memoir
Mark Kidel
There is a sense in which Elvis Costello emerged as a recording artist fully grown, with that unique vocal mix of vulnerability and insolence, savvy and often brilliant lyrics. Although he has never stopped experimenting, always with the logic of a musical connoisseur, it was all there, one could say, with “Less Than Zero”, his timeless first single on Stiff.From the start, he was as comfortable with electrifying rock (see “Pump It Up”) as with heartfelt yet unsentimental love ballads (“Alison”). And he is in fabulous form on his new album The Boy Called If, a series of vignettes in which he Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Was Peggy Ramsay a “woman out of time”? The celebrated London literary agent, who nurtured the talents of at least one generation of British playwrights, surely counted as a legend in her own lifetime (she died in 1991). Has she lasted beyond it?That the stories relating to her professional life – the personal life was kept much more off limits – around her celebrated office off St Martin’s Lane, up those flights of stairs, have lived on is due not least to Alan Plater’s 1999 drama Peggy For You in which he (one of the hundreds of writers on Ramsay’s roster, of course) imagines a day in the Read more ...
Anna Parker
Marcin Wicha’s mother Joanna never talked about her death. A Jewish counsellor based in an office built on top of the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto, her days were consumed by work and her passion for shopping. Only once did she refer to her passing, waving her hand around her apartment and asking Wicha: “What are you going to do with all this?”Later, the bereaved Wicha sifts through “all this”: black binders full of recipes clipped from magazines, chargers for old phones, inflatable headrests, yellowed newspapers and ballpoint pens. The stacks of stuff remind him of past conversations, and Read more ...
theartsdesk
How do we mother “at the end of the world”? Among the ruins of late capitalism, climate catastrophe, and entrenched white state violence?Julietta Singh “admit[s] that at a conceptual level there is a crucial part of me that wants to throw in the towel on human life.” Yet, she adds, “motherhood complicates this conceptual willingness.” The Breaks, addressed to Singh’s daughter for her to read (at six years old) and re-read throughout her lifetime, meditates on the rupture between mother and child that will be necessary for her to inherit and transform this world: “I know it is not just me you Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Anyone familiar with psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s bestseller The Body Keeps the Score (2014) will recognise the ghost of his title in Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s My Body Keeps Your Secrets. His book is an essential text for understanding the physiological changes wrought by trauma and the techniques that work to recalibrate body, mind and brain in its aftermath. Through a blend of memoir and reportage, Osborne-Crowley explores the same subject while indicating her own emphasis: the experience, and grammar, of shame.Staying close to her own experiences, while drawing on her background Read more ...
David Lan
In June 2001 the London Festival of International Theatre brought Amir Nizar Zuabi’s Alive from Palestine to the Royal Court Theatre for one performance. The Guardian said, “How often do you see a piece of necessary theatre? These 'stories under occupation' fall precisely into that category. We are used to the idea of theatre as a diversion. Here it is fulfilling a more important function of bringing us the news.”I didn’t see it and I couldn’t get hold of a full script – perhaps there wasn’t one – but by reading a print-out of the English surtitles I felt I’d got enough of a sense of its Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
According to Rosie Wilby, “breaking up and staying together are simply two sides of the same coin. They are a flick of a switch apart, separated only by one fleeting moment of madness, or perhaps clarity.” Wilby’s book The Breakup Monologues: The Unexpected Joy of Heartbreak takes the view that breakups make us stronger, better people, and this collection charts the end – arguably for the better – of several of her relationships and those of her social circle. As she says, “breakups have been the biggest learning experiences I have had.”Wilby is a comedian and writer based in south London. Read more ...
Jessica Payn
Two years ago, I became preoccupied with beetroot. I didn’t want to eat it, particularly, or learn new ways to cook this crimson-purple veg. Instead I hunted down stories of the “beet-rave”, as it was once called (from the French la betterave), from an earlier time when rave was a root vegetable, and a “wild rave”, instead of a techno-fuelled, all-night dance party, was a horseradish. In his novel Jitterbug Perfume (1984), Tom Robbins describes the beetroot as “the most intense of vegetables”, a “deadly serious” root whose leaking liquid resembles blood. It was Rasputin’s favourite, he Read more ...
CP Hunter
Sam Mills’s writing includes the wondrously weird novel The Quiddity of Will Self, the semi-memoir Fragments of My Father, and Chauvo-Feminism (The Indigo Press), which was released in February 2021. Chauvo-Feminism is a non-fiction long-form essay in which Mills delves into the phenomenon of men who create a feminist public persona which does not translate into their private lives. Her own experiences are interspersed with the story of the #MeToo movement and other women’s publicly-shared stories in a way that amplifies the multitude of untold stories that unfold every day. Avoiding the neat Read more ...
theartsdesk
"Ugh, I just feel so fat today," the woman near me in the locker room says to her friend as they get dressed after their workout. I look over – discreetly, as one does – to catch a glimpse of the grimacing side of her face as she zips up a pair of close-fitting blue jeans over a barely rounded lower abdomen, hip bones evident under taut fabric.As I sit putting on my socks, I wonder whether this woman, who has just complained of feeling fat, has even registered that there is an actual fat woman not ten feet away. While she "feels fat" as she frowns her way into her formfitting tank top and Read more ...
Lydia Bunt
As much as we would like it to, writing can never fully recapture someone who is gone. This we learn all too effectively in A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux, arguably one of France’s most important living authors. The text, released in an updated translation by Tanya Leslie, is a concise piece of autofiction: a portrait of Ernaux’s father’s life and death which stumbles, self-reflexively, at realising a complete conception of the man.Ernaux’s writing marks a return to the real after the deconstructive emphasis of mid-20th century French fiction. But rather than picking up traditional realism in Read more ...
theartsdesk
The infamous border wall. Prolonged detention. Children in cages. Even as Biden's election promises a sea change in Trump's devastatingly hardline immigration policy, immigrants, both first- and second-generation, face a spectrum of prejudice, violence and categorisation in the increasingly divided "land of the free". In the wide-ranging collection The Good Immigrant USA, editors Chimene Suleyman and Nikesh Shukla make it their aim to "finally let immigrants be in charge of their own narrative" as writers and artists from Teju Cole to Jenny Zhang and Chiogizie Obioma to Dani Fernandez Read more ...