am like: M’KAY.

But a more profound problem for me was what seemed to me a lack of heart. Truly her family were strange and her path odd. Her father chose to buy a guitar rather than pay for her college. She ran away to marry a man she met on the internet back when the internet was just message boards. And yet somehow I don’t feel I understand how she felt about any of it. Everything is filtered through a distant ‘amusement’ which is no doubt where many people eventually get to with their families. But for me, for a book so ‘revealing’ I didn’t think it revealed much of anything.

LADY OF QUALITY by Georgette Heyer

In this novel, Georgette Heyer largely dispenses with having a plot and just goes full on in enjoying her supporting characters. And I enjoyed them too. I bought this at the last minute when I made the discovery that books about solitary confinement (SOLITARY) and rape (THINGS WE DIDN’T TALK ABOUT WHEN I WAS A GIRL) were not the most ideal for when you are trying to relax on holiday. You really shouldn’t be lying in your hotel bed blubbing gently about systemic racism in Louisiana while on vacation. There’s plenty of time to do that at home.

So I went to Heyer, as I so often do at such times, and she provided just the gentle cheering up I needed. Apparently this was her last Regency romance, written in 1972, and I think it shows: she can hardly be bothered to go through the motions. Oddly, I read her first, REGENCY BUCK (written 1935, and which invented the genre) the last time I was on holiday. By the end, apparently she was only churning them out to pay the bills (mostly tax) while she worked on what she thought would be her ‘magnum opus’: a medieval trilogy covering the House of Lancaster from 1393 to 1435.

She died before she could finish this, which she thought would be her most important and serious work. Perhaps there’s a lesson for us there, that we better get busy with what’s important before it’s too late. Though on the other hand, apparently what she did manage to finish of the trilogy was totally panned when it came out. Her romances, trash though she clearly thought they were, solider on: REGENCY BUCK is nearly a hundred years old and still in print. So perhaps there is still a lesson there, but it’s going to take a little thought to find out what it is.

I FEEL BAD ABOUT MY NECK by Nora Ephron

This book of essays contains some profound truths about the female experience. Here for example is an extract from an essay about maintenance, specifically as it refers to your appearance:

We begin, I’m sorry to say, with hair. I’m sorry to say it because the amount of maintenance involving hair is genuinely overwhelming. Sometimes I think that not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death.

She also has some wise words on aging, and particularly (and unfortunately) raised my consciousness about my neck:

Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth. You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn’t have to if it had a neck . . . Every so often I read a book about age, and whoever’s writing it says it’s great to be old. It’s great to be wise and sage and mellow; it’s great to be at the point where you understand just what matters in life. I can’t stand people who say things like this. What can they be thinking? Don’t they have necks?

She doesn’t enjoy aging, but, in what could be a watchword for us all at every birthday, her last essay is called ‘Consider The Alternative,’ which is good advice.

I laughed a lot in reading this book, but what surprised me is how much I thought about it afterwards. It was full of interesting ideas. Here she is on the end of her second marriage:

Why hadn’t I realized how much of what I thought of as love was simply my own highly developed gift for making lemonade? What failure of imagination had caused me to forget that life was full of other posibilities, including the possibility that eventually I would fall in love again?

I love that – I often, when I feel trapped, ask myself what my ‘failure of imagination’ is that I think I have to stay where I am. Self-indulgently, let me end with her celebration reading. It’s pretty much how I feel, and it’s rare I hear someone else express it. I say rare: in my real life, with people I actually know, I guess it’s pretty much never.

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real.

A PERFECT SPY by John Le Carre

Some call this Le Carre’s greatest novel. These people need to smoke less crack. What they really mean is that it’s not ‘just’ a spy novel, but a spy novel with daddy issues. Great, heaping masses of daddy issues. This is Le Carre’s most autobiographical novel, and my god but it shows.

The story is about a British spy who suddenly disappears, leaving his wife and his posting in Vienna. Very swiftly his employers begin to suspect he has been a double agent for decades. The novel has three strands; first, an account of where the spy has disappeared to; second, the text of a long letter about his life he is writing to his son; and third, the search of his wife and his employers to find him. Most of the novel is the letter, which is very much about his very tough childhood, with his conman father, and leads to the revelation of whether he is a double, a triple, or perhaps just a single agent.

To me it seemed kind of slow, with a bit too much repetition of the same themes: the loveless child, the danger of lying, etc. I guess in that way we can see it was based in life. In general one’s own life does seem to go on and on with the same rather boring themes you can’t seem to break free of. I guess that’s what therapy is for.

INDONESIA, ETC: EXPLORING THE IMPROBABLE NATION by Elizabeth Pisani

I read this book while on holiday in Indonesia, as I am too much of a good girl to enjoy a vacation without attempting to learn something about the country I am visiting. What it made me feel is that even after three weeks in Indonesia I have barely been to Indonesia at all.

This is largely because it is enormous, the 4^thmost populous country on earth (Jakarta tweets more than any other city!), 5000km from end to end, and made up of thousands of islands, each of which have a very different way of living. I enjoyed learning lots of stuff about Indonesia, and will even more enjoy telling people this stuff later at dinner parties so I look well informed.

However what I found most interesting was not the social or economic history but the author’s travel itself. She tries to say with ordinary Indonesians everywhere. Indonesia is not a very wealth country, so most of those people are quite poor. She spends a good amount of time telling you about individuals and their personal lives, and I can’t think when else I have read a book that genuinely tries to cross the class gap. At first I was rather suspicious of this effort, as it could very easily turn into that creepy ‘poverty tourism’ of some township tours, but she is herself aware of the danger of becoming “one of those slightly earnest foreigners who has gone native.” At some point she has a melt down, and after that I liked her much better:

I closed my door and suddenly seven months of staying in damp, windowless flea-pits, or being woken at four by the mosque, five by the chickens and six by the school kids, seven months of defending my childlessness, being asked why I didn’t have any friends. . . seven months in a world without loo paper, alcohol or English conversation, seven months of wearing the same six pairs of knickers, . . . of getting over foot rot only to come out in a mystery rash, . . . seven months of trying to fit into a world that was, quite simply, not my world. .

She bursts into tears and then pulls herself together (as she needed to go and see the crocodile shaman), but after this point I realized that she was trying to do something in this book beyond an ordinary travelogue. Or perhaps that’s just it, she is trying to do a travelogue of the ordinary. I’ve never read anything quite like it.

CHILDHOOD by Tove Ditlevsen

Here’s a book that makes you realize why there aren’t very many female authors in history. Tove grows up poor in Copenhagen in the early twentieth century. However such is her love of writing that she can say:

. . on my fifth birthday (my father) gave me a wonderful edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, without which my childhood would have been grey and dreary and impoverished

I would think with the rickets and the diphtheria and everything you can still qualify as having an impoverished childhood. (Side point: It’s quite refreshing really to realize anyone was ever poor in these Scandinavian countries; on my side I am quite exhausted by all this blond hair and equality and hygge.).

She is, as are it seems many aspiring writers, a misfit. (Why is nobody’s memoir ever about how popular they were?). Far from school days being the best days of your life, she says that:

Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own.

The point is anyway that she is desperate to be a writer, and as this is the first of a trilogy, we can only assume she succeeds, but I can’t imagine how, as the books ends with her being forced out of school at fourteen (reason: she is female) and starting work as a child minder. I couldn’t help but think of the many thousands of girls of limited means in centuries past who longed just as passionately as her and didn’t make it. And that’s only thinking of the tiny subset who lucked into literacy and so could even consider a writing career. I will read the next two books in the trilogy and let you know how she managed it.

CAYLPSO by David Sedaris

What I got from this is that David Sedaris is older and sadder than he used to be. In 2011 I went on a big Sedaris binge, and read almost everything he ever wrote. This year, on an unexpected holiday in Barcelona, I borrowed his first book THE SANTALAND DIARIES. So it is especially jarring to read his latest. In the first he is poor and young; in this one is rich and old. I’m not quite sure how you contrive to be unhappy when you have enough money to buy a second home (by the beach) or Japanese trousers that‘cost as much as a MacBook Air,’ but he is managing it.

Perhaps it is just him. Or perhaps it just shows that, horrifyingly enough, money really doesn’t make you happy. Or perhaps, even worse, it’s shows that to get older is to get sadder. You have more time for sad things to happen to you, so the odds are against you. His sister, from whom he was estranged, killed herself. His mother is dead, his father is ninety-one and doing some serious hoarding.

You feel him sort of flailing for his old style, trying to have last lines that neatly and unexpectedly complete every essay (a miracle of his past books) but somehow, at least for me, it all seems a bit effortful. That said, Sedaris not at his best is about ten times better than most. A small sample:

I started seeing people wearing face masks in the airport and decided that I hated them. What bugged me I realized, was their flagrant regard for their own lives. It seemed not just overcautious but downright conceited. I mean, why should they live?

This really made me laugh. I feel this way about people with their raw/paleo/whatever diets, but I’m not ballsy enough to say so.