The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

Posted by litlove

When I finished the final page of Virginia Evan’s novel, my first thought was to chase down a quote I half-remembered from probably the best non-fiction book I’ve ever read: Being Wrong by Kathryn Schultz. In this book, Schultz takes a deep dive into our human propensity to believe everyone else is wrong, while finding all occasions in which we are wrong to be devastating and damaging. The mechanism that makes being wrong so painful is called cognitive dissonance, which happens when we are forced to hold two conflicting beliefs in our mind at the same time, or when our actions quite clearly fail to meet our standards and principles. The emotions provoked are so intense and shattering that we will do almost anything to avoid feeling them. Schultz breaks them down in this way:

There is the sudden awareness of the immensity of the world, and of our extreme smallness, vulnerability, and confusion within it. There is the utterly primal nature of our emotional response in such situations: panic, anguish, rage. There is the fear that we don’t have the ability or resources to find our way again in the world. And somewhere in the mix, there is also the wronged and outraged and grieving sense that we shouldn’t be here in the first place – that some cruel or careless being, more powerful than we are, has abandoned us to our fate.’

The difficulty with this is that we are wrong all the time, over matters large and small. We confuse belief with knowledge. We make mistakes, we don’t listen carefully or remain attentive, we want things that will cause us endless problems, we are impulsive, reckless, hopelessly stubborn, and afraid of our emotions. Fallibility is baked into our experiences from start to finish. Or to quote Sybil van Antwerp, ‘I have found it to be absolutely astounding, all the trouble living has turned out to be.’

Now, if Sybil had read Being Wrong as part of a qualifying test to call oneself an adult, which I firmly believe we should all be obliged to sit, she might not have had quite so many problems. The Correspondent is based on that familiar trope, the cantankerous elderly person at odds with the world. Male versions of these abound in literature, from Ebenezer Scrooge to Jackson Lamb, and although less numerous, there are plenty of female versions too – Mrs Fisher in Elizabeth von Arnim’s Enchanted April is the one who always springs to my mind. The character is based on a compassionate premise: although they may look as if they are simply horrible people, there is, in fact, a root cause for their irascibility. This is usually a deep grief held from many years ago which has led them to spurn the world and become lonely and bitter as a result. The work of the narrative is to unearth this concealed trauma, teach the character the lesson they have been avoiding, and thus restore them to a full and happy life.

So yes, this is a fairy tale. One very fondly held by fiction and its readers, perhaps because we all have elderly relatives in our lives who could use a bit of redemption or – since fairy tales comfort parents for the inadvertent harm they may do their children as much as they reassure children that they have the tools to survive – we may just hope it for ourselves.

Sybil van Antwerp is a letter writer by compulsion and by preference, and this is an epistolary novel comprising the letters she writes to family, friends and the occasional famous writer (Joan Didion, Kasuo Ishiguro, Larry McMurtry, etc). When the story begins she is 73 and achieving a small measure of unwanted fame from the recent death of the judge she used to work with. The mention of her name in his obituary brings her to the attention of an anonymous letter writer, who clearly bears a significant grudge. It’s not like Sybil doesn’t have enough problems. She lost a child in a terrible accident which brought about the end of her marriage and estrangement from her daughter. Now her ex-husband is dying and she can’t reply to the generous and forgiving letter he sends her, although she knows she should. When his funeral comes around, she can’t face attending it and this drives a further wedge between her and her family. She is also slowly going blind, a life sentence that will put an end to the reading and the letter-writing that constitute her pleasures. We watch her making a fist of things generally, being judgemental, bickering with the garden club she belongs to, running over her neighbour’s cat and behaving with rather ugly coldness, and fighting with the dean of a college whose classes she wants to audit. Though there are a few glimmers of hope – a sister-in-law she’s very fond of, and a young neurodivergent boy she writes to, two suitors vying for her attention. There’s also a further subplot concerning her original birth mother. Sybil has known she’s adopted since she was a child, and is initially hostile to the idea of sending off DNA to find information and possibly matches to unknown relatives, but then she changes her mind.

The narrative gradually starts to unravel this knot of fractious interactions to reveal a series of terrible mistakes that Sybil made around the death of her son. Events conspire to make her face up to, and perhaps most crucially admit to others, the wrongdoing that has left her so guilty and ornery all these years. The ending, when it comes is as poignant and fairy tale (and sentimental) as you might expect.

But – and here I apologise to all the people who love this book – I spent the first three-quarters of it not really rating it at all. As you might be able to see from my summary, there is just too much going on. It would be enough that Sybil is going blind, or that she’s lonely, or that she’s frozen in grief for her son. Any one of these would account for her crankiness. Towards the end of the novel, it’s suggested that she is also neurodivergent, which feels like even more unnecessary overdetermination. She really doesn’t need some anonymous stalker on top of all this, and in fact, I found myself forgetting that part of the plot because Virginia Evans has so many plates to spin, those letters are few and far between. Equally, Sybil doesn’t need forgiveness from her relatives, and a new love in her life, and a new family, and a chance to make amends in so many different ways. It’s too much and too easily achieved. Nothing gets treated with the depth and profundity that it deserves, and as I hope the quote from Kathryn Schultz shows, the psychodrama of moving from denial and suppression to making peace with our guilt is a rich, fraught story, full of the paradoxes that make us most complicatedly human. The story of being (in the) wrong is one that we really need to hear over and over again, to help us come to terms with it.

Evans manages to pull this book off by means of some heart-wrenching letters in the final pages, and a clever resolution of her multiple plot strands. It means the novel leaves a good impression and offers a plausible justification for its hectic events: that some kind of perfect storm was necessary to force Sybil to confront her demons. But not finding Sybil particularly funny (I didn’t realise she was meant to be witty until I read some reviews), I still remember how long I had to spend with the kind of antagonistic woman I would cross the street to avoid in real life.

I think what intrigues me most about this book is its success. I’m not surprised that readers like it – it’s a familiar story that offers a very engaging fairy tale of forgiveness and redemption. But I am surprised it won the Women’s Prize for fiction. It made me think of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of creativity in which he says (more or less, I paraphrase) that creating something important is like a car crash. It brings together a number of variables including the artist, the gatekeepers willing to put their work into the marketplace and the audience and the critics that choose to validate it as art. Seen as just such a car crash, The Correspondent is revealing. We live in such divisive times, with so much that is terribly wrong in the world being denied or dismissed. Unnecessary politicized conflicts have entered the bloodstream of our lives, causing schisms in families and communities that seem almost impossible to heal. There is just so much overwhelming wrongness around – in our systems, in government, in our media, and we are all so busy deeming each other wrong and being intransigent about it. It’s understandable that Virginia Evans’ book might both hit a nerve and offer hope that even the most defensive person can change. For waving this flag, I salute the novel. I don’t know how we are going to be rescued from our own ridiculousness, as Schultz deems our refusal to be wrong, but we need to figure it out sooner rather than later. Reading The Correspondent might be one place to start, but having consumed the popcorn version, I strongly suggest we all read Being Wrong as well, to understand what we’re really up against.

Whistler by Ann Patchett

Posted by litlove

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what we bring, as readers, to the process of reading a book. I think it can feel as if we turn up to Chapter One as open and empty vessels, ready to fill up this pristine container with whatever literary sustenance is on offer. But the reality is that the book is ushered into the most private of inner sanctums, where we are quite without surveillance or restraint. Here the book performs for an audience of past and present iterations of our selves, all of whom bring their emotional baggage, their prejudices, their likes and dislikes, their eccentricities and peccadilloes, and their opinions. So many opinions, and none of them really scrutinized or fact checked. We are so keen these days to slap content warning signs on books, whereas really we’re the ones containing hazardous material to which the poor book, alone and unprotected, will be subjected.

Mulling over this made me think about the dangers of publishing a subtle book, and by subtle I suppose I mean books that take the ordinary everyday world as their situation and allow only ordinary things to happen there. The more we can relate to, the more we can project. And so the story gets all tangled up with what our aunt’s experience of a second wedding was like, or our sister’s of a caesarean section, or how we feel about our best friend being in debt on the credit cards and whether our own last outing to a museum was enjoyable or not. Perhaps it’s safer for authors to portray these kinds of situations only as backdrops to an attention seeking plot that will be very distracting. Or they happen to characters who are so caught up in a big emotional drama that… ditto. But then it can happen that a particularly skilled writer takes on ordinary life and the results can be devastating; out of such a reading experience can come that numinous feeling of being seen and understood and given solidarity. The feeling of finally hearing words that express something so deep it was hidden from view and we only now realise how much we needed it to be articulated. The books that achieve this are the books that will live on in the mind. And I think these are the real ‘high stakes’ of fiction, not some outlandish plot designed to provoke primal fear that we won’t think about two minutes after it’s been resolved. The real question of fiction is can it put life – not fiction – on the page.

But that’s only my opinion, a facet of my own inner reading world. Others may differ.

Ann Patchett’s Whistler is, more or less, just such a subtle book. It concerns 53-year-old English teacher, Daphne Fuller, who visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art one afternoon with her much older husband, Jonathan. He notices that they are being followed through the galleries by an elderly man and decides to confront him. The man is Eddie Triplett, formerly Daphne’s stepfather for a time that was all too brief, a time that was brought to a premature end by a car accident they were in when Daphne was nine. In the intervening years she hasn’t seen him once and has ostensibly almost forgotten him. Given these circumstances, the meeting is surprisingly momentous.

“All of this transpired quietly; no one turned to watch life’s drama unpacked in the gallery,” Daphne says. “I bowed my head and covered my face. I hadn’t known there was something in me to break, but there it was and break it did. I stepped into an open crack in time and fell backwards.”

You might notice that the three characters in this scenario are all in late middle to old age, an age when you might think that nothing much of interest will happen in their lives. But this is part of Patchett’s subtlety. The past now happens to Daphne and Eddie; it happens all over again so that they might live it fully, incorporate its meaning and significance, understand it, and this is by no means a negligible event. Daphne’s mother married three times, and Eddie was the stepfather she loved the most deeply. The ending of this marriage occurred in the middle of so much muddle and crisis, and was so abrupt and unheralded that it has left a lacuna in Daphne’s life, although she moved on from it without obvious trauma and has created a good life for herself since then. But now, she takes the reader with her on an exploration and an explication of that past, as the night of the accident is slowly and gradually revealed, and Daphne starts to fill in all the missing pieces it created. As she spends time with Eddie, she finds out more about him, about the real reasons his marriage to her mother broke down, about her mother’s experience. And along the way we learn about her real father and her other stepfather, about her close relationship to her sister, about her marriage, her fear of flying, the reasons she never chose to have children. Patchett’s skill as a writer is never more in evidence than in the way she weaves these family stories together. It is compelling and gripping and often extremely poignant.

This isn’t the kind of book where a terrible situation is healed because of new information added to the narrative. Daphne was fine before Eddie reappeared. Instead, the emphasis is thrown onto the illumination that love can provide – both in terms of enlightenment, but also in terms of the warmth, the sheer glow of pleasure that love brings with it. Immediately after the reunion at the Met, Daphne’s husband, Jonathan, goes away for a while in order to clear out his recently deceased mother’s house, and he needs Daphne to reassure him that she isn’t going to have an affair with Eddie while he’s gone. She really isn’t, but it’s profound love that’s come to the surface and there is an intriguing gloss of romance over the two of them. I felt, reading this, that I had an unusual degree of insight into their situation. Since my mother died, I have spent so much more time with my father who is a very quiet and retiring man. Growing up, my mother was always the parental vanguard. She took up the family oxygen and my Dad was fine with that; that was just how we all rolled. But once she had gone, I saw my father in the kind of detail I hadn’t experienced since I was a small child. I notice often these days how very alike we are. But my situation is different, or at least, my father’s is. He’s grieving the loss of a life partner, and he’s always known where to find me, so there is an asymmetry to any rediscovery that’s going on. Still, it gave the first half of the novel an extra glow for me.

However, there’s a danger, with the sort of material Ann Patchett is using, of falling into sentimentality, and sometimes she does. The story that Eddie tells Daphne in the car after the accident, the story that supplies the Whistler of the title, was one such case in point for me. I struggle with sentimentality, though this is not Patchett’s fault. I blame the movie, Ghost, which I sobbed through, mostly from sheer rage at the relentless emotional manipulation I was enduring. On that occasion I was stung by popular culture, and have been allergic to sentiment ever since. So I didn’t pay the right amount of attention to that story about the horse, Whistler, and what it would mean for the book as a whole. For a while after this, the book became very preoccupied with death. It turned out that this was as much Patchett’s theme as love was. I guess that’s the other issue that arises when you collect together a cast of reasonably elderly main characters. And here again Patchett lost me, and I had to skim read most of the final third. I’m not going to even try to justify this one; I just don’t like reading about the ordinary, sad end of life, which is my loss because I love reading about ordinary life in all its other aspects. Though I did read right to the end and felt pleased that Patchett didn’t go for the obvious conclusion. I should have trusted her quality and maybe risked myself more with the sections I skimmed.

So, my own particular troubles with Whistler were highly subjective and really shouldn’t be allowed to cast any shadow on what is an extremely well written, cleverly plotted, richly meaningful and heartfelt novel. Books take their chances with readers, and readers bring baggage. On which note, a final thought about the novel. I wondered how it was that Patchett’s narrative had this crystalline lucidity to it, how the interactions between her characters were so crisp and sharp, their lives so infinitely legible from the brief telling details we’re given. And it struck me that these people bring no baggage with them, shoulder no absurd burdens of responsibility, have no idiosyncratic flaws. There is no randomness to muddy the story. They are deep – but the water runs clear. You can make of that what you will.

Yesteryear, or My Fantasy Is Better Than Your Fantasy

Posted by litlove

Well, Yesteryear is an odd duck of a book, isn’t it? It’s been a massive hit, the buzziest book of the year so far, and this because of its concept: a dislikeable tradwife influencer wakes up in 1855 and is forced to live the life she’s been mimicking on social media. Only now I’ve finished reading it, it strikes me that the key to this book is not in fact socking it to tradwives, but the fraudulence baked into every single layer of the story. Let me explain what I mean, only to do so there’ll be spoilers. I’ll signal them in advance so you can skip if you need to.

Our main protagonist, Natalie Heller Mills, is a walking superiority complex. She knows the right way to live, and it’s by the precepts of her form of Christianity. You marry and have children, celebrating the traditional family and protecting it at all costs, with women taking on the substantial domestic burden and men working hard to finance it. Maintaining this life is a labour of love about which you remain positive at all times. Expressed in this way it doesn’t sound too bad, except Natalie has been indoctrinated into a version that’s rotten with inauthenticity from the start. Her mother has taught her to say that their father is no longer with them, implying he’s dead, when really the marriage has failed. So Natalie learns another rule, one that adds a draconian element to her ideology – you do not make mistakes, or if you do, they must never show. From here on in, she determinedly pitches her tent in the land of right and righteousness, which is not the trouble-free neighbourhood she expects. She just can’t get her audience to relate to her the way she wants. Be nice, her mother begs when she leaves home for college, be kind, but Natalie doesn’t have that in her. She’s fiercely competitive, which is the opposite of compassionate. And no one has been kind to her. She’s clearly not naturally the child her mother wants her to be, and she’s too odd and peculiar for her peers. She heads off into the world with no understanding of herself, a fixed and highly policed template of who she needs to be, and a lot of unprocessed rage.

At college she marries the first man who falls in love with her – well, the first person ever to appreciate her. Caleb is rich and handsome so how could it go wrong? Unfortunately it becomes apparent that he’s a work-shy drifter, with neither motivation nor purpose, and his family, heavily into politics, is even more committed to pretence and dissimulation than Natalie is. But marriage is forever, or as she puts it, ‘You certainly didn’t leave your husband if he was just a dumb rich guy.’ Motherhood turns out to be a disaster, too, thankless drudgery and sleep deprivation, all for a small tyrant who seems to hate her. Natalie’s postpartum depression is poorly handled by her mother and her husband, who just need her to shape up. Everything’s going wrong, but Natalie can’t negotiate with her own beliefs. If they aren’t right, what of her righteousness? Her beliefs are are her lodestar, her comfort, her justification. She knows they are the only route to happiness. ‘Doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith, sweetheart,’ her mother says. When she’s unsure, she boosts her morale by conjuring up fantasies about her former roommate, Reena, and how awful her secular career woman life must be. Being judgey is the only pleasure she’s got.

Determined to make her family life work, Natalie manipulates her father-in-law into donating the money to buy a big farm in rural Idaho, and in return he makes her promise to have lots more children. Hence Yesteryear ranch is created, and Instagram offers Natalie the perfect way to validate her inauthenticity. She manages to build a substantial following with pictures of her perfect life. Except everything is a lie. The big brood of kids has been created by intimate moments between Natalie and the chicken baster, such is the state of her marriage. The loving relationships she performs with her children are all staged, because her dire inability to cope has resulted in the employment of two nannies. The organic produce from the farm is full of pesticides. Home schooling is indoctrination into Caleb’s QAnon-type conspiracy theories. And all these cracks in the facade become very apparent to a young woman, Shannon, who comes to the ranch in order to create Natalie’s content.

So this is where we enter the story, with Natalie and her lifestyle on the point of complete meltdown. Then the second strand of the novel immediately kicks in. Natalie suddenly finds herself in a home that is a primitive version of her home, with a family that is not quite her family. When she tries to run away, believing herself to have been kidnapped, she mangles her foot in a steel animal trap and the crude first aid she receives is hair-raising. Hovering over her life in a semi-fugue state, Natalie struggles to make sense of what’s happened to her, her favourite premise being that she’s in a particularly brutal reality TV show.

Spoiler’s incoming – skip the next paragraph if you don’t want to know the twist.

Only this is not time travel, or virtual reality, or a reality show, or a kidnapping. It’s just a continuation of the life that Natalie was living, with the narrative taking a skip forward in time, rather than backwards. In the present day strand of story, Shannon has revealed to the world that the whole Yesteryear set up is a fake. Publicly shamed, Natalie has deleted her Instagram account and decided that the problem was inauthenticity. Yes! Only, no. Her solution is to live with Caleb in her house in an even more realistic simulacrum of the homesteading past. By this point, she’s lost it mentally and is barely functioning. Her first set of children have been taken away, but she and Caleb have just created more. What happens from here on in isn’t worth talking about because it’s a complete dog’s dinner of an ending. Natalie has doubled down once again on the rightness of her chosen path and made everything even worse than it was. This is psychologically correct. We know that these mass shaming events don’t work, because cognitive dissonance is so powerful and so painful that offenders can’t compute what’s happened. Mostly, they do just continue to tough it out, denying wrongdoing and suffering terrible mental health consequences. But because of the way the book is set up, this part gets lost in a scramble to find some place to stop narrating.

Okay, safe now!

I call it Sophie Hannah Syndrome. She writes her books by coming up with the most impossible crime scenario she can think of and then works out a way for it to be real. The results, to my mind, are plot resolutions that are either absurdly convoluted, nuts, or both. If a narrative scenario looks impossible to resolve, the chances are it IS impossible to resolve, at least in any truly satisfying way. When will publishers learn? High concept does not necessarily make for a great book. The main problem with this twist, as I see it, is that it’s a twist that acts only on the reader. When the twist happens to the protagonist, the reader can be shocked and appalled in solidarity. The twist in Yesteryear leaves the reader simply duped and wrong-footed. The slight of hand left me feeling, is that all there is to it?

So, for me, the real twist of this novel is that the concept is not, in fact, the concept. This isn’t really a book about motherhood or historical homesteading, but rather about the rage and confusion that results from being sold a concept that can’t possibly live up to its premise. Which is a whole lot of irony! And it’s a shame because there’s a good cautionary tale here about what happens when we allow our beliefs to make us lose touch with reality, an inevitable consequence of clinging to them too tightly. Beliefs are a form of theory about life, a perfect, meaningful fantasy about how life should be led. But theory and practice are radically different things, and the place where they meet requires careful negotiation. So this is also a cautionary tale about the dangers of policing ourselves and others rather than embracing the flawed humanity we all share. It’s a warning about the opportunity social media gives us to promote false selves, an act that will always end in misery, dislocation and self-sabotage. No amount of virtue signalling is worth the ultimate cost of abandoning our vulnerable and imperfect selves. And it’s a reminder that stories distort reality – they put coherence in the place of messy reality and offer something deceptively clear cut when the truth is often nuanced, complex and paradoxical. These are all messages that our social-media obsessed, belief-addled society needs to hear. Unfortunately, they get lost behind an eye-catching concept that can never be sufficiently resolved.

Twenty Books of Summer

Posted by litlove

Hello! It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it? But there’s something about the 20 Books of Summer challenge that I find irresistible, so a big thank you to the wonderful Annabel for hosting it again. And yes, I know, I posted my choices about this time last year and then disappeared off the face of the blogworld until this moment, but I did read quite a lot of those books and I will return to them another time and put down a few thoughts. There’s much to say about the previous year, but for now, let’s just get on with the books as I’m excited about this summer’s reading.

Fiction

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke – A tradwife influencer finds herself transported back to 1855 in this buzzy new novel that mixes the cynical publicity games of the internet with a brutal reappraisal of traditional gender roles. I understand there’s a disappointing twist though? Well, I’m just curious to know what all the fuss is about.

North Woods by Daniel Mason – This is one of those novels that follows the fortunes of a rural house in New England over a couple of centuries’ worth of inhabitants, from the earliest American colonies to the present day. Every review I’ve read of it praises the writing, and so this has been on my list to read for a while, waiting for me to have time to devote to it. Rather than wait for that time, it’s on the list now!

The Daffodil Days by Helen Bains – A novel about the ever fascinating Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, that follows the final year of Sylvia’s life through the eyes of the people who surround her in the Devon village to which the couple move. I’m not tired of books about Sylvia Plath yet and by many accounts this sounds like a good one.

The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine – Another novel that I’ve been wanting to read for a while. This is a polyphonic novel, set in Belfast, which revolves around various accounts of a sexual assault on a teenage girl and its aftermath. Longlisted for the women’s prize, but again it was good reviews from people I trust that drew me to this one.

Slanting Towards the Sea by Lidija Hilje – I heard about this first from a dear friend who read it and loved it. Set in Croatia it follows the differing fortunes of a divorced couple who reconnect in later life.

The Performance by Claire Thomas – Set in Melbourne during the 2019-20 bushfire season, the novel concerns three women who are all watching a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days while fires rage around the theatre outside. It’s an innovative narrative that braids the thoughts of the three characters together while the performance takes place. I’ve been loving the more experimental memoirs that I’ve been reading this past year and wanted to try some fiction in the same vein.

Whistler by Ann Patchett – I’ve been on a roll with Ann Patchett novels, loving her last four in a row. Fingers crossed this one doesn’t break the spell. It’s about the reunion between a woman and the stepfather she knew only for a year when she was nine. I really appreciate the way that Patchett seems committed to writing mostly happy books about ordinary life. It shouldn’t be radical or questionable to do that, but some days it seems like it is.

Endling by Maria Reva – This is a bit of a punt for me, not really the kind of thing I would normally choose, but the thought of endangered snails and the Ukrainian marriage industry together in a novel makes me laugh every time. So I decided I had to try it.

The Correspondent by Virginia Evans – This book came from nowhere, it seems, and burst onto the scene by being shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. Again, not a big fan of epistolary novels but the fact it’s had so much word of mouth success makes me want to read it.

Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan – A novel I’ve had on my shelf for several years, which does not in any way correlate to a lack of desire to read it! De Vigan writes autobiographical fiction, and in this book she recounts a time in her life when she hadn’t written for three years and was extremely psychologically fragile. At her most vulnerable, a charming new friend, L., comes into her life and gradually takes it over, dressing like de Vigan, answering her emails, eventually giving a talk in her name. It’s Single White Female with a meta dimension, and I am so there for that.

Red Rose, White Rose by Eileen Chang – My son married last year and my new daughter-in-law is Chinese, which has sent me and Mr Litlove on a Chinese reading kick. In this novella, an upright and emotionally constipated man is led astray by his friend’s passionate, spirited wife. Which sounds kind of French to me, but we shall see.

Non-Fiction

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud – It was Simon at Stuck in a Book who reviewed this and made me want to read it. Also, the fact that I’ve lived in East Anglia all my life, the ultimate flat place. And I like books about post-traumatic memory and depression and working through them. So, hopefully lots of interest here.

Famesick by Lena Dunham – it’s been lauded as an excellent memoir, and is mostly about complicated and debilitating chronic illness, which is why I want to read it, but – and it’s a big but – I’ve never watched an episode of Girls. Will I understand anything that’s going on? This one has been on and off the list, but currently I’m intending to try it.

The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson – When Nelson is on form, there’s no one else like her. But when she’s not, it can be excruciating. This is one of her early texts, about the murder of her aunt which remained unsolved until the moment that Nelson was about to publish a book on her life and death. Suddenly an unexpected DNA match was discovered and the case was reopened. This book considers the trial, but also the effect this mystery had on Maggie Nelson’s family over the course of her upbringing, and the fascination the media has with dead white women. Hopefully it’s a good one.

Notes Made While Falling by Jenn Ashworth – This is a book I’ve dipped into over the past couple of years but never sat down properly to read. However, I’ve wanted to give it some consistent attention because everything I’ve read in it has been absolutely brilliant. I suppose you could call it linked essays, all of them exploratory and innovative, that circle around a traumatic experience of giving birth. It’s wide-ranging and disparate in a good way and I’m looking forward to it.

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston – A classic of the memoir genre, five linked stories of autobiography and folklore as Hong Kingston comes to terms with growing up in the USA as a child of Chinese immigrants. An exploration of voice and silence as she hovers between two cultures both of which have different ways of obliterating her story.

Splinters by Leslie Jamison – Written in the wake of her failed marriage, Leslie Jamison explores what it means to be a divorcee, a mother and an artist all at once, and negotiates the arrival of a new love in her life as she considers the patterns that have so far created her. Jamison is an interesting writer, and I rather love that easy, open American style of writing about the self.

Metamorphoses by Ovid – A book I’ve been meaning to read for a long, long time. Back in the days when I was teaching, I read the parts of it about Narcissus and Echo, Cupid and Psyche, and promised myself I’d return one day to read it in its entirety. My knowledge of the classics is dismal! I should do something about that.

Greyhound by Joanna Pocock – I have a thing for Fitzcarraldo and I’ve been going back and forth between this one and This Little Art by Kate Briggs about the business of translation. I think I will stick with Greyhound, but I might change my mind. Anyway, it details two parallel journeys across America that Pocock took, one as a young woman who had just suffered a series of miscarriages, one seventeen years later in her 50s as she traces the footsteps of certain women writers including Simone de Beauvoir and Irma Kurtz.

Indignity by Lea Ypi – Having come unexpectedly across an image of her grandmother on honeymoon in the Alps in 1941, a photo that she’s been told could never exist, Ypi is forced to reconsider all the old family stories. She embarks on a re-imagination of her grandmother’s past as the Ottoman aristocracy gives way to the birth of the Balkans and a communist state. I’m intrigued by the question in the blurb about what moral authority we have in the present to judge our ancestors in the past. Yes, that’s worth considering.

So that’s my list for 2026. It’s women almost all the way this summer, with only two male authors in the mix, but I’m okay with that. What do you think of my choices?