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Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid

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Such a Fun Age: 'The book of the year' Independent (Bloomsbury Publishing): Amazon.co.uk: Reid, Kiley: 9781526612144: Books

I don’t hear much about the latest fiction, but there are some titles that break through my early-20th-century mindset. Everyone was talking about Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid five years ago, including being longlisted for the Booker Prize, and I think it became even bigger during the pandemic. Better late than never, I listened to the audiobook – and, yes, everyone was right. It’s one of the best 21st-century novels I’ve read.

The novel opens with a brilliant ‘set piece’. Emira is out for the night with friends, in her party clothes and a few drinks down. She gets an emergency phone call from Alix, asking her to take Briar for the evening. Briar is a three-year-old whom Emira often babysits, and she agrees to come straight away and takes Briar to a nearby supermarket. Emira is African-American; Briar (and her parents) are white. When an older white woman sees them together, she thinks Briar is in danger and speaks to a security guard. He refuses to believe Emira is the babysitter.

It’s an excellent way in to a clever and nuanced novel about race in contemporary America. None of Reid’s central characters are out-and-out racists. What makes it so thought-provoking, and often hard to read, is that Reid is spearing the white progressives who are so self-conscious about being anti-racism. Alix is a writer and influencer whose project LetHer Speak has unexpectedly spiralled her into fame, while Emira starts a romantic relationship with a white man, Kelley, who witnessed the supermarket incident and urges her to go public about it. He doesn’t understand what repercussions Amira would face.

There is much more going on in Such A Fun Age than race, though. Emira is a brilliant portrait of a millennial who is overly qualified for the job she has, and is about to fall off her parent’s healthcare plan, but has no sense of her future. “Emira didn’t love doing anything, but she didn’t terribly mind doing anything either.” Alix is a complex character, swinging between sympathetic and the reverse, anxious and ambitious and never entirely comfortable in what she is doing.

There were moments like this that Alix tried to breeze over, but they got stuck somewhere between her heart and ears. She knew Emira had gone to college. She knew Emira had majored in English. But sometimes, after seeing her paused songs with titles like ‘Dope Bitch’ and ‘Y’all Already Know’, then hearing her use words like connoisseur, Alix was filled with feelings that went from confused and highly impressed to low and guilty in response to the first reaction. There was no reason for Emira to be unfamiliar with this word. And there was no reason for Alix to be impressed.

And, for a zeitgeisty novel, it’s much more than an opinion piece with fictional characters. Reid’s plotting is brilliant. Two of the main characters are connected in a way I didn’t see coming, and Reid is so clever in her creation of their lasting resentments from a shared memory differently remembered. Everyone is so believable, and all the novel’s morals are in convincing shades of grey. Honestly, the only bad thing about the novel, in my opinion, is the title. It’s so flimsy and nothingy, and doesn’t tell you anything about the book.

The audiobook is also up there with the best I’ve listened to. Nicole Lewis is a brilliant narrator, and manages to present Emira’s detailed character so well. Emira often replies briefly – things like “Oh, ok” – and Lewis does an exceptional job of using those small moments to show her discomfort, her intelligence, her refusal to accept everything expected of her.

I bought Such A Fun Age in an Audible sale, and wasn’t even sure I’d ever get round to listening to it. I’m so glad I did. It’s gone from a novel I dimly knew about to one of my best reads of the year.

A round up of audiobooks (#ABookADayInMay, sort of)

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Today’s book was finishing off an audiobook that I don’t have masses to say about, so I thought I’d use it as an excuse to round up a whole bunch of audiobooks I’ve listened to this year – so I can tick them off on my A Century of Books list. Buckle up and discover the variety of books I listen to on audio!

Superforecasting (2015) by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner
A non-fiction about people who are particularly adept at forecasting the future – not in terms of psychic powers, but through teamwork, second guessing themselves, a deep understanding of logic and a good dose of humility. It was an interesting listen, though not quite what I thought it would be. Some of it was how-to, and I have no aspirations to being a superforecaster. But I enjoyed hearing about the people who are (without it being a book I’d necessarily rush to recommend to people).

Excellent Women (1952) by Barbara Pym
This was a re-read for book club, and (as recently discussed) I have really leant into re-reading by audiobook. It was 20 years since I read Excellent Women and I didn’t remember anything about it except that I was disappointed it was set in London. This time around, forewarned that it wasn’t in a village, I could concentrate no how much I enjoyed the humour of this story: about a single woman called Mildred, her travails trying to get to know her boisterously feuding neighbours, her various almost-romances with clergy, and the weight of expectations on her shoulders as one of society’s ‘excellent women’.

Passing (1929) by Nella Larsen
This was an absolutely excellent book about Black women ‘passing’ as white, and the consequences of it, that I must write about properly one day.

Life With Picasso (1964) by Francoise Gilet
An absolutely fascinating portrait of life not-quite-married to a total narcissist. It sounds like living with and loving Picasso was absolutely exhausting, and it’s no wonder he tried to get the book thrown out before publication. My one qualm with the book is that Gilet recounts extremely detailed conversations at enormous length, many years after they happened. Whoever did the introduction to the book tries to claim that Gilet often told her these conversations over the years in exactly the same words, but methinks the lady doth protest too much. (The book is also rather too long – the nuances of life among artists in mid-century Europe is my favourite, perhaps, but it wouldn’t be the same sort of book if it weren’t dominated by Picasso and his selfishness.)

From Bauhas to Our House (1981) by Tom Wolfe
A short non-fiction, basically railing against modern architecture – and, along the way, giving a potted history of architecture in America. It was less personality-driven and funny than I’d imagined, and more informative (though I don’t think I remembered many of those details.)

True Stories (1996) by Helen Garner
My journey into Helen Garner’s non-fiction continues apace, and I enjoyed this collection of essays from across Garner’s career. The 1991 label is a bit misleading, because they come from several decades of career. It’s a real mix, and I particularly appreciated the extended section on Garner’s siblings and their dynamics as adults (‘If there are five of you, you form a complex network of shifting alliances’) – the other books I’ve read by her are less revealing about her own life.

50 Great Myths Of Popular Psychology (2009) by Scott Lilienfeld et al
What a rich book! Lilienfeld (and a bunch of other authors) go through 50 myths of popular psychology – neatly explaining why all of them are false, and why a lot of what is passed down in popular consciousness or stereotype isn’t accurate. Some are widely known not to be true (e.g. we only use 10% of our brain), some aren’t myths I’d ever heard (e.g. people with dyslexia see words back-to-front), while some were truly revelatory to me (there ISN’T safety in numbers). Each chapter ends with a list of other mythbusting dealt with quickly, so there’s actually far more than 50 in here. I listened for free on Audible Plus Catalogue, but you can also get the ebook free from Lilienfeld’s website. My one critique of his reasoning is how often ‘people widely believed this’ is evdienced by ‘it appears in films’. I don’t think people believe in time travel, but that appears in films…

There we go! I can fill up some gaps on A Century of Books, and hopefully have given you some possible reading options.

A Body Made of Glass by Caroline Crampton – #ABookADayInMay Day 11

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A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria

When I was shopping in Blackwells bookshop last weekend, I saw A Body Made of Glass (2024) by Caroline Crampton on a display table and was very intrigued. As the month had rolled over, I had my 15 hours of audiobook listening time renewed on Spotify – and during the week, I spent 9.5 of those hours on Crampton’s excellent book.

A Body Made of Glass is subtitled ‘A History of Hypochondria’ and it’s in a genre that I really appreciate – non-fiction that merges historical research with personal memoir. Crampton is self-professedly a hypochondriac, which is also called (or at least strongly overlaps with) health anxiety. It is recognised in a couple of different variants by modern medical reference books and likely to be taken more seriously by doctors than it would have been a while ago – depending, as Crampton discusses, on your gender, race and class.

So what is hypochondria? It’s one of the questions Crampton poses and explores at length, and there isn’t a simple answer. It may vary between people, but the main things are hypervigilance about symptoms, and extreme anxiety about them. It may manifest as a lot of googling and fixation on possible illnesses, including genuinely developing symptoms that you are concerned about. It often includes medically unexplained symptoms – tests will show the all-clear, but that might not allay the anxiety. The hypochondriac is likely to fear that something has simply been missed,

Crampton’s own medical history can partly explain her anxiety. She had cancer as a teenager, and had to start chemotherapy at a time when most teenagers are concerned with far more trivial matters. As she explains, it means her fear about symptoms is always taken seriously. She gets rushed into tests that others might have to fight hard to get on a waiting list for. But it also means she knows her health is not guaranteed. She knows the truth of the hypochondriac’s fear that this time the slight twinge could be the first signs of something drastic.

But, at the same time, she knows her anxieties are not an accurate representation of reality. She has the brilliant line: “I become an unreliable narrator of my own body.” But how else to judge something as subjective as health? Especially when it comes to the complex, unclear tapestry of the interplay of mental and physical health.

A Body Made of Glass is not exclusively a memoir, though. Often Crampton uses her own experiences to set the tone of a chapter, returning to it when apt – but this is a work of history. The title refers to one form of historical hypochondria – people who believed that their bodies had become glass. King Charles VI of France was one of the most famous sufferers from this delusion. Victims of it would be terrified of touching other people, lest they splinter – or would sit on piles of cushions to avoid breaking. It’s interesting to see how the particular manifestations of hypochondria have changed over times – strongly influenced by the culture. People didn’t have this glass delusion before glass became a common household item. Fast forward centuries – there was a spate of people developing the ‘tic’ symptoms of Tourette’s after TikTok videos about the illness became extremely popular during the pandemic.

Crampton goes right back to Hippocrates, and has done a brilliant amount of research into different theories of health over time, and about how hypochondriacs were treated. To pick a handful – there was the period where the womb was believed to travel around the body, causing mischief. At another time, physicians believed the nose was a microcosm of the body, and treating part of the nose would heal the relevant part of body. She traces the way treatments have been sold and mis-sold over time – from quacks deliberating fooling 17th-century London society to the way in which placebos can be used in genuine medical treatment.

It’s a really brilliant combination. The deep history comes mostly in the first half, interspersed with Crampton’s own experiences. As the book continues, it becomes more philosophical – while tethering discussions about how you diagnose illnesses and how you consider the ‘reality’ of symptoms to the concrete world of the GP’s office. It is a book with a lot of heart and care for people with health anxiety, and a subtle clarion call for them to be respected.

This is one of the reasons I so appreciated A Body Made of Glass. Hypochondriacs – particularly in popular culture – are so often mocked and derided. Think Mr Woodhouse in Emma. His fears about health make him a sweet but tiresome figure of fun. There’s no real consideration about how these anxieties weigh on him. Hypochondriacs are often portrayed as ‘doing it for attention’, or dismissed simply as making things up. I saw so much of myself in what Crampton writes, and it was really encouraging and refreshing to feel seen and understood.

Crampton gives sufferers from health anxiety the dignity and voice they/we deserve. The autobiographical sections were the ones I most liked, but it is overall a well-measured balance of the subjective and objective. It’s an absolutely fascinating, brilliantly written book – and I hope many doctors are among those who read it.

Joe Cinque’s Consolation by Helen Garner #ABookADayInMay Day 5

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Helen Garner Joe Cinque's Consolation Audio Book mp3 on CD | eBay

Today I had an action-packed day in London, and I did get through quite a lot of a book on the train to and from, but not a whole book. Luckily I only had 40 minutes left on an audiobook of Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) by Helen Garner, and I finished it as I was driving into the railway station.

I’m making my way through everything available by Garner on audiobooks – well, everything non-fiction – and Joe Cinque’s Consolation has a lot in common with This House of Grief, published ten years later. It is about a tragic death and the impact it has on those in horrendous mourning, and it closely follows the trial of somebody accused of murder. In this case, though, it’s pretty unambiguous that they committed the killing: one of the central questions is whether or not they have diminished responsibility.

Joe Cinque was in his 20s when Anu Singh, his girlfriend, drugged him with rohypnol and injected large quantities of heroin into him while he slept. During the night, he dramatically died. I’ll spare you some of the more graphic details (which Garner does not spare the reader). Anu Singh had told various friends that she planned to kill him and then kill herself – various motives flew around, from her fear that he would leave her, to her own hypochondriacal (and incorrect) obsession that she had a muscle-wasting disease. None of the friends reported what Anu had said until it was too late, and one of the friends (who had been involved in getting the heroin) is also tried for murder.

Garner got involved in the story after a previous joint trial of both murder-accused broke down, and the decision was made to do separate cases. The book is very Garner: she is interested in the minutaie of the trial, down to the expressions and foibles of each witness. She is as compelled by the way in which people on the stand might make a half-hearted joke as she is with the finer points of law.

Beyond the courtroom, she interviews various people, including Joe Cinque’s distraught parents. (Anu Singh refused to be interviewed.) The scene where she first meets them is fascinating – not only for what she learns from them, but for how she frames it and reflects on it. “Her voice was heavy with the authority of suffering” is a brilliant and concise observation of Mrs Cinque. And afterwards she goes over the mistakes she made as an interviewer – and for sitting, unawares, in the chair that had usually been Joe. Garner takes us so far behind the scenes of reporting that the reporting becomes almost the heart of the book – without retracting from the seriousness of the crime.

A mix of criminology, psychology, elegy and character study, almost nobody else could have written a book like this – Janet Malcolm is the only other name who comes to mind (someone Garner is often compared to, and she does mention The Silent Woman, Malcolm’s brilliant book about the aftermath of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes). I think I’ve almost run out of Garner’s full-length non-fiction, but it’s been a fascinating journey.

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

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I think my friend Kirsty first mentioned Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino, and it falls in a genre I particularly like – the sort of essay that is both personal and well-researched. When they lean too much one way (entirely confessional without any sort of context) it can feel a little unrelenting. If they fall more into the objective-research category, then I don’t feel sufficient connection.

The latter, of course, has been a mainstay of essay-writing forever. In recent years, a number of excellent essayists have written in the area I most appreciate. (Recent-ish works I’ve admired are Notes to Self by Emilie Pine, Forty-One False Starts by Janet Malcolm, Toxic by Sarah Ditum, Notes From No-Man’s Land by Eula Biss, The Wreckage of My Presence by Casey Wilson, Miss Fortune by Lauren Weedman. Probably not a coincidence that they’re all by women.)

Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (2019) puts ‘self’ right in the title, and there is certainly a lot of reflecting in every sense of the world. She holds up a mirror to her own life constantly – but it is a large mirror, and she gathers in a large number of people standing around her. She sees herself in a number of different groups, about whom she writes en masse – be that millennials, women, millennial women, non-Caucasians, internet-users, unmarried people etc. It works because she doesn’t wield the sort of unanswerable certainty that we see in right-wing column writers and Twitter firebrands. Tolentino’s thoughts on (say) how we represent ourselves on social media would be self-indulgent if she considered herself a lone example of the insecure bravado of internet posting – and far-reachingly bland if she thought everybody was exactly the same. Tolentino finds the middle ground, which sounds like a wide path but is surprisingly seldom trodden.

In each essay, Tolentino often moves from the specific to the broad. In the case of that internet-essay (‘The I in the Internet’), she starts from reading back over a blog she launched in her middle teens, and almost as quickly gave up on. It harkens back to a more innocent (perhaps) era of the internet, where the ‘blog’ section of a free website was about the only place you could launch these performances of the e-self – but Tolentino follows the connected line between this sort of phenomenon and the place we find ourselves now. As she does so, she takes in more and more of the internet landscape, and I found it a compelling take even in a much-discussed arena.

Continuing that specific vs broad and personal vs universal line: Tolentino is at her best when she can combine them, leaning on the specific and personal. Easily my favourite essay in the collection was ‘Reality TV Me’, where Tolentino looks back on her appearance in a short-lived, little-known American reality TV show Girls v Boys. What makes it a fascinating essay isn’t Tolentino’s relation of her experiences – it’s the clever way she comments on the memories. She had never watched the full show – and finds that she has misremembered many elements of it, partly in service to her construction of her own identity. She gets back in touch with the other contestants and, together, they analyse how they were cast, which archetypes they were intended to represent, how the show formed their understanding of themselves, and how their recollections of it relate to it. It’s a layered, complex, extremely well-constructed essay.

Leaning more towards the detailed research side of things is ‘We Come From Old Virginia’, about rape culture on university campuses. It’s a tough, brilliant essay. Even in an era where sexual assault and sexual violence is more widely recognised and discussed than in the past, there is still a lot that shocks and saddens in this essay. It links to the essay on reality TV in its unravelling of memory and truth – centred around a notorious rape claim in Rolling Stone that turned out to include many false details. It is brave to include this sort of scandal in a feminist book – it could too easily have seemed to downplay rape culture, and was used as such by some commentators at the time – but Tolentino writes with nuance, insight and compassion. Above all, she asks, why is the false accusation of rape considered so much worse a crime to many (especially right-wing men, but beyond that too) than rape itself.

At the other end of the spectrum, Tolentino is weakest when she treads old ground. Does anybody really need her takes on marriage as a patriarchal institution? The fact that she doesn’t want to get married is only really interesting to her (and her boyfriend, I suppose). ‘I Thee Dread’ is the most formulaic essay of the lot, and has no specific hook to hang on. ‘The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams’ is interesting but, again, the idea that capitalism is rewarding the super-wealthy and nobody else isn’t ground-breaking. The one turn to literary criticism – ‘Pure Heroines’ – is solid but unexceptional.

I started reading around Trick Mirror and its reception, and discovered the furore around a piece of criticism by Lauren Oyler in London Review of Books, unforgivably badly titled ‘Ha ha! Ha ha!‘ (I don’t know if a sub-editor is to blame for that title, but they should be suspended without pay.) Oyler is apparently renowned for writing savagely about acclaimed books and, sure, it’s easier to get a reputation that way than by writing kindly about them. The critique itself is a masterclass in pieces that sound profound, but don’t actually say anything at all. I went further down the rabbit hole, and the best thing written about it all is Freddie deBoer’s takedown of Oyler’s takedown.

Pace Oyler, I think Tolentino is – at her best – astoundingly good. The only problem with a collection is that her best only comes when she balances the specific/general and the personal/broader spectrums . There are enough examples in Trick Mirror of her doing that to make it well worth reading. It’s not a perfect collection, but I think she is deservedly recognised as a thoughtful, emotionally intelligent and well-researched voice in modern essays, and I’ll certainly read more by her.

A whole bunch of audiobooks I’ve listened to recently

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As per, I’ve been listening to an awful lot of audiobooks recently – some very good, some enjoyable trash, some in between. Here’s a quick overview of some of them (…minus the trash, which nobody needs to know more about):

The First Stone (1995) by Helen Garner
After loving This House of Grief, I downloaded an earlier non-fiction by Garner – a response to two college students going to the police after being allegedly groped by the college dean. Garner poses some interesting questions about gradations of assault, and writes excellently as ever, but it is very galling to read a book by a noted feminist where Garner seems nonplussed about why a woman would complain about being groped. She recognises it’s annoying – but not in the same league as rape, and that her generation always just put up with it. I suppose it’s a good sign that, 30 years since this was published, things have moved on sufficiently that no feminist would wonder-out-loud why a woman doesn’t just cope with being assaulted.

Toxic (2023) by Sarah Ditum
Great segue into this excellent collection of essays about what Ditum calls ‘the upskirt decade’ – the 2000s, where the paparazzi were even worse than normal, and famous young women were treated as sexual consumption for everyone. There are chapters on Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Janet Jackson, Kim Kardashian and more. Sometimes the links she tries to make with contemporary political issues are a bit flimsy, but in general it’s an exceptionally good look at a recent period where media ethics (and common consensus) were so misogynistic. The afterword, sadly, shows how misogyny has largely just found a new guise…

Ride the Pink Horse (1946) by Dorothy B. Hughes
People adore Hughes’s The Expendable Man, but now – having read that and Ride the Pink Horse – I think her brand of hard-boiled Americana isn’t quite for me. In this novel, Sailor comes to town during fiesta trying to exhort money from a man whose wife he was ordered to kill. Along the way, he gets to know various desperate locals. It reminded me of a less miserable Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock – but I still didn’t find much momentum beyond the atmosphere.

You Are Not Alone (2023) by Cariad Lloyd
I love Cariad Lloyd’s podcast Griefcast, interviewing people (usually comedians) about the people they love who’ve died, and how they cope with the grief. This book is closely related – drawing on Lloyd’s grief about her father dying from cancer when she was a teenager. Unsurprisingly, she writes excellently and wisely about grief, and I think this book would be helpful to a griever – perhaps particularly someone who doesn’t know why they haven’t ‘got over it’. Audiobook includes snippets from a fair few podcast episodes.

What’s That Lady Doing? (2023) by Lou Sanders
Lou Sanders is one of those comedians who makes every single sentence funny, and I really enjoyed her memoir. She clearly went through quite a lot as a teenager, and tells stories that balance humour and pathos. I’d have liked even more about her career, but perhaps there is a second book coming.

Broken Horses (2021) by Brandi Carlile
Brandi Carlile is a singer I deeply love, and her audiobook was a real journey. She doesn’t always come across as the easiest person to know, but she’s certainly transparent. The way she delves into songwriting is fascinating and the audiobook includes new versions of many songs at the end of chapters – a perfect reason to choose the audiobook.

Tales from the Café (2017) by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
I’d heard a lot about this book about a café where you can be transported back in time. What I didn’t realise until I was quite a long way through this audiobook was that (a) it’s an episodic selection of four separate stories, and (b) this is a sequel, not the original. Oops! I enjoyed it, though there is so much world-building and so many rules that the actual emotional moments get a bit lost.

Middle England (2018) by Jonathan Coe
Read for my book club – I really enjoyed my first Coe, often called his Brexit novel (though Brexit takes a long time to appear). There is a broad cast of characters doing ordinary and not-so-ordinary things – ranging from the amusing (an arrogant author on a cruise) to the moving (a man losing his faculties doesn’t understand where his factory workplace has gone). I found a woman dealing with accusations of workplace bigotry particularly interesting and even-handed, and at its best I was really engaged. But it’s also (oops again) the third of a trilogy, and I haven’t read the others – so some of the characters meant very little to me, as they get bit parts that seem to rely on previous time spent with them. Coe is also not subtle in his anti-Brexit stance. (I share his political views, but would like a novelist to be a bit less polemical.)

This House of Grief by Helen Garner

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This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial: Amazon.co.uk: Garner, Helen, Weinman, Sarah: 9780553387438: Books

I hadn’t heard of Robert Farquharson or Cindy Gambino, or their children Jai, Tyler, and Bailey, before I started Helen Garner’s This House of Grief (2014). I suspect the same wouldn’t be true of most Australians. They were at the centre of a tragedy that led to a trial, and a retrial, for murder. This much was clear from the outset: Robert Farquharson drove his three young children into a farm dam and all three drowned. He managed to get out of the car. But was it murder or was it a tragic accident, caused by Farquharson blacking out during a coughing fit?

The initial trial took place in 2007, and Garner was there throughout as a journalist – as she was at the second trial, in 2010. I listened to the audiobook, after hearing Garner’s non-fiction praised repeatedly on the Chat 10 Looks 3 podcast – I’d previously read her novel The Spare Room but hadn’t tried any of the non-fiction. And it is absolutely masterful.

This is the sort of case that would make a compelling newspaper article, or perhaps a podcast episode or hour-long documentary. In Garner’s hands, it becomes something much more granular. Since she is able to devote so much space to the trial, it feels like we are in the courtroom with her. The initial trial took seven weeks, so of course it isn’t in real time, but it sometimes feels that way. Periods of questioning are detailed so thoroughly – say, for instance, the doctor who is brought in to answer questions about whether or not Farquharson could black out from a coughing fit in something called ‘cough syncope’. We go back and forth, back and forth – an aggressive cross-examination, the attempts to discredit his medical credentials, the reactions from the jury. The actual evidence the doctor relates is a small part of Garner’s presentation of the scene. Her eyes are everywhere.

Garner notices things other people wouldn’t – and probably wouldn’t mention, if they did. How often a witness bites their lip, or the look on the face of a juror, or even how bored some people seem during the more technical sections of evidence – ‘the air in the court became a jelly of confusion and boredom’:

The judge took off his spectacles and violently rubbed his eyes. Journalists sucked lollies to stay awake. Jurors’ mouths went square with the effort to control their gaping yawns.

This certainly isn’t an objective book. One of many ways in which Garner’s writing reminds me of Janet Malcolm’s is that the writer is fully present in the reading experience. Garner relates how she takes the trial home with her, how she desperately wants to believe that Farquharson is innocent but is very unsure, and the mental exhaustion of going back and forth. She writes about camardarie (and the reverse) with other journalists, including being berated by some for her supposed light-heartedness.

Her detailed observation does slip into needless cruelty at times. I was startled by one moment – she bumps into a lawyer she used to know, and he says one line. In that time, she manages to say he is looking bad for his age, has lines on his face, is wearing an ill-fitting suit and hasn’t polished his shoes. It’s all so unnecessarily unkind. Like Janet Malcolm, she doesn’t have any sense of what is kind or unkind to say. She is merciless in the way she presents any of the people she sees. Even the grieving mother is described as having put on too much weight. She censors none of her thoughts.

That’s not to say she always highlights negative things. They are just more shocking, in a context where we might expect a certain generosity of empathy. She applauds a female witness whenever she outwits the unpleasant machismo of the cross-examiner, or describes ‘that little buzz of glamour peculiar to the Australian tradie’ when Cindy Gambino’s new husband takes to the stand. Indeed, he sparks one of the asides which make Garner herself such a dominant figure in the reporting:

But, having recently watched a bunch of blokes pour a concrete slab in my own backyard, I was equipped to imagine the effect of this sight on a young woman in Cindy Farquharson’s stifling situation. A concrete pour is a dramatic process. It demands skill, speed, strength, and the confident handling of machinery; and it is so intensely, symbolically masculine that every woman and boy in the vicinity is drawn to it in excited respect.

Somehow, the tragic deaths of the three boys do not get lost in the maelstrom and minutaie of the court proceedings. Garner manages to keep the emotion of their deaths central, without being maudlin, even while we are preoccupied with the minute-by-minute trial. And it is that clash of the absurdities – and some mundanities – of the legal system with the searing emotional pain of a grieving mother that makes this book so extraordinary. To the everyman, it feels ridiculous that this tragic event can become, for instance, hours and hours of analysing photographs of wheel marks, and disputing over whether or not the police officer’s yellow lines next to them are accurate. Garner is too subtle a writer to spell out this disparity. But it is key to what makes her analytical eye work so well.

And her writing can be beautiful, without being self-conscious. Sentences like this tread the tightrope of poeticism and journalism so well: “Judges are men who in the cool of the evening undo work that better men do in the heat of the day.” ([sic] to ‘men’, please!)

I didn’t think I’d find a non-fiction writer as curiously brilliant as Janet Malcolm – but I think Helen Garner is in the same league. If you’re looking for reportage or dry facts or even a kind, considerate piece about a tragedy – this isn’t the place for you. But if you’re looking for something sharp, odd, poetic and haunting – This House of Grief is a masterpiece.

In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

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Sorry I’ve been quiet recently – I got Covid, and while it wasn’t a bad bout of it, I have been quite low on energy since and have spent my evenings watching TV rather than blogging.

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado | Waterstones

But I’m back with a review of an audiobook I listened to – and one of the best books I’ve read this year. Published in 2019, I’m rather late to the party – so perhaps you already know In The Dream House, a memoir by Carmen Maria Machado. But ‘memoir’ doesn’t do justice to the innovation that Machado brings to this patchwork world – quite unlike anything I’ve read before, though the nearest comparison I can think of is another unusual and brilliant memoir I’ve read this year, Joan Givner’s The Self-Portrait of a Literary Biographer, which follows a slightly similar fragmented style.

At the heart of In the Dream House is an abusive relationship had years earlier with a woman whom Machado calls solely ‘the woman in the dream house’. Queer abusive relationships are, as Machado explores, hardly ever written about – indeed, barely even recognised as possible by many people. Particularly when both partners are women, it goes beyond all the stereotypes of abusive relationships that people are familiar with from screen and page. It is all the more alienating.

The bare bones of her story are these: that she met a woman who was in an open relationship with another woman, and became another partner. Eventually, they decide to become exclusive – and it is Machado’s first relationship with a woman. They have deep intimacy and some wonderful experiences. But The Woman in the Dream House has a dark side that erupts now and then. The abuse is seldom physical – but there is constant controlling, and anger that is unpredictable and unappeasable. The Woman in the Dream House accuses Machado of sleeping with any man or woman she mentions. She screams the most appalling abuse at her and then claims not to remember. Some of the most chilling moments are when the anger comes with a terrifying calmness – like her whispering that Machado is the most selfish, terrible person she’s ever met when she makes an innocuous comment, or when she refuses to let Machado share the driving on a long car journey even when The Woman is so tired that Machado fears they will crash. The Woman deliberately drives dangerously fast when she sees Machado is scared.

Abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something and not care how they get it.

Machado shows us the silencing terror at the heart of this sort of abusive relationship so brilliantly. It is not the sort of memoir that lingers on horrible details, but it does make you feel breathless with fear nonetheless. Because the relationship seems so inescapable. To outsiders, there is little to suspect. The Woman is usually on good behaviour with others – and has, of course, used the usual ploy of separating Machado from her friends and her safety network.

Machado could have written a straight-forward memoir of this time and it would have been very compelling. But what makes In The Dream House even more brilliant is the unconventional way in which she tells us – as I hinted at in that comparison with Givner’s book. Each chapter is titled ‘Dream House as’ something – a dizzying array of things, from the simple (‘Dream House as Confession’, ‘Dream House as Romance Novel’) to the more unexpected (‘Dream House as Hypochondria’, ‘Dream House as Thanks, Obama’). Many of them are genres or literary styles – though the chapters are not told in these styles, necessarily. The title is often very loose, but frames a new bit of the puzzle. Machado shares memories or stories out of chronology – and many of the chapters are reflections on literature or philosophy or history that weave in and out of personal recollection. A lot is about queer history and reception. For instance…

I think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them. I know I should have a very specific political response to them. I know, for example, I should be offended by Disney’s line-up of vain, effete ne’er-do-wells (Scar, Jafar), sinister drag queens (Ursula, Cruella de Vil), and constipated, man-hating power dykes (Lady Tremaine, Maleficent). I should be furious at Downton Abbey’s scheming gay butler and Girlfriend’s controlling, lunatic lesbian, and I should be indignant about Rebecca and Strangers on a Train and Laura and The Terror and All About Eve, and every other classic and contemporary foppish, conniving, sissy, cruel, humorless, depraved, evil, insane homosexual on the large and small screen. And yet, while I recognize the problem intellectually—the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness became a kind of shorthand for each other—I cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. I love them for all of their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. They’re always by far the most interesting characters on the screen. After all, they live in a world that hates them. They’ve adapted; they’ve learned to conceal themselves. They’ve survived.

At first, when I saw that In the Dream House had this fragmented, multidisciplinary approach, I was a bit nervous. The words of the prologue didn’t encourage me – it felt a bit overwritten, a bit self-consciously literary. But that impression disappeared quickly. Machado takes an experimental, innovative approach and makes it as compelling as a thriller. She finds the perfect balance between literary writing and searingly honest storytelling. And it is a fine balance, extremely difficult to achieve with the assured success that Machado shows.

I was wary about going into In the Dream House for various reasons – would I find it too scary, would I find it too opaquely written – but I am so glad I gave it a chance. It’s an extraordinary book, and one of the best memoirs I’ve ever read.

The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight #ABookADayInMay No.17

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The Premonitions Bureau: A Sunday Times bestseller: Amazon.co.uk: Knight, Sam: 9780571357567: Books

I didn’t know anything about The Premonitions Bureau (2022) by Sam Knight when it turned up in the Audible sale – but the title, the cover, and the unexpected subtitle telling me that it was a true story were enough for me to take a gamble on it.

The story starts with the Aberfan disaster in 1966 – I’m sure you all know about it, but
it’s when a colliery waste tip atop a Welsh hillside suddenly fell down into the valley with devastating effect. 144 people died, including large numbers of pupils in the village school. And several people claimed to have predicted that the tragedy would happen.

‘Claimed’ is perhaps the wrong word, since apparently two of the people who predicted it also died in the disaster – neither of them apparently having any sense that they were having a premonition. One of the children in the school told her mother “I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.” Another had drawn a picture of people digging at the hillside, with the words ‘The End’.

John Barker, a psychiatrist who ran a mental hospital in an old Victorian asylum in Shropshire, was fascinated by the possibilities in this phenomenon. He had already been deeply interested in unusual psychiatric issues – such as Munchausen syndrome, or the idea that people could literally be scared to death.

Being a scientist, he decided to go about this systematically. He set up the Premonitions Bureau, inviting people to send in any premonitions they had – whether in dreams, visions, or convictions. They got hundreds of replies from all over the place – some trolling them, but others very serious. Few seemed to be particularly specific – more along the lines of ‘something terrible will happen to a plane’ – but each was catalogued carefully. The hope was to be able to present their findings to the Medical Research Council and perhaps, in turn, set up a system to warn people of impending disasters. (Though there was also a debate about whether you could have a premonition of an event that then doesn’t happen – a Catch 22 for any way of using this tool to save lives.)

I had never heard of the Premonitions Bureau, and I did find Barker a likeable, fascinating and curiously impenetrable person. And I found much the same with Knight’s book. It goes on so many tangents, exploring interesting side-roads to the main discussion – often spending large chunks of chapters talking about these other matters in great detail. And some of them are certainly interesting, but by contrast, the bits about the actual bureau seem a bit flimsy. We don’t learn much about the hundreds of contributions or contributors, or what happened when they were right or wrong (though, as an exception, we do get a lot of detail about a train crash that was apparently predicted and which one of the BeeGees survived). It does feel as though there isn’t enough material to give a thoroughly researched book about this bureau – that it is an enthralling and enticing topic which isn’t quite followed up by what we learn about it. The bureau is there throughout, but sometimes as a shadowy thread at the centre of a lot of other topics.

And Knight is careful in not committing either way to whether or not he believes premonitions can happen. There are moments which seem to defeat any scepticism, but not much on probabilities of success or alternative explanations of the ‘accurate’ premonitions.

I did finish The Premonitions Bureau having found it interesting and well-written, but thinking that I might prefer to read a fictional story that could equally well be invented for this eye-catching title. Perhaps truth is stranger than fiction, but I think fiction could have been more satisfying.

Foster by Claire Keegan #ABookADayInMay No.16

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Foster by Claire Keegan | Waterstones

Today’s book is so short that it is almost a short story – 88 pages, or an hour and half as an audiobook (which is how I read it – indeed, since I listen to audiobooks fast, it was a little under an hour). So many people have raved about Foster (2010) in the past couple of years that I couldn’t help downloading it when it was on offer.

This is a thoroughly Irish novella, Irishness seeped through every sentence – whether that be depictions of the County Wexford countryside, the turns of phrase like ‘It was a cottage she lived in’, or the open casket at a funeral that takes place halfway through. It is 1981 and the unnamed narrator (another one!) is a young girl who has been deposited with John and Edna Kinsella. They live on a farm in County Wexford, and she has come from Country Carlow – not knowing exactly why she is there, or for how long, or indeed if she is ever going to go home. Her father leaves with a warning not to fall in the fire, and departs with no kinder word of affection. He has also forgotten to leave any of her clothes – but the Kinsellas have some that she can use, until they can buy her some more.

Keegan’s novella is a masterclass in what is not said. We don’t learn a huge amount about the home that she has left, except that it is busy, crowded and not a particularly kind place to live. The narrator is used to incident. There is no space for rest, for simply being. And even while the Kinsellas’ farm is being productively run, there is peace and there is calm.

And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end – to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder, some big gaffe, to break something – but each day follows on much like the one before.

There is a twist in the story, though it is one that simply deepens our understanding of character. It isn’t played to jar the reader; the plot is not as important as the people.

This is a beautiful little book, showing in not-many pages the richness of human kindness, the complex simplicity of country life, and the transformation that can take place when love is gently, generously shared.

People who got Stuck into this Book:

“Foster is a sublime novella, a masterclass in the ‘less-is-more’ school of writing – a poignant story, beautifully told.” – Jacqui Wine

“It is a very well written story, subtle and nuanced with a clear focus on the characters. I think I expected more from it, though.” – The Mookse and the Gripes

“Foster is as lyrical as poetry and has the depth of a full-length novel, yet it’s very brevity is what makes it so impressive.” – 746 Books