Crudo

Kathy is a writer. Kathy is getting married. It’s the summer of 2017 and the whole world is falling apart.

From a Tuscan hotel for the super-rich to a Brexit-paralysed UK, Kathy spends the first summer of her forties trying to adjust to making a lifelong commitment just as Trump is tweeting the world into nuclear war. But it’s not only Kathy who’s changing. Fascism is on the rise, truth is dead, the planet is hotting up. Is it really worth learning to love when the end of the world is nigh? And how do you make art, let alone a life, when one rogue tweet could end it all?

Olivia Laing radically rewires the novel in a brilliant, funny and emphatically raw account of love in the apocalypse. Crudo charts in real time what it was like to live and love in the horrifying summer of 2017, from the perspective of a commitment-phobic artist who may or may not be Kathy Acker.

After falling utterly in love with The Lonely City, I got pretty obsessed with Olivia Laing. I did the usual thing I do in these instances – sought out as many podcast interviews as I could. Olivia Laing gives good podcast. My favourite of her interviews – as is so often the case – was on Literary Friction (my favourite of the bookish podcasts I listen to), where she talked about her novel Crudo, written in a frenzy over seven weeks in the summer of 2017.

The book is about existing during that summer – the early days of the Trump presidency, the first fallout after the Brexit vote and the ongoing tragedy of the Grenfell Tower fire. It’s about the numbing horror of the 24-hour news cycle, the creeping sense of detached fear we have that maybe we’re in the midst of a long and drawn out apocalypse, where the most we can hope for is to bow out before the bloody end – and this was before most of us knew what a zoonotic disease was, and the role our casual destruction of the planet played in creating them. It’s also a book about learning to be married in your forties, having spent the vast majority of your life alone. On Literary Friction, Laing said it was, in part, a book about selfishness.

A weird thing about Crudo that you don’t strictly need to know going in is that is it is sort of autobiographical – Laing herself was a woman just married in her forties navigating the relentless horror of that summer, and is sort of written as Kathy Acker, a famous post-modernist writer who died in 1997. Laing writes from the perspective of an invented Acker, who in turn built a career out of theft: she wrote her own re-imaginings of Great Expectations and Don Quixote, among others. Like Laing, Kathy loved to write from the invented perspectives of the famous and dead.

Reading Crudo you get whiplash. It is the perfect microcosm of modern life – as they describe it on Literary Friction, the epitome of the state of the nation novel – veering between the different sorts of excess we have at our fingertips. The too much news contrasts with the too much food, horror on screen is read against a backdrop of the glorious Italian summer Kathy spends eating and drinking with her new husband. Crudo means raw in Italian – that’s what it is. This book is about the way the world leaves you raw – and how opening yourself up to someone by marrying them does the same thing.

Crudo is particular to that summer, but applicable to the others that have come since. Trump is no longer president, but Trumpism is still thriving and I’m scared of what will happen next now it is freed from the few remaining threads of accountability the White House provided. Here in the UK, we Brexited, and we’re not focused on it because there is so much else to worry about, but it is chaos and it is destroying businesses, and the consequences in Northern Ireland are as bad as all of the experts nobody listened to predicted. The situations have shifted, but the feeling is the same. The impending doom. There was an odd sort of comfort in sitting in that for Laing for a while, like I recaptured, briefly, that feeling of all being in it together we glimpsed in the early days of the pandemic, when people stood in doorways banging saucepans for the NHS just to feel like they were doing something.

It is not a hopeful book, but it is not strictly a depressing one either. It’s all so beautifully normal – Kathy’s lazy days, the small fights with her new husband that feel huge until they don’t anymore, her constant desire for more space from the man until she has it, and the terrible feeling of missing him when she finally does. It’s a snapshot of a moment that adds up to a devastating and intimate portrait of a person in the midst of a life-shifting summer – but the reality of lift shifting is it doesn’t feel especially huge at the time – in what feels like a world-ending crisis, but actually turns out to be a precursor for whatever comes next. Though Olivia didn’t know that then.

It made me wonder what this crisis is a precursor to.

Sometimes you just have to sit in it for a while, and there’s no one better to do that with than Olivia Laing.

Intimations

Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas, feelings and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean it submit to a new reality – or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it?

Suffused with a profound intimacy and tenderness in response to these extraordinary times, Intimations is a slim, suggestive volume with a wide scope, in which Zadie Smith clears a generous space for thought, open enough for each reader to reflect on what has happened – and what might come next.

The isolation of the pandemic has created a space for the mind that we’ve never experienced before. Or maybe I shouldn’t say created, maybe it was always there, but in the long-term suspension of anything resembling the sort of life we had always taken for granted has finally become un-ignorable. I think whether this is a good thing or a hellish thing probably depends on the day, and what sort of person you are – in terms of both privilege and disposition. In Intimations, Zadie Smith’s utterly absorbing series of essays about pandemic life, she describes us as being “Confronted with the problem of life served neat, without distraction or adornment or superstructure”, and Zadie, like us, has “almost no idea what to do with it”. So we sit and we think, or we try not to think, and in the grey space between those two goals we reach for books like this, which are like a fresh hot water bottle in a cold lap – they burn a little, but they comfort too.

Rightly or not, I tend to read essay collections with the hope they will ‘explain life’ to me, to unlock some previously unidentified truth that will make me ‘solved’ for having read them. The first thing I often do find, but I’m less sure about the second – I think perhaps that will continue to mostly evade me until I pluck up the courage to start writing it for myself. While I definitely went into Intimations with my usual attitude of teach me how to be, Zadie, the profound experience I had with this book – and continue to have when I pick it up from time to time to reread an essay as I have done since I first read it – shook me.

The past year has been a destabilising lurch into the unknown. Before now most of us – the lucky ones, I guess – never understood how living in a real-life disaster movie could be so boring. We’ve clung to routine, or no routine, great habits and maladaptive ones, obsessive scrolling and Netflix – our coping mechanisms in the absence of any roadmap instructing us How to Deal. This whole time, we should have just been reading Intimations instead.

I’m not saying you’ll finish these six essays knowing suddenly how to mark time in some way other than with whatever you’re going to eat next (just me?) – like I said, essays don’t tend to ‘solve’ you, much as you might wish them to – but Zadie’s words go some way towards lifting the emotional burden. I’m writing this the day after Alexandria Orcasio Cortez’s Instagram Live where she revealed the details of what happened to her during the storming of the capital, and before that, how her response to that trauma was informed by a previous sexual assault. During that video she talked a lot about trauma, and how doubt over the legitimacy of our own experience – stoked by the gas lighting of a society that hasn’t figured out how to face its own darkness – stops us from talking about it. And this is so counter intuitive, she explained, because research has actually shown that one of the ways that we process trauma is to talk about it, by telling people: This Is What Happened To Me.

That’s what Zadie Smith is doing in Intimations.

It’s been really hard to figure out how to talk about suffering during the pandemic, when so many of us are in such fortunate positions of privilege. When the entire world is going through the exact same thing, how can you talk about your individual suffering? I don’t know about anyone else, but there have been times in the midst of all this when I am having an especially bad day I have found myself berating myself along the lines of – so today you’re making a literally global pandemic all about you?

Yep. I guess.

As Zadie writes: “…it is possible to penetrate the bubble of privilege and even pop it – whereas the suffering bubble is impermeable. Language, logic, argument, rationale and relative perspective itself are no match for it.” It’s an essay that suggests rather than berating ourselves for this sense of our own suffering we might be better served by accepting it, feeling empathy for it – so that ultimately, we might give other people the same kindness.

Intimations is a collection filled with these small truths – the writing brings with it a sort of clarity that you want to sit in conversation with. It is a work that keeps informing your day to day long after you have turned the final page. It’s a conversation about quarantine, and time, and the murder of George Floyd – an essay that points towards the other pandemic, the one that has been slowly killing us without half of the headlines: contempt.

She writes: “Patient zero of this particular virus stood on a slave-ship four hundred years ago, looked down at the sweating, bleeding, moaning mass below deck, and reverse-engineered an emotion – contempt – from a situation he, the patient himself, had created. He looked at the human beings he had chained up and noted that they seemed to be the type of people who wore chains. So unlike other people. Frighteningly unlike!”

It is a time of trauma – not equally distributed – and none of us know what to do. We don’t know “what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it”, and it feels like our identities have been swallowed by that reality. Intimations doesn’t have the solution – though for a short while at least does answer the question of what to do with all that time. The solution probably, let’s face it, doesn’t really exist – or isn’t so much one achievable thing as a multitude of shifting and evolving goal posts. But it says something important, all the same.

This is what happened to me.

This is what happened to me.

This is what happened to me.

January Wrap-Up

About as dressed as I ever get these days

I always fear sounding whiny and negative when I write about myself, but if I’m being honest, January has been a hard month. In the UK we’re in our third national lockdown – not as strict as the first lockdown, not as lax as the second – we just passed 100,000 deaths and our utterly incompetent government still won’t fully close the borders whilst claiming they are doing ‘everything they can’.

You compensate in weird ways. I have gotten completely obsessed with wellness and productivity influencers. Women with perfect bodies who wake up at 5am (because they want to, not because they’re anxious!) to set up their bullet journals, and always seem like they are able to eat more than their tiny waists would imply – I know this because the What I Eat In A Day video is the staple of such content creators, and I watch them obsessively. It’s not a practise I recommend.

Like most things, the current state of my days can be summed up by a tweet I found on Instagram:

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This month on the blog
I wrote about my love affair with Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier

I’m reading
Embracing the Culture of Numbness
We Are All Grieving
The Journalist and the Pharma Bro

Recipe of the month

This Golden Tempeh Nourish Bowl by Pick Up Limes. My latest health-based obsession is gut health, and so I have been trying to simulate some sort of control over the world by introducing more fermented goods into my life. Hence, I’m trying to figure out tempeh. Also kombucha. This recipe is real good, though I would recommend marinating it for as long as possible – it is not a leave it for 10 minutes and hope for the best sort of job.

Quote of the month
From Crudo, by Olivia Laing
“Kathy was becoming obsessed with the numbness, the way the news cycle was making her incapable of action, a beached somnolent whale. No one could put anything together, that was the problem. She had recently read an article that listed all the reasons why monarch butterflies were dying, before seguing proudly into an account of taking a plane across America so the writer could cheer herself up by seeing monarch butterflies. On the plane she complained about the air pollution of jet fuel and perfume, how it gave her allergies, but she didn’t connect the casual habit of flying thousands of miles with the collapse of the butterflies. Kathy didn’t blame her. The equations were too difficult, you knew intellectually, but you never really saw the consequences since they tended to impact other poorer people in other poorer places.”

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Shameless Instagram plug. Come follow me! I am more active over there these days.

How was your January? What are you reading? I’d love to hear from you in comments.

Rebecca

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .

The novel begins in Monte Carlo, where our heroine is swept off her feet by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden proposal of marriage. Orphaned and working as a lady’s maid, she can barely believe her luck. It is only when they arrive at his massive country estate that she realizes how large a shadow his late wife will cast over their lives – presenting her with a lingering evil that threatens to destroy their marriage from beyond the grave.

I am a huge Lily James fan girl, so of course I watched the Netflix adaptation of Rebecca as soon as it came out. I enjoyed it. The scenery was rich and immersive, the outfits gorgeous and Mrs Danvers downright weird. Then… I didn’t think a lot more of it. I rarely read the book after having watched the film – I don’t know why this is. I will often watch the adaptation of the book, but something about the other way around doesn’t tend to call to me unless the film was one I particularly loved. Which I did not – though I of course enjoyed it, it wasn’t an experience that was going to linger in my mind for years to come.

What changed? Well, I started to notice that there was a response I was seeing from a particular group – women around my mum’s age – of total dismissiveness of the film. They got it all wrong, they said, that wasn’t Rebecca at all. So when I went to visit home over Christmas and spied my mum’s copy on the book shelf, I decided it was time to pick it up.

And that, friends, is the last anyone saw me for the next couple of days.

In general I have really enjoyed my reading lately, but it has been a while since I have truly resented having to do anything but curl up in a corner and scour the pages like I did with this.

Because despite having watched the movie, what I did not anticipate was: this book is seriously messed up!

Rebecca is a tale of toxic relationships, patriarchy, sexuality and death – actual, real death and the insidious, incremental, unbearably slow death of the self, a common phenomenon driven by a particular type of consuming, domineering relationship.

In Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier serves us the two Mrs De Winters as foils to one another. We have the deceased Rebecca: wildly sexy, charismatic, beloved and great at parties, presented in stark contrast to the new bearer of the title. The narrator and current Mrs De Winter: youthful and inexperienced, mousy, shy and not even allowed the respect of her own name – a symbol, we soon realise, of her willingness to completely abandon herself to this relationship with the cold, mysterious Maxim – couldn’t more different. And oh, is she aware of it. She is consumed by it, in fact. Her intrigue about Rebecca – driven by her husband’s absolute refusal to discuss her – quickly crosses over into obsession, and perhaps some admiration too, for this woman who was so loudly, so profoundly, herself.

Then we have the other domineering female presence of the book: Mrs Danvers. The house keeper at Manderly, she is a black cloud hanging over everything right from the start. She’s a like a dark shadow stretching throughout the house – the thing moving in the corner of your eye that you don’t notice until it’s already too late. She too can’t help but compare the current Mrs De Winter to the former – who, you get the feeling as the book goes on, she was probably in love with (apparently Du Maurier was bisexual herself, so even though this book came out in the 1930s it seems likely this is what she meant to imply). She makes it her mission to nurture the narrator’s Rebecca obsession, feeding her small details that add up to a comparison in which she is found desperately wanting.

What is especially intriguing about this book, is that about three quarters of the way through, the narrative utterly flips – if you’ve watched the movie you’ll know this already, but it not, I won’t spoil it for you (also, it’s way better in the book). Du Maurier executes a genius twist that sees everything the narrator had come to believe about her life at Manderly crumble away, revealing an even darker reality.

At its core, I think, Rebecca is a book about identity. As the story goes on and the gothic undertones draw in closer around her, you start to see the narrator as a woman divided – one part of her explores her power, experimenting with what she understands as Rebecca-like behaviours, only to be shamed and rejected for them by Maxim. The other, dominant side is the submissive wife, the blank page willing to be whatever her husband wishes of her – a husband who on the rare occasions he engages with her at all speaks of her innocence, her fragility and her youthful inexperience as what attracts him.

I know which side I want to see win out.

Rebecca was thrilling, compelling and totally, totally addictive. Clearly, I need some more Du Maurier in my life.

Top reads of 2020

It’s hard to know what to say about 2020. I’m so tired of the vagueness of talk about ‘these extraordinary times’, but at a loss for how to describe them for myself.

I suppose I could talk about my 2020. In a nutshell: it sucked, but not as much as it might have. I made it through to the other end with a job (albeit with a 20% pay cut), a home – a new one. I finally escaped from my seven-person shared house into a much smaller, somewhat Covid-safer environment. My new landlady has a dog. I’m healthy. My loved ones are healthy too.

In the other hand, like so many, I can count the number of times I’ve seen my family this year on one hand – my brother is clinically vulnerable, so he and my mum have spent the year even more isolated than I have. My gran became very sick and died during the first lockdown in March – I couldn’t say goodbye or grieve with my family. My dog died right before lockdown started, too. My mental health has taken a massive hit. I don’t sleep well.

Within that: I read lots. There was a long period there were nothing brought me any comfort or enjoyment aside from books, and I clung to that. I feel closer to my friends than I ever have, even though I’ve barely seen most of them this year. I got really into cooking, and I’m getting pretty good at it. I did a lot of knitting, and I’m getting better at that too. I started a bookstagram account, and I’m really enjoying curating that space. It’s my little corner of the internet filled with the things that I love.

This is how I have existed in ‘these extraordinary times’. I built a Covid bunker out of books, filling my head with stories in a mostly fruitless effort to push the anxiety out. But it wasn’t all for nothing – yes, I’m still anxious, but the reading was excellent. Here are a few of my favourites…

City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

One of my first pandemic reads, City of Girls lifted my heart at a time I desperately needed it. There’s an entire life in this book – one filled with fun, sex, adventure, self doubt, utter and complete failure and fuck up, destruction, rebuilding, loss and how you go about continuing life after it – there are even periods of contentment. As well as being an incredibley thrilling ride through the roaring twenties in the theatre world of New York City, something about this novel offers some much needed hopeful perspective on things. It’s a visceral reminder that a life is so much greater than the sum of its parts – that there is always, always something just around the corner. And not only that, but, whether you believe it or not – you’re ready to meet it.

Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

This BOOK. Written like a series of transcribed interviews with one of the most iconic bands of the 1970s, Daisy Jones & The Six narrates the drug-fuelled, heartbreaking, exhilarating years of the eponymous band’s meteoric rise and explosive split, with singer-songwriter Daisy Jones and Billy Dunne at its addictive, star-crossed centre. A book about how people – and relationships – crumble under the weight of ego (and lots and lots of drugs), soul mates (the fucked up, destructive kind), the bitter cost of fame, and maybe, eventually, a little bit of healing. And music. Lots and lots of music.

Normal People by Sally Rooney

On the spectrum of responses to Normal People, I come down strongly on the side of love. It is a book about all of the small and big ways we can meet each other and fail each other over the course of a relationship. As close as we might think we are to somebody, we’re only ever parallel lines, and in that space between lie endless possibilities for connection – and, as Sally Rooney is far more interested in, misunderstanding. Connor and Marianne, the dual narrators of Normal People, fail and hurt each other in seemingly endless combinations throughout this often frustrating (or, depending on the type of person you are, uncomfortably confronting) book about figuring out how to love someone for their entire, complicated self – while bringing your entire, complicated self, open and vulnerable, to the table.

The Girl With The Louding Voice by Abi Daré

This book was one of my biggest surprises this year. We were sent a copy at work and it hung around the office for ages (that’s how long I’ve had it for – since back when I still went into the office!) before I eventually claimed it for myself – where it proceeded to get bumped off the top of the TBR for the next several months. Sometimes it goes that way. If you’re making the same mistake, I suggest you bump it up to your next read. This book is powerful, emotive and utterly addictive. The story of one young girl, Adunni, and her determination to get an education despite facing the devastating loss of her mother, forced marriage and other immense challenges that would take us into spoiler territory to name, once you start reading you won’t be able to put The Girl With The Louding Voice down until you find out how Adunni’s story ends. True to its title, it is the vibrance of the narrative voice that made this novel stand out. Adunni’s personality is huge and encompassing, and I fell completely in love with her faster and with greater force than I have with a protagonist in a long time. I read this book with a sort of desperation, rapidly flipping the pages, hoping against hope Adunni would get the ending she deserved. Daré is a powerful writer, and I am greatly looking forward to reading whatever she comes out with next.

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

At this point it’s fair to say I am a fully paid up member of the cult of Bardugo. After Six of Crows I didn’t think it was possible for me to love her any more – then she goes and throws THIS into the mix. Like Veronica Mars meets Buffy by way of Gilmore Girls (the Yale years), this is a thrilling dual narrative split between Alex Stern (one-time drug dealer, natural ghost see-er of traumatic and mysterious origins) and Daniel Arlington ‘Darlington’, for all appearances the typical Yale rich kid (aside from the whole ‘I can see dead people’ (with the help of substances, anyway) thing) that centres on three key mysteries: what exactly are the origins of Alex Stern? Who is the murderer currently prowling the campus? And what the heck happened to Alex and Darlington that sees the book start with her bloodied and alone in her apartment and him, apparently, vanished?

Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo

This sprawling, evocative and utterly unique book throws you into 12 vastly different lives. Told mostly from the perspective of Black, British women, this novel of interconnected but separate narratives spanning continents and centuries doesn’t spend much time with each of its characters, but completely immerses you in their lives. The 12 portraits are empathetic but sharp – they dig deep into challenging territory of racism, trauma and heartbreak, but very equally into the satirical, where no one is let off the hook. It gives these women such authenticity and complexity that you feel robbed when their stories end – even as you’re eager to meet the next.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

I can’t decide whether I want Jia Tolentino to be my best friend, or if I just want to live inside of her brain. I love a book of essays, but Trick Mirror took the form to a level of cut throat relevancy I have never experienced before. These works are so of the moment, so cutting and so minutely observed on all things pop culture, feminism, race and politics that I spent half the time shaking the book and aggressively nodding my approval and the other face palming and screaming (internally, obvs): HOW have I never thought of that?! Whether she’s skewering #GirlBoss feminism, the cult of athleisure or her own performance on a little known reality TV show, her perspective is revealing, thrilling and deeply cathartic. Please, just read it.

And there we have it! Well, plus Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier and Intimations by Zadie Smith, both of which I have read in the last week and fallen utterly in love with. We’ll talk about those more in 2021, I guess.

If you made it to the end of this post, first, thank you. Second, tell me, what are some of the books that got you through 2020?

Happy New Year friends. I don’t know what to expect from this coming year, but there will be good books, and there is comfort in that ❤

The 3 bookish podcasts you need

2020 has been the year of the podcast. I have always been a listener, but as my anxiety levels have increased (and… I mean… 2020.) my pod hours have sky rocketed. Truthfully, I probably spend an unhealthy amount of time listening to podcasts, but as vices go, I could have chosen much worse. For the first time, this year I started deliberately seeking out bookish podcasts, so today I thought I’d share three of my favourites.

Literary Friction
Bookish, introspective, whip smart and brimming with exciting recommendations, it’s always a good day when a new episode of Literary Friction lands in my feed. Hosted by Carrie Plitt and Octavia Bright, expect in-depth author interviews and thematic discussions on everything from the necessity of hope, to sisterhood, race, therapy, vanity, social media and so much more. I recommend listening in a hot bath – some sort of bubbles/salts essential – with a towel pillow. Literary Friction is the perfect accompaniment to a lazy, introspective Sunday afternoon.

Dip in: State of the Nation with Olivia Laing. Recorded in 2018 with the release of her novel Crudo, this is a look at the role of the state of the nation novel – those books that capture the Zeitgeist and push us to reflect on the current moment.

City of Voices with Zadie Smith. Honestly I could listen to Zadie Smith talk all day. This episode, a live recording of an interview celebrating the release of Grand Union, Smith’s first short story collection, is all about embracing our inner chaos and turning our backs on the influence of social media (to whatever extent that is still possible).

Book Riot
If you’re into the newsy, gossipy side of the book world then Book Riot, hosted by Jeff O’Neal and Rebecca Joines Schinsky is the show for you. A weekly delve into the latest in the book world, they cover the bookish buzz, scandals and publishing insider info you need to know. As someone always several weeks behind of the goss – at least before I listened to this show – I get a lot of satisfaction being up to date with what’s going on, whether that’s the books making the awards lists, the publishers launching new, exciting imprints or the tell-all essays on whatever latest old science fiction writer turned out to be a perv. I would say I think this show suffers from being slightly too regular (they’re pushing two pods a week at the moment) but you can always skip one when they fall too far into the irrelevant (for example there’s one in my feed right now about The West Wing I don’t feel the need to listen to). Overall though, Jeff and Rebecca’s critical eye to the publishing world and regular dose of bookish excitement is enriching, and has provided me with a much greater insight into the industry than I previously had.

Dip In: Our Favourite Reads of Summer 2020. Who doesn’t like a good recommendations show? As if we don’t already have longer TBRs than we could ever possibly tackle! What I particularly enjoy about Jeff and Rebecca’s recommendations is they don’t necessarily feel the need of pick up every book simply because it’s ‘of the moment’ – there’ll always be a few gems in their lists I’ve never heard of before.

Deals deals deals. A very publishing ‘inside baseball’ type episode, this is a look at the recently announced book deals and pretty much whether or not Jeff and Rebecca think they’re worth the money. Again, if you’re interested in the inner workings of the publishing industry then this conversation will interest you.

The High Low
While technically a news and pop culture show, The High Low, hosted by writers Pandora Sykes and Dolly Alderton, has a strongly bookish flavour. It’s a show that celebrates writing, and is filled with author interviews, bookish recommendations and links to the best articles and essays Pandora and Dolly have enjoyed that week (something that makes my journalist heart oh-so-happy). As the name implies, The High Low embraces the silly as much as the serious, giving rise to a wide-ranging conversation that one week might centre an absolutely devastating, necessary piece of political writing, and the next might be consumed by an essay on what coronavirus means for the future of the buffet (someone really wrote this, and it was fantastic).

The High Low just aired its final episode (literally heartbreaking), but I think it still deserves its place on this list and I will be going back to listen to my favourite episodes again and again. Dolly and Pandora created a beautiful community of people celebrating things they loved and having challenging conversations with empathy and introspection. It might not be current any more, but it’ll always be relevant.

Dip in: Wiley’s Anti-Semitism, Kiley Reid’s Such A Fun Age & An Author Special With Nesrine Malik. Recorded back in July, the interview with Nesrine Malik (who, if you don’t know please Google all of her work immediately – this piece about cancel culture is a wonderful start point) about resisting cultural myths is vital listening.

Anti-Racism Resources & An Author Special with Candice Brathwaite. At some point I will finally get around to reviewing I Am Not Your Baby Mother, Candice Brathwaite’s utterly mesmerising memoir/ social and political commentary on Black motherhood in the UK. This episode of The High Low was where I first encountered her, and I fell in love immediately. It’s an utterly compelling conversation on the inequalities, joys and frustrations of Black motherhood in the UK, and the groundbreaking work in representation Candice has done in the last few years in the ridiculously white world of the mummy bloggers.

Do you listen to many podcasts? What are some of your favourites? Let me know in comments so I can keeping feeding my obsession

A bookish gift guide

Books are, in my humble opinion, far and away the best way to show your love – and most especially at Christmas, when even the busiest among us has time to settle down with blanket and bestseller, hot chocolate in hand. Here’s a few of the books my loved ones will find under their respective trees this Christmas…

For Your Bestie: Big Friendship by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman

The ladies of the Call Your Girlfriend podcast have written the book about friendship we have all been waiting for. Refreshing, honest, thoroughly researched and utterly celebratory, Big Friendship looks at what it means to be in a committed, platonic relationship with another person and the joys and difficulties that come with that. Strung together around the narrative of their own friendship – its inception, development, how they almost lost each other and how they went about rebuilding – Big Friendship is about the family we choose, and how we can keep choosing them, no matter what the years throw our way.

The Big Non Fiction: She Said by Jodie Kantor and Megan Twohey

In this remarkable work – which reads more like a thriller than a piece of journalism – New York Times reporters Jodie Kantor and Megan Twohey narrate their experience of breaking the Harvey Weinstein story, and the following explosion of the #MeToo movement into the cultural conciousness. This book takes you behind the scenes into the nitty gritty of reporting – finding sources, confirming stories and the continuing work of convincing people to come forward, despite the personal cost. If you’ve watched the movie Spotlight, it’s a lot like that.

For The Reader: Truly Devious, The Vanishing Stair and The Hand on the Wall by Maureen Johnson

There is nothing more delicious than devouring an entire series in the liminal time between Christmas and New Year’s, and this YA mystery series has it all: remote boarding school full of genius teenagers, romance, a years-old murder mystery that suddenly intrudes on the present day when a student is found dead under mysterious and confounding circumstances. The addictive and immersive world of the Ellingham Academy is the perfect post-Christmas literary escape.

The Mum Read: The Familiars by Stacey Halls

The 17-year-old mistress of Gawthorpe Hall is pregnant for the fourth time. With three miscarriages already behind her, when Fleetwood Shuttleworth discovers a letter hidden by her husband Richard – himself desperate for an heir to his family fortune – from her doctor declaring her unfit to survive childbirth, she becomes desperate. Then she meets Alice Gray, a mysterious young midwife whose ancient knowledge of herbs and potions promises to help Fleetwood survive her pregnancy and provide the heir her husband demands. Then the witchcraft accusers come to town, and everything goes to hell. This deeply atmospheric, creepy, emotive book weaves a rich and enveloping tale that is just the right balance of female empowerment and spooky witchy vibes.

The Young’un: Asha & The Spirit Bird by Jasbinder Bilan

The magical middle grade read tells the story of Asha and her journey across the Himalayas to track down her missing father. Immersed in the culture of India, unflinching in its portrayal of family difficulties and how children respond to them and filled with adventure and peril, you’ll fall in love with Asha and her best friend Jeevan on their journey to save Asha’s family from the debt collectors who would take everything from them.

The ‘Tough Year’ Read: City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

Vivian’s life opens up when she moves to New York. This tale of love, heartbreak, finding your passion, utterly fucking up – like, fucking up so badly it feels like there is no way back – finding that way back and becoming the person you were supposed to be all along, is the inspirational, comforting, everything is going to be okay-ist book I have read all year. It also has sexy showgirls, theatre, costumes, glamour and lots and lots of sex. Elizabeth Gilbert wrote this book while navigating the loss of her wife, and it doing so she created the book we all need as a friend to guide us through hard times.

The Everybody MUST Read: I Am Not Your Baby Mother by Candice Brathwaite

This seminal work on Black British Motherhood is like nothing you’ve ever read before. Part memoir, part socio-political journalism, Candice extrapolates her own experiences into the wider narrative of racial divides in Britain. From mummy blogger representation to utterly heartbreaking health disparities experienced by Black Mothers, this book offers revolutionary insight into the real Britain so often ignored by the headlines. Compelling, emotive and revealing in every sense of the word, whether you’re a mother or not, whether you want to be or not, this book has something to teach you about life.

Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race: A Discussion

Reni Eddo-Lodge’s 2017 book Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race is a thorough and confronting analysis of race relations in Britain today. Through chapters on subjects including Black British history (and its erasure), systemic racism in institutions like the police, education and sport, feminism and the relationship between race and class, Eddo-Lodge delves into the racist structures that British society is built on and the ways they are upheld by a society that has chosen to avert its eyes.

Though the book was a massive deal when it first came out, following the murder of George Floyd, it flew back up the charts, and in June, Eddo-Lodge became the first Black Brit to top the best seller list. It was an achievement about which she felt an understandable amount of conflict.

Why was it happening for the first time in 2020? (a shameful 6% of authors published in the UK are people of colour, so it’s not actually that surprising)

And how was it possible that so many white people were just waking up to the existence of racism now?

I first had my mind given a good shake by this book last year but I decided it was long overdue a reread and today I want to do something a bit different. In the
wake of the massive protests for racial inequality this year there was the huge drive for books on anti-racism. And I do think this is a good thing, but given

a) The huge amount of people (white women especially) who still voted for Trump in the US election (still matters, even though he lost)

b) The amount of white people who were surprised by that and

c) Here in the UK, the Conservative government’s decision to choose Black History Month as the moment to move to end the teaching of critical race theory in schools – effectively closing down discussions of white privilege in educational settings.
(I feel the need to add here that the UK curriculum already contains no substantive discussion of racism or Black history, and the government also rejected calls for changes to the curriculum to address this lack earlier in this year, so this entire story was about something that already isn’t happening and was only a means to stoke up right wing vitriol – which worked, obviously)

…I don’t think a lot of people really engaged with what they read.

So, let’s talk. When we read anti-racist texts it shouldn’t be as a passive observer. Reading the book is not the same as holding yourself accountable for the internalised racism that you inevitably hold. In addition to experiencing the author’s story and really taking on the information they are imparting, you need to push yourself – to learn more, to ask yourself big, uncomfortable questions. There’s a tendency – which I have absolutely fallen into – to hear people’s stories about racism they’ve faced, or even witness it yourself, and fall into shock and horror. You know, that moment when you think “I can’t believe this still happens! How can people be so awful?” etc. This is understandable, I think, but ultimately unhelpful. It is a means for those who consider themselves ‘good’ white people to separate themselves from those acts of racism, to centre their own feelings of horror in order to comfortably distance themselves from the truth of the matter that the same white supremacy that produced that horror is one that they (I) benefit from every single day. Nova Reid, an incredible writer and anti-racism activist I have learned SO much from has talked about this a lot on Instagram.

This post, I hope, is a suggestion of how you might read Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race through the frame of accountability.

Let’s go.

Reni on the absence of Black history in UK education:
“…I don’t think my ignorance was an individual thing. That I had to go looking for significant moments in black British history suggests to me that I have been kept ignorant. While the black British story is starved of oxygen, the US struggle against racism is globalised into the story of the struggle against racism that we should look to for inspiration – eclipsing the black British story so much that we convince ourselves that Britain has never had a problem with race.
We need to stop lying to ourselves, and we need to stop lying to each other. To assume that there was no civil rights movement in the UK is not just untrue, it does a disservice to our black history, leaving gaping holes where the story of progress should be.”

Key events:

– Racist attacks in Liverpool in 1919, the most high profile of which was the public lynching of Charles Wootten. He was thrown into the sea and pelted with rocks by a white mob until he drowned. The British response? A repatriation drive that resulted in as many as 600 Black people being sent ‘back where they came from’ – deported to the West Indies. Many of these people had settled in the UK after fighting for Britain in the First World War.

– The Bristol Bus Boycott. Guy Bailey was denied an interview at Bristol Omnibus Company because he was Black. In response, he and the West Indian Development Council launched a campaign against the BOC’s racist practices through the local media, gaining support from local students, politicians and press – meanwhile every single one of Bristol’s West Indian residents were boycotting the bus service. Over 100 students marched in support and the boycott continued to grow. In the end, BOC were forced to cave and change their discriminatory hiring practices – though to this day, Eddo-Lodge notes, the company (now called First Somerset & Avon) has never apologised.

These are only two events that I learned of for the first time reading Why I Am No Longer Talking To White People About Race. The entire first section is filled with stories of the civil rights struggle in the UK I would wager the vast majority have very little awareness even happened.

Questions
Instead of asking yourself, why wasn’t I taught about this? Instead ask, why wasn’t I curious about this before now?

Reni on challenging white feminism:
“British feminism was characterised as a movement where everything was peaceful until the angry black people turned up. The white feminists’ characterisations of black feminists as disruptive aggressors was not so different from broader stereotyping of black communities by the press. Women of colour were positioned as the immigrants of feminism, unwelcome but tolerated – a reluctantly dealt-with social problem.”

Key events:

– An incident on BBC Radio 4’s Womens Hour in 2013 where Reni was cast as a bully by Caroline Criado Perez, who equated the anti-racism work Eddo-Lodge spoke of with the bullying and harassment Caroline herself was experiencing online at that time following her successful campaign to get a woman on the new ten pound bank note.

– The massive backlash the term ‘intersectionality’ faced when it first made it into the mainstream feminist discussion, with an article in The New Statesmen inferring Black feminists were ‘The Mean Girls Club’ only one example. Eddo Lodge writes: “…this knee-jerk backlash against the phrase – to what is more often than not a rigorous critique of the consequences of structural racism – was undoubtedly born from an entitled need to defend whiteness rather than any yearning to to reflect on the meaning of the phrase ‘white feminism’.”

One problem that comes up over and over again among white feminists – and white women in general – is tone policing. It is surprising how many white women who would sincerely consider themselves to be liberal, even anti-racist still don’t recognise this behaviour. Tone policing, as defined in this excellent series of infrographics by Feminism India, is the act of focusing on the tone of a person’s statement, rather than the content. It is a tactic often employed by white women against Black women to lecture them on how their anti-racist message would be a lot more successful ‘if they were nicer about it’. It’s a way for privileged groups to silence the marginalised and avoid accountability. Basically, it is a very sneaky form of racism white people – and I really can’t emphasise this enough – many of whom consider themselves anti-racist utilise to uphold their own comfort (AKA life in a white supremacy) over progress.

Questions
Why do I feel that someone should communicate the trauma of racism and anti-Blackness in a way that makes me feel comfortable? Am I acting out of a desire to preserve my own privilege?

Can you think of a time when you have felt the ‘knee-jerk’ need to defend whiteness that Eddo-Lodge identifies? Have you ever felt threatened when listening to a person of colour talk about their experiences?

In conclusion
Have you read Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race? What came up for you while you were reading? What questions do you think readers should be asking themselves in response to this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Further learning
Reni’s follow-up podcast, About Race where she delves further into subjects covered in her book

Follow The Black Curriculum on Instagram, an organisation committed to teaching Black history, year round

Watch Small Axe: Mangrove on BBC iPlayer, a drama based on the true story of the Mangrove Nine and police systemic racism

City of Brass

In the markets of eighteenth century Cairo, thieves, tricksters, con artists and outcasts eke out a living swindling rich nobles and foreign invaders alike.

But alongside this new world, the old stories linger. Tales of djinn and spirits, of cities hidden among the swirling sands of the desert – full of enchantment, desire and riches – where magic pours down every street, hanging in the air like dust.

Many wish their lives could be filled with wonder, but not Nahri. She knows the trades she uses to get by are just tricks and sleights of hand: there’s nothing magical about her. She only wishes to one day leave Cairo, but as the saying goes…

Be careful what you wish for.

City of Brass by S.A. Chakraborty is a rich and imaginative fantasy that weaves elements of Islamic folklore with the political machinations of monarchy to create a vivid world filled with tension – of both the romantic and warmongering kind.

The story starts with Nahri, an orphan surviving via the means of the age-old con (fake healings, telling the future, the occasional exorcism, etc) who stumbles from the life she had known as just another Cairo trickster into the magical world of the djinn, beings born of fire who live, for the most part, in a magical land hidden from the human world by, you guessed it, more magic. This dangerous new world of flying carpets, flesh-eating ghouls and terrifying demon-djinn known as ifrit – regular djinn are sexy, ifrit decidedly not so. From what I gather there are a lot of claws and fangs happening – might hold the keys to Nahri’s mysterious past, if she can only get her new sexy djinn friend Dara to answer any of her questions.

I clicked with Nahri right away. A survivor well versed in thinking on her feet, she’s always got a witty retort and a means to make a buck tucked in her back pocket. She has an unusual talent for diagnosing and healing, skills she’s honing with a local pharmacist, and dreams of leaving Cairo behind to seek a career in medicine – even though that’s not something women really do, where she’s from. She can also speak any language as soon as she’s heard it, which is just very cool, honestly.

On the other hand, we have Ali, the other narrator of City of Brass. The prince of Daevabad, the aforementioned hidden magical land, he took me a lot longer to warm up to. But now, two books in (I finished Kingdom of Copper a couple of weeks back), I have come to the conclusion that this was kind of the point. Ali is not an easy person to like, but as I, and Nahri, discovered, he does kinda grow on you. Ali is the kind of guy who is stubborn about all of the wrong things. He holds himself up as the one with principles and his identity is very much wrapped up in that, but the principles – if not the high and mighty attitude that comes with them – seem to melt away when they present any personal risk. Trapped by the confines of royal life and his politically and personally domineering father, there’s a sense throughout City of Brass that he isn’t a fully formed person yet, and though to start with I read him as a weak manboy I didn’t have a lot of time for, after a while his story became one I could engage with. But initially, I’m not going to lie to you, whenever the narrative flipped from what was happening with Nahri to what Ali was up to, the story massively slowed down for me.

City of Brass is, in many ways, a totally perfect book for right now. Rich and complex, Chakraborty goes deep on the many different tribes of the djinn, their histories (a lot of which are bound up in conflict) and how those have led to the balance of power we see in Daevabad now. Keeping track of what different tribes were, which tribes didn’t like other tribes and how those feelings impacted Ali and Nahri required my whole brain. It was exactly what I needed – when I picked up the book and stepped into the world of Daevabad, everything that was going on in my day fell away. There’s not much higher praise for a fantasy than that, right?

Also, the sexual tension between Nahri and Dara… It’s also a very effective distraction.

Just saying.

Dominicana

Fifteen-year-old Ana Canción never dreamed of moving to America, the way the girls she grew up with in the Dominican countryside did. But when Juan Ruiz proposes and promises to take her to New York City, she must say yes. It doesn’t matter that he is twice her age, that there is no love between them. Their marriage is an opportunity for her entire close-knit family to eventually immigrate. So on New Year’s Day 1965, Ana leaves behind everything she knows and becomes Ana Ruiz, a wife confined to a cold six-floor walk up in Washington Heights.

As the Dominican Republic slides into political turmoil, Juan returns to protect his family’s assets. Suddenly, Ana is free to take English lessons at a local church, lie on the beach at Coney Island, dance with Juan’s brother, César at the Audobon Ballroom, and imagine the possibility of a different kind of life in America. When Juan returns, Ana must decide once again between her heart and her duty to her family.

In bright, musical prose that reflects the energy of New York City, Dominicana is a vital portrait of the immigrant experience and the timeless coming-of-age story of a young woman finding her voice in the world.

Joining Bookstagram (follow me!) meant that I was fortunate enough to see a huge amount of books by Latinx authors flood my timeline during Latinx Heritage Month. One of them was Dominicana by Angie Cruz and wow am I glad this book came into my life.

I have never read a story quite like this before. A complex, heartfelt and necessary exploration of an immigrant experience, Ana’s story will stay with me for a long time. There is a sense of immediacy and urgency to Cruz’s glorious writing – it lives entirely in the present tense – that grips you close, holding you deeply inside Ana’s experience in such a way I have rarely seen portrayed with quite such thrilling effectiveness. You’re blinkered by Ana’s experiences – but in a good way. As a reader you adopt her expectations, her understanding of the world and her context in such a way that every moment of her life and her move to the US and all of the alienation, fear and excitement that comes with it feels like your own. It’s incredibly tough at times – domestic violence is a regular feature of Ana’s world – but compelling to read such a closely written portrait of a life.

Part of the way Cruz has achieved this is her deft approach to the political moment of the New York Ana lands in. You understand her context only as she far as she does – which doesn’t include any knowledge of the country and its cultural landscape. So, when she and her new husband move in across the street from the Audobon Ballroom in January of 1965, a month before Malcolm X is assassinated there – and goes on to see from her window a small part of what his community mourning him looks like – you know this has happened and what it means, but Ana does not, so you the event and its after effects remain cloaked in painful mystery. She doesn’t speak any English and her husband won’t allow her to leave the house without him, and there’s no means for her to learn more – so the reader doesn’t either. I found it so refreshing the way Cruz doesn’t waste time spoon feeding context. She treats the political situation in the Dominican Republic in a similar way – you get enough of a sense of what is happening from the story and what it means for Ana and her family, but if you want to understand in more depth (which I would always recommend), you can do further research. The story doesn’t ask it of you, but it does give you a compelling reason to do so.

This is just one of the ways Cruz has crafted how utterly unknown New York is to Ana when she first arrives – the entire city is a question mark, and that fear of feeling lost the moment you step out the door alone was so present, especially in the early chapters of the book before Juan’s return to the Dominican Republic. The realness of that fear only increases the joy at its overcoming.

Dominicana is a unique immigrant narrative entwined with a powerful coming-of-age story – and as you’ll know I’ve you’ve been reading this blog for a while, I love nothing more than reading about a woman stepping into her own. And let me tell you, Ana is a character you want to scream and applaud loudly from the side lines for. Ana has as much self doubt as any 15-year-old – and the sort of weight on her shoulders no one, but especially not one so young should have to carry – but she holds herself with this quiet strength that grows steadily throughout the narrative in a way that was utterly delicious to read. In the process of building her life in New York, Ana falls down a lot – whether that’s from trusting the wrong people, or because what she wants is incompatible with what she needs to do for her family – and there is a bracing authenticity in how she faces it all. Cruz has written a book uninterested in the happy, neat ending of a girl riding off into the sunset, but one that instead revels in the complexities of human relationships, and the never-ending push and pull of duty to family verses duty to self.

It’s an extraordinary piece of writing about an experience too often sidelined. Cruz has crafted a novel that demands the spotlight.