Blog Archives

Rediscovering ordinary: Remember Me Like This by Bret Anthony Johnston

31/10/2015

Over the course of a fiercely hot Texan summer, the five members of the Campbell family struggle to rediscover ordinary life. For Mum Laura, father Eric, grandpa Cecil and brother Griff, it’s as if their prayers have been answered: Justin, the teenage boy abducted four years earlier, has been found. But change, however much desired, requires a challenging adjustment. Will they ever be an ordinary family again?

I found this an extremely poignant return to the territory of abduction (as portrayed in Pretty Is and The Girl in the Red Coat) and family divided by grief (like Everything I Never Told You and A Song for Issy Bradley) as the members tiptoe around each other in an attempt to ease each other’s pain. The slow pace allows for evocative description and emotional depth, for example (p211):

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Talk of the Toun by Helen MacKinven

29/10/2015

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Angela has been best friends with Lorraine since their first day at St Philomena’s primary school aged four. Though Angela is from the council housing scheme and Lorraine a more affluent area where plastic lions grace the ends of driveways, her intelligence and ability to mop up her friend’s tears has made Angela the more dominant of the pair. But now, at seventeen and with the option of leaving school for a job at the local factory, it’s looking as if Lorraine has the greater social capital, and not only in attracting the boys. As her friend begins to pull away into the arms of former Borstal boy, Stevie, or, perhaps more shockingly, seduced by the pro-life horror movie, to hang around with Pamela, a.k.a. Little Miss Brown Nose, Angela feels betrayed. Can she eat her way to happiness or will a week with her parents and gran at a caravan site in Filey save the friendship?

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Lost in translation? An Unnecessary Woman by Rabih Alameddine

27/10/2015

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On the first day of every year, Aaliya has begun to translate one of the great works of literature into Arabic. What began as a personal challenge has become an obsession, with her thirty-seven translations stacked in boxes in the never-occupied maid’s room of her Beirut apartment, seen by no eyes other than her own. Unloved by her family, married at sixteen and liberated from that marriage three years later, her one female friend long dead and her one male friend disappeared, now she’s retired from her job at the bookshop these translations, along with the city in which she’s spent her entire life, are all that give her life meaning, all that keep her sane. Or do they? With her blue-dyed hair, with her emotional outbursts and fierce defence of her solitude, she seems on the brink of severing her ties to reality, increasingly alienated from all but the life of the mind.

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Why read? The Nearest Thing to Life by James Wood

25/10/2015

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Why do we read fiction and why do we need a literary critic to comment on what we read? Seduced by a review in the Guardian and beguiled by the title, despite feeling distinctly unqualified, I thought I’d give this short book, a blend of memoir and criticism, a go. I was looking for ideas on how to improve my own fiction writing and reviewing and, failing that, insights into why so many of us have a passion for books.

The latter was the subject of the first section and, for me, the most engaging. As a child, James Wood found in fiction, as I did, “an utterly free space, where anything might be thought, anything uttered” as a refuge from the restrictions of the religious culture of his home. Wood argues that, while in principle we have the freedom to think what we like, we’re afraid of that freedom: “we nervously step up to the edge of allowable thought, and then trigger the scrutiny of the censuring superego” (p11). Fiction lets us explore that otherness in a containing manner, the fictional characters whose minds we are privileged to inhabit, holding our hands along the way.

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Flogging the first, fixing the second and rewriting the third: Am I now a novelist?

23/10/2015

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This post marks three months since the publication of my debut novel, Sugar and Snails, and a possible a transition to another stage of my writerly identity. A few weeks before publication I wrote of my ambivalence at claiming the title of author but, once my book was out there, and people were saying nice things about it, I felt less of a fictional fictioneer. Now, as I start to soft-pedal on the selling (for non-British readers, flog is slang for sell), get ready to edit the next one (another contract is signed and Underneath is scheduled for May 2017) and revisit the fast first draft of what I hope will be my third, I’m wondering if author is big enough to encompass the size of my ego. With three novels in mind, am I now a novelist?

The analogy isn’t very original but, like many clichés, it’s one that works: like children at different stages of development, these novels require different kinds of attention, fluctuating amounts even, as they venture into the world. Of necessity, my firstborn has been the priority over the last six months and, while it’s always going to need me, it can stand on its own two feet as I snuggle up with the baby, and the middle one prepares for its turn in the limelight.

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All is not rosy in South Korea: The Defections by Hannah Michell

20/10/2015

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Belonging matters in South Korea towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, so dual-heritage Mia, with an absent English mother and mute and severely disabled Korean father, is never going to fit in. Bullied at school and, at thirty, still resented by her stepmother for whom Mia’s green eyes and pale skin are a constant reminder of her husband’s transgressions. With a lifetime of unhappiness, Mia has idolised the English, ever grateful for her job as a translator at the British Embassy, and particularly in awe of her boss. But Thomas is not as admirable as he seems. His career and marriage already at risk through his alcohol addiction, complications abound when he becomes both emotionally and strategically entangled with Mia, putting them both in jeopardy.

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Serendipity, coincidence and luck: The role of chance in fiction

18/10/2015

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Keep at it! You’ll get there in the end if you try hard enough. How often did I come across such words as I struggled to find a publisher for my novel? And, now I’m published, am I going to regurgitate the mantra to others on the way up? No, I’m not, because – do you know what? – it’s bollocks. While writing a good book, and investing time and money to make it better, and treating each rejection as a trigger to try again, no doubt improve our chances, there’s no magic formula. Success doesn’t happen without an element of luck.

They mean well, those published writers who perpetuate the mythology. After all, the great unpublished are hounding them for scraps of encouraging advice. Looking back on their own rocky road to publication, all they see is hard graft and talent. If that got them through, why wouldn’t others achieve the same result? But history is a story told from the point of view of the victors. The voices of those who worked equally hard without the golden ticket go unheard, save a few brave exceptions. Although his emphasis is marketing, Dan Blank proves himself an ally of the disaffected, picturing success as a function of writing talent, author platform and luck.

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Psychologists Write: Gerald Alan Fox

17/10/2015

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I first embarked on a career in pharmacy on a P&O liner, followed by running a small group of pharmacies. The rare combination of pharmacy and psychology degrees led me to work with pharmaceutical manufacturers in the UK and Europe on psychotropic medicine and registration files. Concerned by the illegal drug scene, and the cavalier but legal use of tranquillisers and anti-depressants and sleeping tablets, I helped set up a drug helpline, a benzodiazepine dependency group, and gave a series of talks, on prescribing those drugs, to doctors in general practice (GPs) and hospital psychiatric units. I practised psychotherapy for over thirty years. I began analytically after two years at the receiving end and gradually moved towards gestalt and insight directed therapies eventually combining all disciplines with CBT. This eclectic approach adapted well to individual needs and tended to shorten the course of treatment.

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Fictional psychologists and psychotherapists: 19. The Sorrows of an American by Siri Hustvedt

14/10/2015

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The Sorrows of an American takes us through a year in the life of New York psychotherapist, Erik Davidsen, and those who are close to him: his mother; his sister, Inga; his niece, Sonia; his patients; and his tenant, Miranda, and her beguiling five-year-old daughter, Eglantene. It’s a glimpse of ordinary life which shows us the extraordinary twists and turns of the human condition. It’s also a fine example of what a talented and committed author, prepared to do her homework (with impressive acknowledgements of psychiatrists and psychotherapists consulted and the author’s supervised voluntary work in a psychiatric hospital) can make of this strange profession.

Like many therapists, Erik is vulnerable, although this vulnerability is woven so well into the story we hardly label it as such. Middle-aged, lonely after his divorce, his father’s death – and the discovery of his old diaries – prompts an investigation into his own back story. He can take things to heart, such as when he’s snubbed by his tenant (p40-41):

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On book pricing: a cautionary tale

12/10/2015

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One of the things I was careful to check before signing up with my publisher, was the proposed retail price of my book. I’d come across other small presses where the paperbacks were the price of a hardback from one of the Big Five. While I appreciate that small print runs contribute to the higher unit costs for the independent publisher, most readers wouldn’t understand. Why should they pick up a paperback from an unknown author and publisher when they could get a discounted hardback from a household name and half a dozen fancy bookmarks for the same price? How could I entice friends and family to support my launch if they had a sneaking suspicion they were being ripped off?

So I was delighted when debut novel, Sugar and Snails, came out priced at the lower end of the scale. With its beautiful cover and quality printing, people queued for signed copies, a few buying an extra one or two for friends. They were happy, I was happy, my publisher was happy – until I spoke to some booksellers.

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World Mental Health Day: Dignity in Fiction?

10/10/2015

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Following on from last month’s post for World Suicide Prevention Day, I’m marking World Mental Health Day on Annecdotal this weekend. The 2015 theme is dignity, so I’m highlighting sympathetic portrayals of mental health issues in fiction. I’ve blogged elsewhere about the mental health themes in my own novel, Sugar and Snails, including the development of the false self to protect one’s vulnerabilities; insecure attachment; and invisible vulnerabilities and self-harm; as well as my personal connection to those issues in the struggle to find a mind of my own and my post on Stigma Fighters about being a wounded healer. So I won’t repeat that here (but do follow the links if you haven’t already); focusing instead on the ways in which my recent reading provide insight into the mental health challenges we face across the lifespan.

The fragility of early parenthood couldn’t be captured better than in the character of Ari in After Birth by Elisa Albert. Still traumatised by an overly medicalised birth, she’s lonely and she’s angry at the structures that estrange women from vital sources of genuine support. This should be considered a prerequisite of a healthy society, not only for the sake of the struggling parents, but for the future well-being of their offspring. Cuts in public spending in these areas hurt us all.

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Traumatised teens: After the Bombing by Clare Morrall

7/10/2015

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Alma Braithwaite, a thirty-something music teacher at a girls’ school in early-60s Exeter, lives alone amongst the dust of the house where she grew up. Orphaned at fifteen by an air raid that also destroyed part of her school, Alma seems stuck in the past. That’s certainly the view of the new headmistress, Miss Yates, whose reforming ways Alma seems determined to resist. But, though now elevated to the role of teacher at her old school, there’s a part of Alma that’s still a traumatised teenager, dependent on the former structures for her sense of self.

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Creation myths: Returning home in my reading and writing

4/10/2015

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Many of us are fascinated by where we came from: the parents and places that made us who we are. While it seems we need to leave home, either physically or geographically, to become ourselves, at some point we’re drawn back to reconcile ourselves to the gap between the reality of our personal origins and the myths we’ve been sold or created. Ambivalence about home is such a core feature of my own reading and writing, it’s a struggle to condense it into the ninety-nine words Charli Mills has requested this week on the theme of returning to a place of origin. Join me on a tour of my literary bookshelves while I contemplate my own take on the prompt.

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