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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.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Severe illness from the inside: Body Kintsugi & Rocking with the Reaper

7/10/2022

4 Comments

 
Here are two recent reads about a woman’s experience of serious illness and associated treatments and surgeries. The first is a translated novella and the second a chunky mélange of memoir, popular psychology and self-help. But, genre aside, what distinguishes them is their tone: the first, distant and matter-of-fact; the second, unashamedly emotional. See which you prefer.

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Feminist crime: Woman at Point Zero & After the Silence

25/8/2022

8 Comments

 
Here are two novels in which issues of female disempowerment are explored within a murder narrative. The first is a modern classic, translated from Arabic, set in a culture where women have no custody over their own bodies. The second is a contemporary Irish crime novel, set in a society where men have learnt ways of controlling their partners without leaving a physical mark.

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8 Comments

Aftermath: The Tin Nose Shop & The Wilderness

12/7/2022

6 Comments

 
These two novels are about the consequences of untimely deaths on those left behind. The first is set during the First World War when a grieving soldier is set to work making masks to hide the horrific facial injuries of those wounded in the trenches. The second is about two orphaned sisters and an anthropologist with unconventional ideas about mourning rituals.

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Mourning a marriage: The Chosen & So Long a Letter

15/4/2022

6 Comments

 
These two novels depict a character’s reflections on their life following the sudden death of their spouse. Both the male writer in the first novel and the female teacher in the second are mourning not only the loss of a partner but of the promise of their original romance.

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Haunted by the aftermath: The Memory Monster & Reeling

7/2/2022

14 Comments

 
Two translated novels – the first from Hebrew, the second from French – about young people invited to apply for grants to support their ambitions, which lead them into damaging situations. The first is about a tour guide to the Nazi death camps; the second about a teenage dancer groomed for abuse (with a section from the point of view of her school boyfriend, who feels burdened by his Jewish heritage). They question whether the legacy of such cruelty is to forgive, forget or become monsters ourselves. Difficult subjects, but both an easy and worthwhile read.


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14 Comments

The past lingers on: Ever Rest, Old Bones and This Other Island

18/7/2021

10 Comments

 
Three short reviews of novels about how the past keeps hold of us. The first two are connected by the discovery of a body and a sleepy Shropshire village; the third novel, This Other Island, is, like Ever Rest, mostly set in London and, like Old Bones, it’s about family secrets.

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How would you answer the covid novel’s call?

28/6/2020

8 Comments

 
History can’t have got the memo. The virus destined to put the world on pause has had us glued to the news: first with the exposure of right-wing government incompetence, then with the spotlight on racism we can no longer ignore. Whether this depresses or delights us, it’s hard to keep up. What’s the role of the writer – particularly writers like me with a tiny readership – in historic times? Should novelists switch to facts from fiction? Should we try to shape historic discourse or step back and observe?
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On rescuing and burnout: are you trying to save the world?

31/5/2020

11 Comments

 
A new Twitter follower picked up on my post on self-compassion and flagged her own about the urge to rescue other people when the one who really needs rescuing is herself. Well, that got me rethinking a familiar theme which might account for why my email inbox is clogged and my to-do list is endless when the world is meant to be on pause. Apologies to those struggling with a loss of human contact and structure but, from where I stand, there’s a surfeit of life-belts in an extremely small pond.
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11 Comments

The emotional climate in the age of Trump: Right after the Weather & Weather

22/5/2020

3 Comments

 
The titles themselves are reason enough to pair these recently published American novels. What I didn’t expect when I picked them from my TBR shelf is that they’d both feature the painful shock, especially among women, of Donald Trump’s election to president. The first zooms in on alienation, perceived inadequacy and a painful discovery of one’s own propensity to violence. The second forefronts the anxiety engendered by the climate crisis and rampant capitalism. I wonder if either of these authors is considering a sequel about their characters’ relationships with the coronavirus pandemic!

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In which Anne disappears down the rabbit hole

11/5/2020

13 Comments

 
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Image by Prawny from Pixabay
At 15.55 one Sunday in mid-April, Anne decided to go stark raving bonkers. Of course she was conscious of the contradiction: madness that’s chosen, isn’t madness at all. Nevertheless, she was earnest in her objective, if unclear how it would be achieved. She even made a note to that effect on the information sheet for the novel she’d just been reading. The novel about depression with rabbits in the title that had just made her laugh out loud.

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My first month of lockdown reading and recommendations

28/4/2020

4 Comments

 
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After a full month of lockdown, am I any closer to answering the question I posed to myself at the end of March: Do you read differently in anxious times? Of course not! While my preference for fiction remains, I’ve enjoyed both long and short novels this month, both sober and comic, and, as for theme, read wherever I took my fancy from my dwindling TBR shelf. I’ve shed cathartic tears in response to a political satire – thank you Enter the Aardvark by Jessica Anthony – and laughed deep into my belly reading a novel about the experience of depression – Rabbits for Food. We’re strange creatures, we human beings!


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In death’s waiting room? The Great Unexpected & Extinctions

24/8/2018

4 Comments

 
I sometimes wonder if the link between books is too tenuous to pair the reviews; less often, I worry they might be too alike. These two new novels about curmudgeonly widowers reluctantly rubbing shoulders with other retirees in what feels to them like death’s waiting room seemed to belong to the latter category: second novels about men at odds with their grown-up daughters finding a kind of redemption when an unlikely friend intrudes upon their private space. Both have hints of humour and a quietly political backdrop of past injustice but, despite the surface similarities, once I was lost in the pages I realised that no two novels are ever the same.

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4 Comments

Part-time mourning for writerly disappointments?

20/7/2018

15 Comments

 
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The writer’s life is rife with disappointment. One of the main factors differentiating the successful from the unsuccessful is not the degree of failure they encounter, but the ability and willingness to scrape oneself up from the ground and carry on. But how do we do that? The blogosphere thrums with posts on adopting an almost military discipline, but that’s not right for everyone. It’s not right for me.


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15 Comments

Narrative structure, psychoanalytic theory and the grief that never goes

13/7/2018

14 Comments

 
I sometimes wonder if there’s a fundamental incompatibility between my ambitions to improve as a writer and attract more readers, and my loyalty to my personal truth. Certainly the recent trend towards up lit seems at odds with my need to embrace both light and dark. And industry advice doesn’t always acknowledge the complexity of being human and that characters can be as motivated by loss and fear as by desire.

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14 Comments

Reimagining the birth pangs of psychoanalysis: When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D Yalom

2/6/2018

10 Comments

 
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In 1882, in a wintry Vienna, two brilliant minds connect. One is an ambitious, although rarely read, philosopher; the other is a highly respected diagnostician and doctor to the rich and famous. The men are drawn to each other’s ideas but, although one’s a bachelor and the other a married father of five, they have more in common than they realise. Both men’s obsession with a much younger woman is threatening their well-being.



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10 Comments

Balancing the light and dark #amreading

31/5/2018

2 Comments

 
A couple of years ago I blogged about the reasons I’d give up on a novel. Near the top of my list of eleven reasons, I wrote:
 
4. While I believe there’s room for a touch of humour in almost any topic, I don’t like comedic takes on tragic situations unless, like
The First Bad Man, it’s really dark and over the top. Apparent denial of desperation and devastation can really freak me out.

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3. Yet, much as I’m drawn to the dark side, I don’t want my reading to be totally bleak. There are ways of writing about trauma that allow for a sliver of light.
 
While these two points still hold for me as a reader, I’m not sure I can identify exactly where the balance lies for me between dark and light, either in relation to what I want from a novel or in how to find it.


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2 Comments

Even loving marriages have secrets: How I Lose You & Fire Sermon

11/4/2018

4 Comments

 
Two debut novels by women about women reviewing their (successful and stable) marriages in the context of an important relationship for one partner that’s not shared with the other. In the first, the wife’s passion for God and poetry leads her into the mind, arms and eventual bed of a man who isn’t her husband; in the second, the wife, emerging from her grief at her husband’s sudden death, becomes suspicious about the nature of his secret friendship with a woman he’s met on business trips abroad. Both authors employ non-linear structure to good effect.

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4 Comments

No feelings? #amwriting #mentalhealth #Flash4Storms

9/10/2017

5 Comments

 
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One day last summer, I had an errand to do ten minutes’ drive or half an hour’s walk away from home. Even though the route, along a fairly busy road, isn’t particularly pleasant, I prefer to walk, both for the exercise and to feed my writing. So I grabbed my raincoat (it was that kind of summer) and laced up my boots. On the way back, the sun came out at the moment I levelled with a track I’d never previously taken. It was time to investigate.

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Writing happy?

29/3/2017

8 Comments

 
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How to mark a 500th post? A normal person might host a competition or a giveaway to express their appreciation of their readers and blog followers. One such from the eminent Emma Darwin resulted in my first-ever guest post, on the topic of writer’s block, of which, almost four years on, I’m still immensely proud. But, having failed to plan ahead for today’s illustrious event, and with more than a nip of narcissism in my psyche, I’m stuck with celebrating myself. Look away now if that offends you: there’ll be more reviews next month.


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8 Comments

Finding comfort in books with blue covers?

30/11/2016

8 Comments

 
One of the pleasures of the physical book, as opposed to ebooks,  is the value it confers beyond the words within it.  Many of us find, despite potential minimalist inclinations, there are books we don’t want to let go of. Part of the pleasure of the book is to look at it.

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8 Comments

Why I (and plenty of others) turn to crime (writing, that is) by Kate Evans

7/11/2016

2 Comments

 
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I’m delighted to welcome Kate Evans back to Annecdotal a year on from her popular post on Healing Words. As she’s just published the third novel in her Scarborough Mysteries series, I invited her to spill the beans on why she’s turned to (fictional) crime.

Read on for some fascinating insights into the crime writer’s mind.

We British like a crime novel, so says
Alistair Horne, of Cambridge University Press. It is by far the best selling genre in the UK. Is this because we are a particularly heartless or ghoulish lot?




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2 Comments

Do you read for relaxation?

31/10/2016

8 Comments

 
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Reading, in fact produces its own forms of anxiety. Worries and preoccupations suggested by some other person’s prose start flurrying into my brain, preventing me from sleeping through the night.

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8 Comments

The complexity of human relationships: Prosperity Drive by Mary Morrissy

21/5/2016

8 Comments

 

Edel Elworthy is confused about most things, but she’s pretty sure that her adult daughter, Norah, who has moved back into her childhood home on Prosperity Drive to care for her, is aware that she’s fallen at the top of the stairs. But she “thinks she understands why lately Norah has refused to come running. Payback” (p4). Though there’s something she feels she ought to tell her if only she could form the words.


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8 Comments

Ever so ‘umble? What’s wrong with pride?

29/4/2016

12 Comments

 
I’m proud to be taking the reins this week at the Carrot Ranch, with a flash fiction prompt on showing someone around a property. My theme arose partly from the open weekend at North Lees Hall, which attracted over a thousand visitors across the two days. Although I got rather chilled standing in the doorway trying to steer a one-way system on the two sets of stairs, it was great fun. For those who couldn’t make it to Derbyshire, here’s a virtual tour of the house, both inside and out.

Did you notice the p-word in my opening sentence? Did it make you wince? If so, I hope I can persuade you that, not only is the adjective perfectly apt for the purpose, you should lay claim to it yourself.


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What’s wrong with an angry woman?  The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

18/1/2016

18 Comments

 
When Fleur Smithwick, one of the early endorsers of my debut novel, Sugar and Snails, likened my central character, Diana, to the narrator of The Woman Upstairs, I was flattered. I knew that the author, Claire Messud, was well regarded by the literati and, although I hadn’t read it, the reviews suggested The Woman Upstairs was my kind of book. I also recalled some fireworks around the publicity, when (presumably male) reviewers and interviewers had queried the creation of an angry female character. Having finally read the novel, I followed this up to discover an article in the New Yorker on character likeability. Interesting as that article is, I’m shocked that it stems from an unchallenged assumption that readers will agree that Nora is unlikeable, not someone you’d want as a friend.
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    Anne Goodwin's books on Goodreads
    Sugar and Snails Sugar and Snails
    reviews: 32
    ratings: 52 (avg rating 4.21)

    Underneath Underneath
    reviews: 24
    ratings: 60 (avg rating 3.17)

    Becoming Someone Becoming Someone
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    ratings: 9 (avg rating 4.56)

    GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Issue 4 GUD: Greatest Uncommon Denominator, Issue 4
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    ratings: 9 (avg rating 4.44)

    The Best of Fiction on the Web The Best of Fiction on the Web
    reviews: 3
    ratings: 3 (avg rating 4.67)

    2022 Reading Challenge

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