It’s happened to me a couple of times in recent months. The book in question was one of my favourite novels, namely – I kid you not – Never Let Me Go². I should’ve taken more notice because I’m bereft without it. I want to break into friends’ houses at the dead of night and go rummaging through their possessions till I find it. I’ve asked around of course, but no-one has fessed up.
Welcome
I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist. I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.
So, you’re midway through composing a blog post when, in a flash of inspiration, you hit on the very book that will nail the point you want to make. You scuttle off to your “library”, zeroing in on the shelf where – however eccentric your filing system¹ – you know it will be waiting for you. Except that it isn’t and, you now remember, it did a flit some time back. You lent it to a trusted friend – his/her exact identity lost in the mists of time – and it’s never been returned.
It’s happened to me a couple of times in recent months. The book in question was one of my favourite novels, namely – I kid you not – Never Let Me Go². I should’ve taken more notice because I’m bereft without it. I want to break into friends’ houses at the dead of night and go rummaging through their possessions till I find it. I’ve asked around of course, but no-one has fessed up.
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It’s been another hectic week on the blog tour: sharing the novels that have helped me find a mind of my own with Urszula Humienik; examining how contemporary novels feature scientific research with Gargi Mehra; talking attachment with Safia Moore stemming from my character’s difficulty in “telling a story about when you were a little girl”; confessing and commiserating with Clare O’Dea regarding our shared difficulty in articulating what our novel’s about; to come to port on Friday with Lori Schafer to address the question of how much my novel might be autobiographical. After my weekend in a virtual California, I’m heading northward today to join lead buckaroo, Charli Mills on her fabulous Carrot Ranch in Idaho. She’d already set my place at the table with this lovely introduction on her blog. I’m heading back to the UK for the rest of the week, stopping off first with novelist and psychologist Voula Grand, who was the first to feature in my series Psychologists Write, to explore a shared interest in transgenerational trauma, both on and off the page. Then it’s a second guest post (the first, on Day One of the tour, being on debuting as an older author) with my publishers, Inspired Quill, to reveal my responses to the thoughtful questions put to me by one of the team, Hannah Drury. With all this travelling I wonder if I’ll have time to tidy up before Thursday, when I’ll be showing everyone around my Writers’ Room, courtesy of novelist, former prison governor and Costa Short Story Award winner, Avril Joy. Friday, I’ll be hot-footing it to London to join novelist, blogging addict and reader of an early version of Sugar and Snails, Geoff LePard, for a post on how walking facilitates my writing with, hopefully, a few photographs of the walk that features in my novel. (Yikes, did he realise that’s the day he launches his second novel, My Father and Other Liars, or is his attention to me an excuse to avoid a launch party?) A novella about the pleasures of reading aloud and being read to demands a review in the same vein. And an audio review gives me the opportunity to get in some much-needed practice in performance – not to mention the chance for another fiddle with YouTube – in preparation for reading in public from my own novel. My review takes just under eight minutes. However, if you prefer to read it for yourself, you can download a print version below. Your feedback on any aspect of the content or its delivery will be much appreciated.
I’ve been asked twice now about my approach to reading for reviews and, grateful for that interest, I’ve given it a little more serious thought. Coincidentally, after almost a year of regular book blogging, I’m probably in need of some kind of policy; until I develop something more formal, this post will have to stand for that. While it might appear somewhat back to front, it makes more sense to me to begin by outlining what I’m trying to achieve followed by how I go about it. Your feedback, as ever, would be much appreciated. HER reviews As some of my reviews will testify (e.g. My Real Children; Indigo; Hidden Knowledge), I can feel disorientated when a novel fails to unfold according to my expectations. But isn’t that often the case initially when we come to read fiction? Unless it’s ploddingly formulaic there’s an interval, before we settle into both story and style, when we don’t know where we are. Part of the pleasure of opening a new book is that sense that, despite the clues from title, cover and blurb, it could lead us somewhere new. But, as I’ve intimated time and again in my reviews, there needs to be balance between novelty and familiarity, and each of us have our own preferences for where we position ourselves between them. Completing the initial round of my publisher’s edits for my forthcoming novel, Sugar and Snails, I’m reminded of the potential for disorientation I’ve built into the story. My narrator, Diana, has a secret she is unable to share with the reader initially; when you get it, you might look back on what she’s previously told you in a new light. I have to hope I’ve hit a reasonable balance between surprise and security, but I know it won’t work for all. Andrew appears to be particularly accident prone, everywhere he goes he brings disaster, especially to those he loves. After one marriage has ended in divorce and the death of a baby, his second has left him as the hapless father of a motherless baby girl. In a purported conversation with his therapist, he reviews his life story, and the extent of his responsibility for the tragedies that have occurred. Andrew is a “cognitive scientist” with a strong belief in the impact of brain biology on our actions as opposed to the more nebulous mind. Although not necessarily a likeable character, his voice is lively and appealing. At first the novel comes across as a parody of therapy, with the therapist’s questions and largely unhelpful interjections generally ignored. But as the novel progresses, we find ourselves embroiled in a far darker story of not only the wrongs unwittingly triggered by this one individual, but, via Andrew’s college-day friendship with a war-mongering president, of political shenanigans of the worst kind. By the end of the novel the dreams, “soundless voices” and speculation about how far studies of the human brain can take us, that have preoccupied Andrew from the early pages, and even the identity of the seemingly neutral therapist take on a more sinister significance, in which his only note of hope is in the science supposedly underlying his experience, along with his insistence on his inability to feel. Ever since I’ve been writing seriously, I’ve made a list of the novels I’ve read across the year, highlighting those that particularly impressed me. Halfway through 2013, I was seduced by the lovely book-cover icons on Goodreads into doing it electronically. At the beginning of this year, they invited members (?) to register for a reading challenge. Although I don’t need a challenge to motivate me to read, I signed up on the basis that their software could calculate my reading total more rapidly than I could. I set my target at 60 books, this being a rough average of the numbers read in recent years.
My Dear Readers, I know that a novel written in the form of letters is known as an epistolary novel, but is there a word for a novel that starts with an intriguing letter and then goes on to portray the lives of the letter writer and its intended recipient? I’m asking because two novels I read recently followed that format and I’d like to tell you a little about them. I’d love to hear your views and, if you do wish to reply, you can do so in the comments box below. With all best wishes, Annecdotist. Surely this is every book lover’s dream? Roberta works in one of those idyllic old-fashioned bookshops owned, not by some faceless conglomerate, but by a true aficionado of the printed word, the laid-back Philip Old. She rearranges the shelves, serves the occasional customer, dust books, and collects the letters, postcards and till receipts she finds between the pages. These serve as epigraphs for the chapters comprising the contemporary strand of the novel. The first is a letter from Jan Pietrykowski, written in 1941, ending his relationship with Dorothea because he disapproves of something she’s done. Roberta has found this letter in an old suitcase belonging to her hundred-and-ten-year-old grandmother, Dorothea, now residing in a nursing home. She’s never heard of Mrs D Sinclair, whose name is inscribed in the suitcase, but Jan Pietrykowski is her paternal grandfather, dead before Roberta’s father was born. Otherwise the letter makes little sense to the reader, or to Roberta, especially as it contradicts what she’s been told about the family narrative. It takes the rest of the novel for her to come anywhere near to approaching the truth. Do you ever ponder your dependence on the modern world and wonder how you’d adapt if it came to an abrupt end? My ability to grow my own food, knock up a functional mortise and tenon joint and navigate across country on foot might provide me a modicum of security, but I’d be useless without my glasses to see where I was going and clueless at working out how to make electricity from scratch. And who knows, until we find ourselves in a situation that demands it, whether we have the mental and physical capacity to kill another human being to save our own skins? I don’t know if it’s surviving trauma that evokes such apocalyptic philosophising or whether it’s integral to the human condition. There’s certainly an attraction in the theme for writers of fiction; I’ve just counted seven novels on my bookshelves that speculate on the impact on human society of devastating global pandemics or massive climate change. You might have even more, so how do I persuade you that Station Eleven is the one you really must read? I received my proof copy several months prior to publication and, although I was interested in the premise, I wasn’t in a great hurry to read it, perhaps put off by the hype. It’s described as perfect for fans of Hugh Howey, who I’ve never read, and Margaret Atwood, who I have, a lot. I can detect the similarities to The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake, both books I loved, but I’m not a fan of fanfiction. In a fair world, where writing was judged on its merits, Emily St John Mandel wouldn’t need to be compared with the literary greats. She is an excellent writer in her own rights. More fool me for not picking it up sooner. I’m ambivalent about school. On a personal level, I achieved good outcomes from my long ago schooldays, but this was more by dint of my capacity for obedience than any genuine nurturing of my intellect and creativity. (I’m always pleasantly surprised when children these days claim to enjoy school.) On a political level, the view that mass education can be used to weaken working-class culture sits alongside the genuine enthusiasm for learning I’ve witnessed in places where a school place can’t be taken for granted. How does this translate into my reading and writing? As a child, I lapped up Enid Blyton’s boarding school stories, although the settings were worlds away from my own experience. The junior equivalent of the country-house genre, St Clare’s, Malory Towers and the like served merely as the backdrop for schoolgirl adventures. And that’s the thing with school stories, the experience is so near universal, it’s difficult to untangle the school aspect from the fact of being a child. When I wrote my bite-size memoir, School at Seven, it was more about friendship betrayed than education. Of my short fiction, school provides the setting for the hormone-heavy story of adolescence, Kinky Norm, and frames the parent-child conflict in both Jessica’s Navel and Elementary Mechanics. The epistolary Bathroom Suite is more about inequality than school refusal. The last time the husband and I went on holiday we came home a day early, and enjoyed ourselves an awful lot more pottering around the garden than we would have done looking for more touristy things to fill the time. The thatched-roofed cottage I’d booked in a chocolate-box Dorset village had a wall-full of Penguins, but the latticed windows alongside the narrow cobbled street made for a sombre interior, far from ideal for curling up with a book. Since then, we’ve managed a couple of weekends away but I don’t think either of us will be dreadfully disappointed if we never go on holiday again. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy reading about other people’s holidays, especially when they don’t go completely to plan. Jenn has been having a marvellous holiday on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca with her husband, Greg. But her fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, Emma, will be joining them shortly, with unsuitable boyfriend, Nathan, in tow. Their arrival changes everything, although not quite in the way she expected. Jenn finds herself seduced by Nathan’s youth and sensuality and, amid thunderstorms and searing heat, risks, not only her marriage, but her sense of herself. There’d been a fair amount of media hype about The Lemon Grove, so I was surprised when I didn’t warm to it as readily as I had to another Mallorca-set villa-holiday novel, The Vacationers. The writing was competent: On a pilgrimage to Wuthering Heights, Samantha Ellis got into a debate with her best friend as to which Brontë heroine was best: Cathy Earnshaw or Jane Eyre. The shock of finding herself persuaded by her friend’s argument sent her stumbling back to revisit the heroines of her thirty-odd years’ devotion to fiction. How to Be a Heroine, part memoir, part feminist literary critique, is the result. When I ‘won’ a copy on Twitter, I thought I’d nailed this year’s blog post for International Women’s Day. Unlike last year, I wouldn’t have to do search around for my own fictional heroines. Samantha Ellis would do the job for me. Although I shy away from non-fiction these days (The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz a rare and exceptional exception), I quickly became engrossed in the book. I warmed to the voice, and the meticulous attention to detail balanced with touches of self-mocking humour:
When Rhett sees that [Scarlett’s] hand is scarred, rough from work, sunburnt, freckled, the nails broken, palm calloused, thumb blistered, he spits, ‘These are not the hands of a lady.’ (The most direct result of reading Gone With The Wind again is that I have become more assiduous about using hand cream.) (p88) The index for my debut author interviews is the only place I’ve knowingly arranged anything booky in alphabetical order by author surname. It just doesn’t work for me out in the real world: when I’m scanning my bookshelves for a particular book, the name of the author is often the last thing that comes to mind. My collection of novels is ordered geographically – since you’re asking, by setting of the book rather than author location – two shelves for Britain (subdivided into the various regions); a woefully inadequate single shelf for North America; one for Europe; another for Asia and Australasia; one for Africa, South America and the Caribbean. It’s totally bonkers – I’m constantly reassigning the underrepresented parts of the globe when I run out of shelf space, and in rather too many novels the exact geographical setting is left unclear – but it’s the best system I’ve come up with so far. I only wish I could persuade my husband to donate his shelf of thrillers to the charity shop and give me more room. Of course there are more eccentric systems: I’m sure Leila, in Lottie Moggach’s debut Kiss Me First, isn’t the only woman to arrange her books by colour. Is that really so wacky? If book covers are designed to look attractive, why not give the same level of attention to their patterning on the shelves? With a block of dark green Virago here and a patch of orange Penguin there, you’ve got a do-it-yourself Mondrian painting. If you really want to go for style over function, you could intersperse the books with interesting objects, but where do you put the rest of your books? So come on readers, it’s time to fess up: how do you arrange the novels on your shelves? I'll be posting next on Friday with a look at Samantha Ellis's virtual bookshelves via our review of her literary memoir How to be a Heroine. Do join me. Published at the beginning of 2013, The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz is a gem of a book about psychoanalysis. Heavy with insight into the human condition while light on the jargon, it’s a most-read for any thoughtful individual, but I’m here to argue its particular value for readers and writers of fiction. If you like stories, I think you’ll be interested in these, and if you’re engaged in producing your own fiction, there’s as much to learn from these tales from the therapist’s couch as from any creative writing textbook. Here are 7 reasons why: 1. It’s unashamedly upbeat about the power of stories. Many psychoanalytic case studies read like stories, but these are especially exquisite. Beautiful prose, tightly structured, these are moral stories without being moralistic, gentle fables in the manner of Aesop and Kipling that leave us pondering the big questions of how to live. Alongside the stories from the consulting room, there’s an examination of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, and ordinary incidents from the author’s life. Without being heavy handed, he leaves us in no doubt as to the centrality of storytelling, that without our stories we are diminished: [O]ur childhoods leave us in stories … we never found a way to voice, because no-one helped us find the words. When we cannot find a way of telling our story, our story tells us – we dream of these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand. (p10)
What’s left of the Christmas narrative once you’ve given up on Santa and the divinity of the Baby Jesus, when you don’t eat turkey and there’s no magic left in buying gifts for friends and family already drowning in possessions? Well, quite a lot as it happens because, stripped of the tackiness and tinsel, Christmas is a celebration of our interdependence and connectedness. So (especially after the previous post about the need for writers to shrug off our parents) I couldn’t let the occasion go by without posting my virtual Christmas card and thanking readers old and new for your support of the blog over its fledging year.
Of course, relationships are at the heart of fiction – at least the kind I like – all year round. Having spent the last few days arranging my published short stories into themed categories (obviously avoiding more pressing tasks), I’m struck by how many are about family, parent-child and couple relationships. And many of those I didn’t list under those headings still touch on how we rub along together, for better or worse. My favourite Christmas stories have a hint of the supernatural, although their morality is firmly grounded in the harsh realities of the societies we humans have created for ourselves. The movie (originally a short story), It’s a Wonderful Life, where a guardian angel convinces a suicidal James Stewart his life has been a force for good, still brings a tear to my eye. It’s a kind of reverse A Christmas Carol, where it’s the visions of his coldness, greed and loneliness that persuade Scrooge that human relationships are worth more to him than his mountains of money. If the Christmas narrative oozes redemption and inherent goodness, where do the cynics get their seasonal kicks? Who writes for those who don’t believe in happy endings, whose families are dysfunctional beyond repair? My favourite anti-Christmas story is Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, the antidote to the schmaltzy home-for-Christmas movie. Determined to gather her adult children around her for ‘one last Christmas’, Enid is unaware how distant her version of the cosy family is from theirs. Christmas hasn’t served as much of an inspiration for my own writing, although I do have a holiday-hideaway scene in my work-in-progress novel Underneath, and I’ve found it useful in longer works as a marker of the passage of time. I’m also quite chuffed, in a business-as-usual way, that one of my short stories, The Seven Dudley Sibs, is actually published on Christmas day. Of the two seasonal stories I have published, I’ve got one for those who go for feel-good and one for the bah-humbugs: in The Front Legs of the Pantomime Horse, Jo finds the local pantomime a lot more rewarding than she expected; in The Wilsons Go Shopping, an ordinary supermarket shop reminds the family how much they’ve lost.
How does Christmas impact on your own writing? Which type of Christmas narrative do you prefer? And, whatever your take on Christmas, hope yours is everything you'd like it to be.
I used to read for pleasure, then I read to develop my craft. Now I read for the blog and website. Is this how it was meant to be? Of course, the three aims aren’t mutually exclusive, I can read as a writer and blogger and still enjoy it, but it does affect the content of my TBR and TBrR (to be re-read) piles. In fact, I think I should re-label my book mountain as my TBB (to be blogged) pile. Reading for the blog definitely requires a higher level of concentration: Do I love this debut enough to invite the author to my Q&A? Would this aspect of plot/setting/ character help bring one of my posts alive? Because it’s not just for me, I’m more accountable and, while I’m not complaining, it sometimes leaves me longing for one of those sand-spattered novels that requires the reader to switch off her brain. Above, for your amusement and edification, is my TBR/TBB pile as of the last day of September: debut novels; novels featuring therapists or set in psychiatric hospitals; one for the Hungarian slant; one with a quirky take on pronouns and a book that isn’t a novel at all.
Anyone want to hazard a guess as to how many of these will get a mention here in the coming month? So how does this compare with your own TBR pile? Anything here you’re already raving about? Anything you’ve sampled and thrown across the room? While we’re on the subject of questions about books, remember the quiz I set when I blogged about my new header at the beginning of last month? Three simple questions, and my apologies for the absence of prizes, but I’m sure you’re all grown-up enough not to hold it against me. The answers are below the line so, if you didn’t do the quiz before, you’ve still got a chance to go back and test yourself before clicking on Read More. While published novelists will often blog about their new book covers, I get to announce the earthshattering news that I’ve changed the masthead on my website. What do you mean, you didn’t notice? I’ll assume that’s because you’ve been too dazzled by my words. To be fair, all I’ve done is swap one row of novels for another. Side-by-side you might mistake it for a children’s spot-the-difference puzzle: On the left, the random sample of my favourite novels culled from my bookshelves that made up the old header; on the right, the bones of the new one: a selection of books that have had at least a walk-on part on the blog, or will do soon. Apart from a couple of novels I hadn’t even read when I made my first choice back in April (Harmattan; The House of Sleep; The Orphan Master’s Son – and I certainly wasn’t consciously planning to position them together slap in the middle), I’m surprised there’s so little overlap (only Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto springs up in both, although Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin also meets the criteria). Clearly, my mind works differently when I’m picking works to illustrate a point or a theme. But I wouldn't want to make too much of that: in all honesty what constitutes my all time favourite novels varies from one day to the next. In fact, less than a fortnight after I launched it, the new masthead is already out of date, with significant omissions such as Claire King's The Night Rainbow, the latest addition to my interviews with debut novelists. But if I tried to update it every time I read a new book I'd never get any writing done. That said, I thought it would be fun to have some dialogue around my selections, and got carried away with the idea of quiz before I noticed it’s enough of a challenge to identify some of the novels from the photos, never mind answer questions about them. So if anyone’s still reading, here are the titles:
Now, here at last, three questions, one each on the themes of author, character and setting:
1. How many debut novels are represented in each picture? (Clue: not all of them have featured in my author interviews.) 2. How many novels feature a psychological therapist as a main character? 3. How many novels have predominantly British settings and how many don’t? I’ll come back with my answers in a couple of weeks – and then we can argue who’s got it right. In the meantime, do share your opinions on my selections. |
entertaining fiction about identity, mental health and social justice
Annecdotal is where real life brushes up against the fictional.
Annecdotist is the blogging persona of Anne Goodwin:
reader, writer, slug-slayer, tramper of moors, recovering psychologist, struggling soprano, author of three fiction books. LATEST POSTS HERE
I don't post to a schedule, but average around ten reviews a month (see here for an alphabetical list), some linked to a weekly flash fiction, plus posts on my WIPs and published books. Your comments are welcome any time any where. Get new posts direct to your inbox ...
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