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After art school: The Chalk Artist & You

4/5/2018

After my last post featuring two novels about fictional teenagers going missing in the Peak District, the link between these reviews is more tenuous. While both feature men who have found a salaried position after art school – the first going into the gaming industry without completing his degree; the second joining the ranks of fictional therapists as a rare art therapist – these novels seem quite different. Yet both also feature obsession: the first with the alternate reality of computer games; the second with an estranged daughter. See what you think.

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Women taking stock: Mirror, Shoulder, Signal & Making Space

23/11/2017

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The common theme in these two recently published novels is a woman experiencing an existential crisis, taking stock of where she’s got to in life by ordering the elements that make up her external world. Sonja, the older of the two, does this through taking driving lessons, and it’s no coincidence that she struggles to take control. Miriam, past adolescence although not yet fully fledged adult, tries to achieve something similar by jettisoning her surplus possessions, and through those of a compulsive hoarder she’s employed to help. Needless to say, neither woman’s path to a more comfortable accommodation with herself is straightforward. Curious? Read on!

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Two novels and a memoir about caring for babies

24/9/2017

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As far as I’m concerned, the welfare of babies and young children is a collective responsibility, so I offer no apologies for linking these three books. The first is a historical novel that begins with a fascinating account of the experience of a wet nurse in nineteenth century Spain, before moving on to the adult lives of the princess who had first turn at the breast and her milk brother, the woman’s own baby. The second is a contemporary novel set a century later, about a young American woman working as a nanny to a Japanese toddler. Both novels show the strength of attachment we can have to other people’s offspring. The third book is an uncompromising and moving memoir about a young Englishwoman who becomes pregnant as a student and decides to keep the child. Finally, because a baby is a kind of harvest of the womb, we finish with this week’s flash.

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Married or single, something’s missing: First Love & All Grown Up

2/8/2017

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Londoner Neve is married, New Yorker Andrea is single, but they’re both struggling with similar attachment issues. Both have tried and abandoned therapy, and not only because of complex relationships with their mothers. They’re both creative types, although Andrea has given up on her art. Two women in their thirties, I’d like to put them in a room together to see if that would emphasise their individual difficulties or they’d help each other out. Failing that, I’m relying on you to judge what they can tell us, either separately or together, about contemporary women’s lives.

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Two novels about a passion for vinyl

14/7/2017

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The digital revolution has massively changed the way we listen to music, yet vinyl has been revitalised in some quarters in recent years. Perhaps it’s no surprise that contemporary novelists should review their record collections in search of new ways of exploring the human condition. But two published within three months of each other? That’s quite a coincidence. Read on to see how these established British authors have addressed the topic in very different ways.

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How a one-star review is a gift to people pleasers

5/7/2017

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After being turned down by multiple publishers and agents, I was pleasantly surprised at how well my debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was received, even going on to be shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. But you can’t take anything for granted in this business. Two years later, my second novel, Underneath, brought me, on the eve of publication, my first one-star review on Goodreads (and a little later on Amazon). Ouch! Someone has looked at my baby, declared it ugly and wants the world to know.

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Four Fictional Absent Fathers

17/6/2017

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In a companion essay to her novella, Her Father’s Daughter, author Marie Sizun asks:

What is a father? That’s the real question. A father – even if he’s imperfect or absent – is a mythical, irreplaceable ﬁgure, especially for a girl. If he’s not there during her childhood, she’s likely to spend a long time drifting in vain in search of him.

Having deprived the male narrator of my second novel, Underneath, of a father, I would argue that the gap is equally damaging for a boy, as outlined in my recent guest post The impact of the absent father in Underneath.

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Playing hard to get? #amreading

31/5/2017

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I recently outed myself as a Philistine, by rating one of the 100 all-time best novels 2 out of 5 (“it was okay”) on Goodreads. First published in 1915, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford had sat unloved on my bookshelf for several years when it was chosen for my book group. When the time came to read it, I realised why I’d given up on it the first time round. It’s the story of the relationship between two wealthy couples, and the sexual intrigues and emotional betrayals behind their respectable facades. The novel is considered a master class in the unreliable narrator that has inspired many distinguished 20th-century writers. So why didn’t it work for me?

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Hitler’s Forgotten Children by Ingrid von Oelhafen & Tim Tate

2/5/2017

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We believe in the God of all things

And in the mission of our German blood

Which grows ever young from German soil.

We believe in the race, carrier of the blood,

And in the Führer, chosen for us by God.

The last time Annecdotal took a peek at the craziness of the Nazi project was with a fictional account of Mengele’s perverted twin studies. Today we’re visiting related territory with a memoir and social history of the Lebensborn programme, both literally and metaphorically Himmler’s baby.

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What makes us who we are?

25/4/2017

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What do you think has most shaped your identity? Is it the genetic code inherited from your parents? Is it the culture into which you were born? Is it the way you were nurtured or not in infancy? Okay, a single blog post can’t begin to answer those questions but, with an overdue book review, a memoir and flash fiction prompt deadlines looming, I’m set to dip into the terrain.

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A necessary nip of narcissism?

26/3/2017

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It had been a great night at the Polari salon in Nottingham, and the audience was waiting for the final performer to take the stage, when a woman bounded from the back of the room. Scowl framed by the hood of her black anorak, and ignoring the compere’s insistence that she wasn’t on the programme, Barbara Brownskirt barked out a series of poems from her numerous unpublished collections about, among other things, her unrequited love for Judi Dench. She was scary. She was hilarious. She was – and still is – the unsuccessful lesbian Poet-in-Residence at the 197 bus stop, Penge, and the brilliant creation of writer and performer Karen McLeod.

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Family dynamics: Swimming Lessons & Our Magic Hour

26/1/2017

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I decided to pair these novels after reading blurbs suggesting both were about young women adapting to significant losses: the mother’s disappearance in Swimming Lessons and a close friend’s suicide in Our Magic Hour. But, on reading the latter, I felt the main character’s issues predated that particular tragedy, originating with a highly ambivalent mother in a difficult marriage. Unfortunately for the character, but very accommodating for my reading and blogging schedule, the same applies to the first novel. I hope one or both of these will appeal but, if not, you’ll find several other posts and reviews on the theme of family dynamics if you follow the link.

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Cry, Baby, Cry!

16/1/2017

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Sue Gerhardt's book nails the argument much more clearly than I can.

Knowing I’ve never had children, readers have expressed surprise that I’m interested in reading and writing about mothers and babies. To me, however, it makes sense politically, (past) professionally and personally. A socialist by inclination, I believe in collective responsibility for the vulnerable, and who could be more vulnerable than a neonate? In psychology, although there are different and opposing models of the impact of early months and years, curiosity about the human mind necessitates at least a passing interest in our origins. Finally, I’m very much in touch with how it feels to be totally dependent on someone who doesn’t heed my cries. So, yes, I give a crap about attentiveness to babies, and not just when they’ve soiled their nappies.

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Never Can Say Goodbye

12/9/2016

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When I read about the latest flash fiction challenge to write a 99-word story about goodbye, I thought it would be easy to pair a story with one of my review posts. As Norah kindly pointed out in the comments, the theme chimed with my reflections on two novels about how conflict in attachments to place can impinge on family. But I thought it might work better alongside my review of What Belongs to You, which is much more clearly about attachment, until I read another novel on a similar theme for that post. But it’s left me, with an approaching deadline, a brain elsewhere and a desire not to be left out, with almost too many ideas, although none of them yet confined to 99 words. But you can trust that, although I don’t know at this moment how I’ll get there, I will get to a flash as otherwise this post would not exist.

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Breaking news? Gay men exist!

5/9/2016

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Among Saturday’s headlines, we learn that a middle-aged man is involved in a loving relationship. That’s news? Sadly, it is, when the man is a middle manager (a.k.a. a bishop) in the Church of England and the object of his affection is another man. It’s already feeling too much information when I’m told he’s unmarried and celibate. Oh, so he’s invisibly gay? Cue big sigh of relief?

As I’m not a member of the church, and have no desire to become one – although I’ve never been known to forgo the opportunity to sing praises to the guy-in-the-sky in one of their magnificent buildings – perhaps it’s not my business. Except that this hypocritical organisation has a stake, through seats in the House of Lords, in governing my country. Wouldn’t it be nice, until such time as they are abolished, if they adhered to the laws of the land and basic human rights that permit same-sex marriage (an institution the church tends to be particularly fond of) and physical expression of love? But it seems they’d rather avoid a split from their branches overseas (including those countries in which homophobia is sanctioned by the state) than take the moral stance they’d like to claim is theirs.

In this context, the role of art and literature in counteracting the silencing and marginalisation of homosexual people garners more importance. So I’m proud to have written a novel that has made the Polari First Book Prize shortlist and to include LGBT novels in my reading and reviews. Here are a couple more, which focus particularly on gay men and boys who pay, and are paid, for sex, the first set in a relatively recent Bulgaria and the second in Iceland almost a century ago. I’m hoping the bishop’s love life is more straightforward than those portrayed in these short novels.

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The Course of Love by Alain de Botton

20/7/2016

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It will take Rabih many years and frequent essays in love … to recognise that the very things he once considered romantic … are what stand in the way of learning how to sustain relationships. He will conclude that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling opening ambitions; that for his relationships to work he will need to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place. (p6)

In a nutshell, The Course of Love is about the need to adjust our ideas of marriage in order to make it a success. In a similar vein, let me suggest the reader adjust her expectations of this book in order to fully appreciate its wisdom and compassion.

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Only connect? #amreading between baffled and bludgeoned

30/6/2016

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As someone who’s drawn to subtle stories with complex characters and hates being bludgeoned with being told what to think and feel, I shouldn’t be surprised that there are times when my expectations aren’t met by the book in my hands and I’m tempted to give up. Usually I try to unravel why it didn’t work for me, with the aim of both getting a stronger sense of what I like and don’t like, and what I can learn from this for my own writing. But sometimes I feel quite disorientated by my bafflement, by my lack of connection with the author’s words. If I’ve been unlucky – or chosen unwisely – and experienced a string of disconnections, I can feel quite low. The activity that has always been my refuge becomes a claustrum. It’s like being internally homeless or losing a good friend. (Or finding your compatriots have voted overwhelmingly for xenophobia, which still has me reeling almost a week on.)

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Homeless inside

27/6/2016

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The Carrot Ranch is on the move and, sadly, not by choice. Forced out of her home and on the road, Charli has nevertheless grabbed the reins for long enough to deliver another flash fiction challenge. Fittingly, the topic is home and she’s served up two brilliant examples from her own novels in progress. While a collection of 99-word stories might not provide the much-needed bricks and mortar, there’s a virtual round-the-campfire homeliness on her blog when writers ride up with our responses to the prompt.

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Neutral to neutered? The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain

24/6/2016

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Fierce, astringent, profoundly tender, Rose Tremain’s beautifully orchestrated novel asks the question, what does it do to a person, or to a country, to pursue an eternal quest for neutrality, and self-mastery, while all life’s hopes and passions continually press upon the borders and beat upon the gate. I don’t often structure my reviews around the blurb (being generally far too fond of my own opinion) but, for the thirteenth novel by this award-winning author, I hoped it might help me explore whether The Gustav Sonata is even more than a jolly good read.

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What’s haunting these houses?

22/6/2016

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It’s almost a year until my second novel, Underneath, is published. As it starts with looking around a house, I had it in mind when I posted my guest prompt over at the Carrot Ranch recently. What I didn’t realise at the time was that this would herald a theme cutting across much of my reading and reviews, from Nolan’s work on a building site in Journeyman, to an updated Wildfell in The Woman Who Ran, to the isolated manor house in The Sacred Combe, a large house in Nigeria in This House is not For Sale, a farmhouse in upstate New York which has been bought on the cheap in All Things Cease to Appear and an entire street in Prosperity Drive. Now I’m adding to that list with a novel about a former show house on an unfinished Irish housing estate from which, one by one, all four members of a family disappear and another about the strange children who come to live in an isolated mansion.

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Her Father’s Daughter by Marie Sizun

14/6/2016

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At four and a half, the child is blissfully content in the Paris apartment she shares with her mother. The war means little to her and, while her grandmother disapproves of her freedom to do as she likes, her mother always takes her side. The only cloud in her blue-sky world is the lie told by the two older women when they insisted the baby sister she’d seen presented to her mother in a Normandy hospital was a figment of her imagination.

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Hope Farm by Peggy Frew

7/6/2016

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It was like a chain of dominoes toppling down, each person hurting the other. And however much I tried to place myself on the outside, an untouchable observer full of disdain or pity, the truth was that I was in there too, somewhere, falling.

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It’s ONLY fiction? Not according to your brain!

30/5/2016

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As someone who spends more time with fictional characters than with flesh-and-blood people, I’m sometimes at risk of embarrassing myself in real-life interactions. Especially when it gets to the level of gossip; it’s not that I’m not interested, or don’t have anything to contribute, but that the anecdote I’m bursting to share is about some fictional character, and some people find that a little odd.

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Life circles: My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

23/4/2016

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As a child, Lucy Barton was the strange kid no-one wanted to talk to, who, lacking a television, knew nothing of popular culture and who, according to the other kids, stank. At home, she and her two older siblings were emotionally neglected, often hungry, and periodically on the receiving end of a vicious slap. Lucy hung around at school at the end of the day for the warmth. Too small to have a library, there were nevertheless books in the classrooms and it was in books that Lucy discovered both a solution to her loneliness and her own secret desire to write.

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What Drives Your Characters: Fear or Desire?

11/4/2016

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The coincidence of Charli Mills’s latest post on the loss of a secure base with the buzz about the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth later this month (more on both later in this post) reminded me of this piece on fear as a motivator that has languished in my drafts folder for well over a year.

I’m a great fan of Emma Darwin’s posts on writing because, while they’re stuffed with useful advice, she never pretends there’s a simple formula (or two or three or two hundred and three) to make our novels novel and our sentences sing. That’s not the case in some other corners of the creative writing industry. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m particularly hacked off by an implicit assumption that the classic quest underlies each and every story structure: we just have to decide what our hero wants and thwart him in his journey to find it. While I can see how that works for some fiction, lots of the novels I read and love don’t go down that route. On top of that, human motivation is a complex construct: some people genuinely don’t know what they want and some are far too passive to follow their dreams. Some are constrained by circumstances or demons from the past and some characters sabotage their own desires.

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