Tag: Female writer

BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott

Here is a book about writing that is very famous and I can see why. It is not at all a technical book, but more about the actual emotional experience of sitting down to write.

Mostly what I enjoyed was her chapter SHITTY FIRST DRAFTS, which is about shitty first drafts. She encourages mess:

“Your day’s work might turn out to have been a mess. So what. . . Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist’s true friend. . . . Perfectionism will keep your cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft.”

And she encourages risk, telling about how she told her student, who was very hung up on mistakes that “. . . when he was old, or dying, he was almost certainly not going to say, “God! I’m so glad I took so few risks! I’m so glad I kept shooting so low!”

I also liked this part:

“Don’t be afraid of your material of your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.”

I found much of her advice helpful beyond writing. I thought about this suggestion a lot:

“Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train. You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbour’s yard every time it piddles on the floor. You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper. So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen.”

It was also somewhat hilarious. Please enjoy this:

“Now Muriel Spark is said to have felt that she was taking dictation from God every morning – sitting there, one supposes, plugged into a Dictaphone, typing away, humming. But this is a very hostile and aggressive position. One might hope for bad things to rain down on a person like this.”

JOE CINQUE’S CONSOLATION by Helen Garner

Apparently I’m on a real Helen-Garner-true-crime kick. This one is another account of a real trial. It is about a university student who hosts a dinner party to celebrate the fact that she is going to kill herself and her boyfriend. The boyfriend is not aware that this is a farewell party, but – get this – most of the other people there are (?!?). She goes on to kill the boyfriend but, in true cowardly form, not herself.

It is really a jaw-droppingly weird story. The girlfriend seems to be pretty sane-ish, but struggling with self-obsession. The judge believes she has some kind of personality disorder, which I could kind of believe, except for that part where she doesn’t even try killing herself, but stands over her boyfriend while he dies slowly over the whole weekend (heroin, rohypnol). She only get four years. Her best friend 100% knew what she was planning, is 100% sane, and gets off scot free. It’s wild. Only of their friends, a 21 year old, gets even close to calling the police, but is shamed into thinking they are not serious. This was in many ways the most interesting part of the story, how none of these students had the courage to follow their gut.

This was an earlier piece of reportage than THIS HOUSE OF GRIEF, and I did not like it as much. It was, for my taste at least, a little bit over-written and overwrought. It was still interesting though, and I don’t doubt that if she has written more of these I will read them.

GHOSTROOTS by Pemi Aguda

Here is speculative horror fiction from Nigeria.  Unfortunately, it’s short stories, which I always struggle to get into.  However they were skilful stories.  I liked, for example, the description of a woman   “who is stroking her blond wig as if it were a living thing, a pet that needs comfort”

I also really enjoyed the way she evoked contemporary Nigeria, very dense and real.  This I thought was an interesting part, about a girl whose parents will not tell her anything about her grandparents:

“But what do Nigerian parents tell their children about their own parents?  Especially the Pentecostal Christians? Nothing.  If you took a poll of your friends, three out of five would be similarly ignorant of these histories of parents who moved from somewhere to Lagos, left behind religions and curses and distant cousins and grimy pasts”

That first generation who moves to town, who goes from nine kids to two, in any country, is an interesting one.

Nigeria is generally kind of an extreme place, and it makes for a fun setting for speculative fiction. One charter fears she is the reincarnation of her evil grandmother, and she asks her “coworkers if they believe in reincarnation.  Five of them believe. Two of them claim to have corroborative stories.” One of them feels she is a reincarnation – of Beyonce.

DOOMSDAY BOOK by Connie Willis

Prepare yourself to hear that there is an author who has won more major SF awards than Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clark and Isaac Asimov COMBINED, despite having written fewer books than any of them.  Yep.  It’s this Connie Willis. I have never heard of her and will be amazed if you have.  In the introduction, they say that she has ‘one thing’ that makes her different from those other writers, and that one thing is her ‘ability to make you care,’ and I would say, yes, I hope so, because my assumption is that is the existence of a ‘vagina.’  However let us not get bogged down in all that.

This book raises the interesting question of what would happen to the careers of historians if time travel were invented. It tells of an ambitious young historian that volunteers to go back to what they consider one of the most dangerous centuries, the 14th.  And then boom, suddenly it’s a novel SPOILER ALERT of the black death.  It’s just a straight up story of what it must have been like to be there then.  Interestingly, they called it ‘the blue sickness.’  I had never considered how awful it must have been to go through the plague without even paracetamol or disinfectant.  It’s stomach churningly terrible.

The people in the future (which looks a lot like the 1950s) try and rescue the young historian, but they can’t get back into the past initially, and what I was struck by was how incredibly inefficient phoning people used to be.  They spend absolute ages waiting by the phone and taking messages and trying to catch people at home. It’s guess I had underestimated how much the group chat alone has improved human efficiency.

THE FRIENDZONE by Abby Jimenez

Here is a genre romcom.  I just read a genre rocmcom by the same author two days ago, as I am on a long beach vacation, and what was weird was this: it was basically the same plot –  couple are blissfully in love, but girl has an illness that means she must break up with him instead of talking to him (?).  Like I appreciate that genre is genre, but damn, it was literally the same story.  However I was three beers in by this stage and the sun was hot.

LIFE’S TOO SHORT by Abby Jimenez

Here is a genre romcom I read on the beach in an afternoon.  It was a genre romcom, so what can I tell you?   Boy meets girl, it ends happily, this is what we are looking for in genre fiction. However, one interesting part was that the girl believes she has a terminal illness, and will likely be dead in two years. She therefore lives her life as fully as she can, always getting the good wine, always doing the trips, etc, and it really made me think how funny it is that because we have (maybe) fifty years instead of two, we think we should not get the good wine.  It’s not as if fifty years is so very long.

FINGERSMITH by Sarah Waters

This book has an elaborate and unlikely plot involving petty theft, pornography, and the madhouse.  It is set in the Victorian era, and must have taken an absolute mountain of research, because it is extraordinarily rich in detail.  The author really knows a lot about London life of the period, which is fun. There is plenty on dog-skin coats, and public hangings, and as a bonus a potty which has a huge eye painted on the inside, and writing that says: WASH ME OUT AND KEEP ME CLEAN/ AND I’LL NOT TELL OF WHAT I’VE SEEN.  Gross!

Some of it was charming, as when a petty thief goes outside of London.  She has never left the city before, and is completely underwhelmed by the countryside.  She describes looking out of the windows of the stately home where she is staying and seeing only horrible scenes of ‘fields and trees’.

This same thief, who is quite sane, SPOILER ALERT is taken to the madhouse.  This part was really horrifying.  It was truly a prison you could not escape. It made me think a lot about Britney Spears, and Vivian Eliot, and Gertrude Beasley, and I’ll just say it again, thank god for feminism.

WORRY by Alexandra Tanner

I thought I was going to like this book.  Despite selling well in the US, it’s kind of hard to get in the UK – only being sold through Blackwell’s – so I went to some effort to get it.  It tells about a girl whose sister comes to live with her in her tiny New York apartment.  It’s very GenZ, with lots of anxiety and self-harm and talking about the internet. 

It had lots of lines like this: “There’s never been a reality in which I could be a serious thinker, a serious writer.  I’m a Floridian.  I’m a consumer.”

When I started to write this, I thought I had quite liked this book, but now as I try and think what to say, I wonder if I did like it.  I actually can’t remember a single other thing about it.  It’s already mixed up for me with all the other books I know where women talk about anxiety and self-harm and the internet.  Honestly, we need to work on our sh*t.

THREE CAME HOME by Agnes Keith

This was a memoir about a woman and her toddler who spent three years in a Japanese prison camp in Borneo in WWII.  As you can imagine, it was not too good a time.

The part that really blew my mind was that everyone knew the Japanese were coming, and she had multiple opportunities to get out (e.g., the wonderfully poetic ‘last boat to Singapore’).  She declined because she did not want to leave her husband.  DAMN. 

She is extremely, extremely hungry, so much so that she has to avoid watching her son eat so she will not steal from him.  When she is finally freed, she is so malnourished her sight is affected, and she cannot read.  She only cries twice: once, when they are interned, and then once again, when the Australian army drop flyers on the camp to say that Japan has surrendered.  This was already rumoured, and so the Japanese prison guards had suddenly been treating them very well, including inviting them to a – get this – farwell banquet?!?  This reminded me of COLD CREMATORIUM, another story about someone who made it to the last day of the war in a camp, and lived to see the prison guards start to worry about consequences.

The reason they had already heard about the surrender was that the British soldiers had managed to create a radio.  It took them one month to make the radio, but three months to make the tools to make it. It is completely from scratch from various bits of waste metal, and one elderly civilian’s hearing aids.  GodDAMN people in the 1940s knew how to do things!  It ran on a hand cranked generator, and the strongest man was given extra food so he could crank it.

I think the most horrifying part was the section where the womens’ camp is moved on, and they believe the men, who are left behind, will be executed.   The wives and husbands are allowed to speak to each other across a ditch.  She thinks this is the last time she will ever see her husband.  When the Australians finally arrive, and she is given paper to write home, she writes this:

“We are all alive.  George thin, but well.  The day we have lived for has come at last.  There are no words to tell you what this means to us.  I have no words to say what I feel.  Peace and freedom at last. Thank god.”

Imagine the state you have to be in, that the first thing you right is, ‘We are all alive.”  It was the first news her family had had of her since the beginning of the war. 

I HOPE THIS FINDS YOU WELL by Natalie Sue

This book has a fun premise, asking what would happen if you suddenly got access to all your colleagues mails and slacks. WHAT POWER!

This basic idea could have gone in a lot of different directions. I thought it might be an unhinged story about revenge, which probably says a lot about me. But actually it was much sweeter. It was about a girl who is self-absorbed, and getting a chance to see how other people really feel helps her focus outside herself for the first time in many years.

It’s interesting because her self-absorption is sort of sympathetic, in that what she is really absorbed in is guilt about the death of a friend. But even so, what you get is that self absorption is self absorption, and whatever its cause, it makes you unhappy.