April reading
A desire for order/reading this month
Hello to those subscribers who have joined recently. It’s good to have you here. You might have found me through the lovely write up my book had in the Wall Street Journal. In my posts I’m often thinking about writing and all the mess that goes along with it.
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The transformations of April, the emergence of flowers, the increased light, surprise me every year. I’ve had the feeling, since the sun has been out for so much longer, that this is the optimal moment for me to somehow sort things. That there are secret ways of efficiency I have not yet found. I haven’t had the energy to do as much cleaning and tidying as I normally do, and my son has developed a fondness not only for chucking things in various directions, but also using scissors to cut paper into lots of small irregular shapes. It’s very freeing to watch someone simply discard what they are finished with (he’s so carefree, so innocent!) but less fun when I am picking the detritus out of a shaggy carpet.
It’s also been a month in which I’ve been working with some more writers on their words. Helping people find confidence in themselves and their writing is wonderful, and seeing new avenues develop and projects emerge is so fulfilling. Get in touch at kdcl.book(AT)gmail.com if you’d like to discuss a project with me. If you were looking for something more structured and intense, and have a pretty developed book project on the go, the wonderful people at the London Writers’ Salon are hosting their Residency programme once more - but be quick as applications close on the 1st of May!
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For this post, I wanted to do something a little different, and highlight some reading I’ve enjoyed over the passed few weeks. Reading is the accompaniment to my writing; I’ve always been struck by people who write but say they don’t read - mostly because this seems like an impossibility. Reading is so inextricable that on some of my most productive writing days, I will have spent equal parts reading. The careful following of an argument or a thought trains us to find a way through ideas. And for me there is no greater pleasure than letting the work of other people form the backbone of my own.
Much of my reading is essay. The essay for me is really about shape more than anything else, allowing for the exploration of something that could be small or strange. The essay can give our ideas or our assertions or experiences new powerful order - and with that clarity. This incredible essay by Anahid Nersessian on divorce at The Yale Review is exactly an example of this. Taking ‘divorce writing’ as a kind of interlocutor, Nersessian explores transitioning from a marriage with children into a new life as someone divorced, a ‘death with no ceremony to mark it.’ Arranged as a series of numbered paragraphs, or ‘false starts’ (the epigraph nods towards Janet Malcolm’s book on writers and artists, Forty-One False Starts) Nersessian examines the trajectory of a life which has been altered by the supposed ‘failure’ of divorce. The essay itself gives form to that failure, the false start of the epigraph reflected in the essay, as it continually reorients itself, looking for new ways of describing, new beginnings and new ends.
I found this essay so moving, not least in one small detail that other may not have noticed: in paragraph 30, Nersessian describes a pregnancy scan where ‘an explosion of cells’ are seen, which her doctor warns could turn into a kind of cancer. Having experienced this myself in 2022, I’m pretty sure she is describing a molar pregnancy, a rare form of pregnancy in which only the placenta develops into a kind of tumour. I remember after I had this experience a friend of mine told me ‘at least this would give you a lot of material’ for writing. I did not agree - the idea of using all the events of my life as if they all simply fodder felt strange, even wrong. I was interested to see that Nersessian does not make this a larger part of the essay, another ‘false start’- given the obvious metaphor of pregnancy loss and its relationship with the future - but it instead becomes a detail in another anecdote. I was struck by this and what it said: how we order and give emphasis to the details of our lives is truly up to us.
Another essay I loved: Melanie Walsh talking about David Foster Wallace. If you know me, you know that the cultural position of the writer is something that really fascinates me. How do writers position themselves in public? How are legacies altered and changed by current preoccupations? Walsh investigates this through the career of one of the end of the 21st century’s most famous writers, often held up as the representative Great American Novelist - read: white and male. The push and pull of the life of Infinite Jest online seems to speak to wider issues about books somehow falling along simplified lines, and their writers along with it. Was Foster Wallace a good guy? A bad guy? I don’t know, honestly, but reading him in this way certainly seems exhausting. Walsh suggests that ‘in this new media environment, complex works are largely reduced to symbols, memes, and endlessly generative discourse machines, devoid of real meaning or depth.’ Her work here is well worth a read for anyone who wants to feel sad about the life of novels online.
I don’t often read new releases just as they come out, but I was sent Sophie Mackintosh’s new book Permanence, which was out at the beginning of the month in the UK and last this week in the US. I haven’t read a novel that got me quite like this in a while - propulsive, energetic, but so committed to exploring its central themes of desire, devotion, and time. Clara and Francis wake up one morning in a room they don’t recognise and a city they don’t know. This city is one conjured by the couple, a place for adulterers to spend another kind of time together, away from ‘real life’. Mackintosh slowly teases out the nature of their relationship, how the process of longing for one another, missing one another, forms a kind of shared fiction: the gorgeousness of the city, their beautiful clothes, and fine food, cannot last. It made me think about the romanticising of certain kinds of relationships, particularly the affair, and how it overshadows much more mundane connection, long term relationships and friendships of all kinds. I really liked that Mackintosh included Clara’s roommate Arturo as a counterpoint to Francis, the love of friendship having its own, special magic that all the romance of an affair cannot compete with. So much more to say about this really beautiful novel. Let me know if you’ve read it. You can also find Sophie on Substack! She writes lovely essays about the life of writing.
In a very different vein, having a toddler with a lot of feelings means that I’ve been looking for books that we can read together to help us unpack them. We started How Are You Feeling Today? by Molly Potter and illustrated by Sarah Jennings. Each page describes a different feeling (in a way I’ve found helpful too) and some accompanying ideas of what to do if you feel that feeling. My son and I have discussed ‘angry’ and ‘worried’ a fair bit, though he says he doesn’t feel scared because he’s ‘so brave.’ It’s prompted a lot of great conversations at bedtime, though some confusion too as the book is aimed at children a little older and he now thinks (per one of the illustrations) that when you feel shy you should get on a skateboard. Any other book recommendations about feelings would be very welcome!
Would love to hear about things that you have enjoyed this month. If you liked this post, I’ll aim to do them a bit more regularly.
Katie x
