NIGELLA LAWSON BY LUKASZ WIERZBOWSKI, THE TIMES, 5 APRIL 2020
You can read her column, about stockpiling books for the end of the world, here.
Or, you could listen to The Dish, a podcast by Kate Gibbs. In Episode 2 we discuss whether making and eating one Nigella chocolate loaf cake per day is an indicator of depression.
Not making anything unless I have to was briefly a theme in my journalism.
UNTITLED (BALCONY VIEW, PARIS), BRETT WHITELEY, 1960
It is sometimes on display here.
You can visit Wendy Whiteley's garden. I have been meaning to, for 15 years.
FROM GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS, BY MAX PORTER
A line I wrote out, stuck up and then, not intending to, put into SORROW AND BLISS. Based on this episode of The Spectator’s Book’ Club podcast. I do not think he would mind.
You can buy LANNY and GRIEF ETC. anywhere, or read this profile in The Guardian.
‘The heart of things!’ The very middle of life.
Also, lovely male authors not minding things: Trent Dalton and being constantly interrupted, by me, on our episode of The Saturday Quiz podcast. podcast. We literally cleaned up though.
The most nonsense I have ever talked, in the context of a podcast. Here.
From the things we never would have thought possible file, SORROW AND BLISS as the GOOP read for March 2021, and the subsequent chat.
SWIMMING IN THE TURITEA STREAM AFTER SCHOOL, NEW ZEALAND, 1993
Janet Frame lived in our town. We used to bike past her house on Dahlia Street on our way to the multiplex.
Jane Campion visited her, at a previous house, in Levin, which Frame had fortified against noise with a second layer of bricks. She laid them herself.
You can buy OWLS DO CRY anywhere, or Look Inside! this edition of FACES IN THE WATER, to read the new introduction by Hilary Mantel, in which she dispenses with and gives all authors an answer to the question, ‘how autobiographical is your novel?’
WORKING, BY ROBERT CARO
Probably I used $70 worth of toner printing out the cover. But it is the best book I have read about writing, by the most astonishing man. I first heard about him in this episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour.
After WORKING, I read his biography of Robert Moses, which is called THE POWER BROKER. You would not think 1153 pages on ‘America’s greatest town planner’ would be interesting to someone who is not also a town planner and yet…
You can buy Robert Caro’s books anywhere, or the audiobook of WORKING here. He reads it himself. If Headspace and other conventional aids to calm do not work on you either, this might.
His index cards! His typewriter! His wife Ina!
A REVIEW OF CRUDO BY OLIVIA LAING, THE NEW YORKER, 10 SEPTEMBER, 2018
You can read all of it, more easily, here. Supposedly, she makes fiction out of the ‘raw materials of the present’ which is admirable since who wants to think about the present all day. Also, ‘Love may not be original, but this funny, fervent novel is.’ When I read that I felt like, oh you are allowed to write about the same thing as everyone else, just not the same way.
You can buy CRUDO, just for the cover, anywhere.
FLORENCE WELCH, BY NORMAN JEAN ROY, BRITISH VOGUE, JANUARY 2012
Writing can make you feel like this.
More often it makes you feel like this. But grim determination and Hermes scarf will carry the day, in art as in life.
If you are not a writer, but you care for one, I wrote a gift guide. You cannot have too many special pens.
If you enjoy exquisite anecdotes about Her Majesty, here is one. Or there is this, by Alan Bennett, a novella but really, royal fan fic, and utterly perfect.
FROM FLOWER HUNTERS, BY LAUREN GROFF, THE NEW YORKER, 14 NOVEMBER 2016
To see yourself represented in fiction.
‘Poor Meg. She is exhausting to everyone. She would take a break from herself, too, but she doesn’t have that option.’ Even though you have to read it wrong, to make Meg be the exhausting one. Anyway.
Here is the rest.
If you have not used up your five free articles this month, you could read this Miranda July story as well. Otherwise, here is the best part:
‘If I went to the mall immediately and got a new sheet, then the chore wouldn’t have time to gather weight. Once a task goes on the to-do list it settles in, grows roots—the trick is to preempt that. I could get a tent light while I was there.’
One day I will preempt a task.
A NOTE TO SELF
I do not know when I wrote it or what I was referring to or why it says Sep in the middle. But I found it when I was packing up from the writing of SORROW AND BLISS and it appeared, then, to be the entire novel. (As does this song, in five minutes and 12 seconds, instead of 90,000 words).
I wrote about authors and their notes to self here.
I have since found a much, much better summary of the novel, on Instagram.
‘British woman has a shit time in life, with a technicolor collection of relationships.’
@book_smut, thank you.
A TICKET STUB, MAX PORTER AT THE SYDNEY WRITERS FESTIVAL, 4 MAY 2019
You can watch it here and not be distracted by a woman a row in front of you eating a sausage roll, very slowly, illuminated by the blue glow of an iPad, which she will continue to use well after finishing the sausage roll.
A NOTE FROM MY MOTHER
It accompanied the single sock which I left behind, in New Zealand, and she returned to Australia by post.
It says, ‘While I feel this needs no explanation, I feel the need to avoid the scenario where you are heard to say “she got quite odd towards the end,” doing things like just mailing me a sock in an envelope. So with that averted, I am , as ever, Your Mother.’
Preempting a task.
Here is a letter I wrote to one of my daughters, during journalism’s extended ‘a letter to my daughter’ period. I do not know if she reads the Sunday Telegraph and thus, if she ever got it.
SARAH MCCOOL BY LOUISA HARLAND, INSTAGRAM, 2020
That is, Aunt Sarah by Orla from DERRY GIRLS.
‘I just think that you should be able to compliment a woman's eyebrows without having her personality dragged into it.’
When you have finished Derry Girls, twice, you could watch MANDY , on BBC iPlayer, but it will require a VPN blocker and therefore, a moral choice if you are in Australia. If you decide VPN blocking is a victimless crime and find yourself, understandably, on a Diane Morgan jag afterwards CUNK ON BRITAIN might actually be the funniest show in the world. Not counting STATH LETS FLATS obviously.
GEORGE SAUNDERS, THE GUARDIAN, 4 MARCH 2017
Section 3 is the whole job. Bob is an asshole!
Section 4 is the whole point of the job.
‘Another reason you’re crying: you’ve just realised that Tolstoy thought well of you – he believed that his own notions about life here on earth would be discernible to you, and would move you. Tolstoy imagined you generously, you rose to the occasion.’
You can buy Saunders’ FOX8 anywhere. You should. It is a hundred and something pages of joy.
While you are in the Saunders section, get THE TENTH OF DECEMBER, just for The Simplica Girl Diaries, daily reflections of a man trying to be better:
‘Stood looking up at house, sad. Thought: Why sad? Don’t be sad. If sad, will make everyone sad …
…Have to do better! Be kinder. Start now. Soon they will be grown and how sad, if only memory is of you is testy stressed guy in bad car.’
Perfect.
PRINCESS DIANA AT THE BRAEMAR GAMES, 1981, BY PHOTONEWS SCOTLAND
Nothing can be said to add to this picture.
My mother used to have the same sheep sweater. I wish she still did.
‘Di Loves It! You Will Too!’
A MAP OF THE HEBRIDES, SOMEWHERE ON GOOGLE IMAGES
Some appear in SORROW AND BLISS, by way of the BBC Radio 4 Shipping News. If you have insomnia like the novel’s principal character Martha, you can listen to a five-hour supercut of it here. If you are in the market for a new drinking game, drink when anyone says ‘there are warnings of gales in…’
While we are roughly in or not far from the North of England, ‘Victoria Wood’ will be my answer to the question, ‘who is your greatest creative influence’ should anyone ever ask it. Then I will tell them I don’t need a period tracker app because if I think about the fact she died in 2016 and cry, again, it’s day 21. And I will regret it, but still. Here is some prerequisite listening, if you are yet to be influenced.
‘Did I not give you a fork, Clint?’
And on to YouTube.
’I have always been big. When I was born I never went in a cot. I went straight in a bunk.’
LEVI’S RIBCAGE JEANS, FROM THE PAGES OF GRAZIA ITALIA, SEPTEMBER 2019
I don’t know where you can get them.
I guess these are similar.
FROM HOTEL DU LAC, BY ANITA BROOKER
Alternate bio.
‘I am a serious woman who should know better and am judged by my friends to be past the age of indiscretion; several people have remarked upon my physical resemblance to Virginia Woolf; I am a householder, a ratepayer, a good plain cook, and a deliverer of typescripts well before the deadline; I sign anything that is put in front of me; I never telephone my publisher; and I make no claims for my particular sort of writing, although I understand that it is doing quite well.’
You could be the 17450th person to review the book on Goodreads. I do not know where any reviewer beyond the first 1,000 finds the motivation.
The third customer to review this stick vacuum cleaner on Amazon brought me untold joy with her chosen user name, and a new verb, to very quickly Lady De Clifford the stairs before everyone gets here.
IAN MCEWAN ON WRITING
Ianspiration.
‘Most novels do not earn their length’
and
‘Hesitation is essential to art’
I can’t find where he said that exactly, but he says is essentially here.
You can buy the short, perfect PURPLE SCENTED NOVEL anywhere but why would you when you can read it here for no money down.
INSPIRATIONAL WORD COUNTS
You can find out the length of most novels here. Having to guess them would make a good parlour game.
I was scared to start writing another novel after this dazzling failure. So I added up and took the average of my favourite slender volumes and made it my unfrightening goal. It was 54,000 words. For a long time, SORROW AND BLISS was called 54,000words.docx.
The slender volumes on the list, obscured by stamps, are AFTERMATH by Rachel Cusk, ON CHESIL BEACH and NUTSHELL and THE CHILDREN ACT by Ian McEwan, BROTHER OF THE MORE FAMOUS JACK, by Barbara Trapido, DEPT. OF SPECULATION by Jenny Offill, which I love and need to stop always citing, SPRING by Karl Ove Knausgård, who I am not on board with, and VILE BODIES by Evelyn Waugh. You can buy etc. etc.
I wrote my honours thesis on Evelyn Waugh. Specifically, Evelyn Waugh and Construction of Masculinity. What a shame it was in a pre-internet age and my academic magnum opus is not available online.
This episode of the Spectator podcast about the anniversary of BRIDESHEAD REVISITED is though, and it is glorious.
He also got chippy about the autobiographical question, which is why he put an author note at the beginning of that novel which says, ‘I am not I; thou art not he or she; they are not they.’ Unfortunately, in this case, they were totally they and everyone knew it.
The most important thing to know about Evelyn Waugh is that his first wife was called Evelyn. They referred to each other as Hevelyn and Shevelyn.
SWEATER, FROM ELLE AUSTRALIA, DATE UNKNOWN
Issue, designer, photographer, model’s head, the magazine, lost forever.
ELLE did not used to put features on the internet. Sometimes, I find mine in unusual places, like this and this.
Some of the stories I have written for VOGUE exist online, like this one and this one.
But if you wanted an object lesson in how to write a perfect feature, I would read this one and this one by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, but then I wouldn’t be able to even try and write the perfect feature, because how could I now that I’ve read those.
If you are mood-boarding a space for writing and thinking either Scandinavian chic or ‘‘Duchess of Devonshire meets literary rat warren’, I offer you this and this.