Three Things

Posted by litlove

This comes with thanks to Paula at Book Jotter for her Three Things meme!

The Book: Earlier this week I had a sudden yen for a Persephone title and picked up High Wages by Dorothy Whipple. I’m so happy that I did. I’ve enjoyed all my reading lately but this is the first novel in a long while that’s held me properly hostage, that I put down with the greatest of reluctance and pick up again at the first available opportunity. It’s the story of Jane Carter who, at 17, is obliged to make a living for herself, having trespassed on her stepmother’s goodwill for too long after the untimely death of her father. She finds work as a shop girl in Chadwick’s, a draper’s shop as it was called, where women came to buy material and trimmings that would then be made up into clothes by their off-site seamstresses. It’s 1912 and the great shopping revolution is underway. Selfridges having opened its doors onto an extravagant cornucopia of goods in 1909, and Jane, with her ‘good eye’ and determined ambition will be at its forefront. She will push Chadwick’s as far as she can towards the new, modern ways, and eventually set up a shop herself selling the fresh trend of ‘ready-mades’.

There’s a fascinating preface to the book that delves into the social history of shopping at this time, and the phenomenon that was the shop girl. Very few avenues of work were available still to women, and retail looked a great deal less arduous than either service in a house or factory work. In fact, it was as exploitative as most other forms of employment. Shop girls worked a solid 12-hour day with only 20 minutes for lunch and most lived in on the premises for a cut of their wages. Dorothy Whipple writes a brilliant villain, one of whom is the redoubtable Mrs Chadwick, who holds the domestic purse-strings in her tight fist:

Mrs Chadwick was rather mean. Not excessively so; but just mean enough to add interest to her days. She enjoyed exerting her ingenuity in the provision, for the girls, of suppers that did not cost more than threepence a head.’ And when the First World War comes, it ‘called Mrs Chadwick’s full powers into play; she lived vividly. She could now scheme and stint to her heart’s content…. She spent exciting moments stealing down to her own scullery, when the girls were out of the way, to take parings from their margarine allowances with a razor blade. She would pop the stolen pieces into the pot where her husband’s supper was cooking… with a greater satisfaction than she had known when she could put ounces of the best butter in and never miss them.’

Jane is permanently hungry while she’s at Chadwick’s, but the disadvantages of life there keep her motivated to move on. Shop girl literature – and there was such a thing – fell into two categories. On the one hand, commercial romances in which the pretty girl behind the counter is plucked from obscurity by a well-off prince and may return to buy goods on her own account; and the rags to riches and possibly back to rags tale, where dangerous social aspirations were met with scandal or worse. Whipple’s book takes a different, kinder, more optimistic path, although Jane’s route to better fortune is punctuation by misunderstandings, hardship and betrayals. And finally – finally – I have a book in my hands in which the main female protagonist chooses work over romance; I’m cheering her on.

The true story: Perhaps one of the best stories of a shop girl made good concerns the author of 101 Dalmations and I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith. Dodie’s first desire was to be an actress, and from 1914 she was a very bad actress indeed, one who, in her own words, was always ‘talking herself into a job and then acting herself out of it.’ She lurched from one bad role to another, until finally she seduced the director of the Windmill Theatre, Norman McDermott, in the hope that it would guarantee her steady employment. In fact he sent her abroad on tour and then, in her absence, sacked her. And so, Dodie decided that part of her life had come to an end and she needed a new direction. In 1923, she heard of a position in the London furniture emporium, Heal’s, and went and talked herself into that. ‘After years of selling myself as an actress to theatrical managers who didn’t want me,’ she wrote in her memoirs, ‘it was child’s play selling goods to customers who were pleased to have them.’

When she turned out to be a success, she went directly to the manager, Ambrose Heal, and (just like Jane Carter in Whipple’s novel) negotiated herself a pay rise. This was considered outrageous presumption, but Ambrose Heal was inclined to be charmed by it, and Dodie needed no more encouragement. She longed to be in love again, and had acquired a taste for sleeping with the boss. She’d unwittingly set herself a challenge, though, as Ambrose Heal had not only a wife, but a mistress too. When he pointed out how little time and affection he had to spare, she told him ‘half-a-loaf was better than no bread’. To his continued protests, she said ‘Then just crumbs from the rich woman’s table.’ So Ambrose Heal accepted defeat, and for the next six years they maintained a stable if clandestine affair.

During this time, Dodie was busy channelling her energies and ambitions into her writing. Ever since she was a child she had written stories and plays but acting had always been her passion. When Ambrose Heal gave her the rather splendid gift of a typewriter for Christmas 1929, she longed for something to type up. As it happened, she had an idea for a play. Playwriting braided together Dodie’s finest skills – a powerful sense of emotional melodrama inherited from her mother and grandmother, balanced by a rather delightful sense of humour. She had a fine ear for dialogue in a family that loved a punchline. Her aunt looking with dislike at her hat in the mirror had declared ‘Well, it’s a beast and that’s all there is to be said about it’. Dodie had been relishing dialogue for years, and she had her own wealth of stage experience into which she could pour her vivid imagination. She wrote her play quickly, loving the experience, and her triumph was complete when it was bought by a director who had once sacked her.

The first night was catastrophic – a rumpus in the audience ended with the gallery booing the play and the stalls booing the gallery. ‘I never heard a noisier, more disastrous, reception’ Dodie remembered, and she went to bed distraught, fearing the play had failed and thinking ‘But it can’t, because if it does I can’t bear it.’ Then in the morning, a miracle happened; the newspaper critics were uniform in their praise. Journalists rushed to Heal’s to get a glimpse of the latest sensation, a 33-year-old woman who ran her own department. By the evening news the billboards proclaimed: ‘Shopgirl Writes Play’.

For the next year, Dodie struggled to repeat her success, starting over and over with different ideas, none of which took fire. A journalist rang her up, asking whether she had anything new ready, and a theatre critic wrote a story claiming that no woman had ever written more than one successful play. ‘Perhaps,’ Dodie wrote acidly, ‘they felt “Shopgirl Writes Play” had been a pleasant fluke, but “Shopgirl Writes Two Plays” would be a bit like Cinderella getting two princes.’ It seemed to goad her on, though, and she had the inspiration of writing about a grand department store suffering in a time of slump. At the end of the first curtain call for Service, she was enticed on stage to take a bow before the audience. It was a heady moment, hearing their whoops and cheers, finally finding her place on stage in the limelight.

Dodie Smith would go on to have three more stage hits, making five in a row which was a record for a woman playwright. She had the success and the money that she’d longed for, and she realised that her interest in Ambrose Heal had faded away. ‘I partly longed for affairs as status symbols,’ she wrote in her journal many years later. ‘Women have for so long been conditioned to equate sex appeal with success.’ Her plays fed her ego far more than any mere man could, and in comparison the romance of an affair felt paltry. And so I keep banging the drum: women want work; stop giving them storylines that are all about the men.

The photos: A few weekends ago I was with my family, searching through the thousands of family photos we’d taken over the years for good ones of my Mum, when my brother remembered the slides up in the loft. He returned with four old boxes, each about the size of a large dictionary, each divided up into about a hundred tiny compartments, each of which housed a slide. We held them up to the light in awe of their antiquity, squinting to see the tiny figures. Well, my brother took them away and scanned them onto his computer, producing a very 21st century One Drive file with almost 500 photos on it. This, for me, was my family prehistory. The life they had together before I arrived in it – well, there’s a sequence towards the end of the slides of me as a baby, and a handful in which I’m a toddler. It is so very strange to see my parents and brother before I knew them. My brother at 5, 6, 7, wearing shorts and a little shirt with a tie (a tie!), taken on holidays and trips, playing with his model railway. Mr Litlove looked at the photos and sighed ‘He’s living the dream,’ he said. I did feel a tad guilty; my arrival must have been a bit of a shock.

But the pictures that fascinated me the most were the location shots. This was only the 1960s, less than a decade before I was born. But the small towns depicted look like they come from another world altogether, a world that is probably less distant from that of High Wages and Dodie Smith’s time at Heal’s than it is from the High Street as we know it today.

This was the world in which my parents were young and it makes me feel very old. I don’t know where these photos were taken, but think it might be from the area around Hay-on-Wye. If you recognise it, do let me know!

We’ll Always Have Paris

Posted by litlove

Part 3 of the memoir

I have been at home only a few weeks of the long summer vacation when a letter arrives for me from A. It is on thin blue paper with an air mail sticker and it comes from France where he is working for a couple of months. His factory has a mandatory holiday for the Quatorze Juillet celebrations and he has a week off. Would I like to meet him in Paris? Excited by the prospect, I rush to tell my mother, whose face immediately falls. It’s not that she disapproves of A, exactly, it’s more that her maternal instincts have been triggered. This will be the first holiday I have ever spent with anyone other than my immediate family, and my first solo trip with a young man. There are implications.

I met A on the very first evening I arrived in college, and we were more or less a couple by the end of the first term. Determined to meet my parents when they come to collect me for the holidays, he is in my room supposedly ‘helping’ me to pack when they arrive. My parents are a little intimidated. He is 6 foot 4 and talks a lot. Really, a lot. In order to gesticulate better with his hands while talking, he takes the potted Boston fern he has been holding and slides it absent-mindedly onto the top shelf of my bookcase. I watch my parents’ eyes follow his hand. We are all wondering how we will get it back down once he has gone.

It turns out that he lives only ten minutes by car from my parent’s house, and so during the Christmas holidays I pay him a visit. When I arrive, he is not there to meet me. He has been sent to the vegetable garden to harvest something or other in penance for breaking his mother’s milk jug that morning. It’s curious; he looks coordinated but is hard on crockery and downright dangerous around glassware. His family terrifies me because they are so different from any I have known. A is the third of four highly educated, highly articulate, hungry siblings. They talk and eat fast, and a faintly adversarial air hangs around the large kitchen table where we have Sunday lunch. A’s father, who is a sweetheart, takes the trouble to ask my opinion, and I make the mistake of assuming there is time to breathe and assemble an opening sentence. I’ve barely finished the breath before the conversation rushes on in lively spate. Apparently when their grandmother visits, she puts up her hand if she has something she wants to say.

It’s 1987 and there is undoubtedly an unspoken issue of class here. I live on the edge of a modern estate by a Tesco’s superstore. A lives in an old manor house set in several acres of gardens. They have an orchard. When I point this out, A rolls his eyes and protests that it’s a scrubby bit of land with a few apple trees on it. But that scrubby bit of land is the same size as my back garden. A loves watching Grange Hill on the telly as an educational tourist; I never watch Grange Hill because why would I? It’s daily life. His family values tiled kitchen floors, wholemeal bread and dark chocolate. My family likes carpet tiles, refined white bread – sometimes with the crusts off – and my mother describes Bournville as ‘cooking chocolate’. I thought my own family had a fairly powerful ideology, but it’s matched if not outdone by the rules and regulations that govern the value system here. There’s a right and a wrong way of doing everything and my instincts are repeatedly wrong-footed.

It’s a relief to leave all these differences behind and return to college, where we are just students in a particular world of our own. But the rules and regulations do seem to follow us. A sits me down and tells me that we are not going to be one of those couples who make their friends feel awkward when they come round. No public displays of affection. He won’t even hold my hand when we walk together on the street, in case we meet someone we know. It’s very confusing as A has pursued me quite hard to reach this point and he does seem to like me. It’s hard to gauge how much he wants this relationship, what it means to him, if he’s committed or not. He buys me a beautiful bag for my birthday and assumes we will go to the May Ball together. But then when we are on the brink of the long summer holiday, he tells me he will be working or travelling abroad for most of it. This is bitterly disappointing, given our proximity outside of Cambridge. My plan is to go home and read as many books as possible in the back garden, and my mother would be devastated if I did otherwise. A’s mother would be devastated if he stayed home underfoot.

What is love to either of us, at this point? What do we think a relationship entails? I’m sorry to say that my idea of romance has been formed by watching The Thorn Birds at an impressionable age. We were all gripped by it in school, and rushed into registration the morning after an episode to compare quantities of tears cried. Father Ralph de Bricassart struggling with the rule of celibacy, ultimately breaking it for love of Meggie Cleary, strikes me as the epitome of passion. At 56, cynical and better versed in the ways of both men and storytelling, it strikes me quite differently. But back then, I believe you measure love by the magnitude of sacrifice made, by the amount of disruption it causes. A, like most self-protective 20-year-old boys, is determined that any relationship he enters will have no material effect whatsoever on his daily life. He’s even been taken aside by one of his former school friends and asked to consider whether, with all the opportunities available to him at Cambridge, he really wants to waste his time on a woman? I know this because he recounted it to me. This is how dumb we both are.

Despite everything, we both believe we can get what we want, and when A’s letter arrives with the invitation to meet him in Paris, I am hopeful. He only has a few days off work and rather than spend them travelling around France meeting relatives – or even perfect strangers – in a way that would please his mother, he is intending to spend them with me, in a way that both his mother and school friend would deplore as a waste of his precious time. That’s good, right?

I don’t discuss any of this with my mother, because what’s preserving the relationship at the moment is the fact I’m too young and unformed to articulate any of my deepest hopes and fears. But my mother is alarmingly insightful. Putting her own feelings aside, she accepts that I will go to Paris and sets about deciding what I will wear. She will show him that regardless of class, income bracket, fancy house, public school education and male mentality, he is punching above his weight.

I’m the most interested in clothes that I’ll ever be, and my mother has loved them and made them all her life. We buy cheap upholstery fabric in a kind of tapestry weave and Mum creates a mini skirt and jacket in a pared-back Chanel style. It is my coolest outfit by far. I set off wearing it on a sunny but breezy day, taking the train to London and then the boat train to Dover. I am that rare creature, a modern linguist who isn’t especially fond of travel. I prefer familiar places and familiar occupations to the new and exotic. Whilst I ought to like museums and galleries and walking tours and cultural sightseeing, and I do like them a little bit, I would almost always rather be sitting somewhere quiet with a book. I have actively tried on recent family holidays to embrace our outings, and I think I’m doing better. In Paris I will simply have to find more courage than I usually possess – I wouldn’t dream of telling any member of A’s family that I ever sat in the back of a car with a puzzle book at a rain-swept beach and found it to be highly satisfying.

When I reach Dover there’s a hitch. I’ve booked a place on a hovercraft because the ferries were all full, but the windy conditions in the Channel mean the boat might not run. While I’m waiting for the authorities to decide, I find a payphone and ring home. My parents will be anxious to hear how the journey is going. I tell them about the hovercraft issue, but almost as soon as I’ve ended the call, the decision is made to go ahead, and I hurry to take my place. I have to run to make my train connection at Calais, but then it is an easy journey to the Gare du Nord.

As the train slows, approaching the station, I see the tall figure of A waiting for me. He walks along the platform, keeping me in his sights as we come to a hissing, grinding halt. Even at this distance from him, separated by the dust spattered window of the carriage, our gazes are locked on each other. Time begins to soften and still. I step down from the train and walk to meet him. The rest of the world falls quiet and empties of people. We are alone.

Years later, I will become very close to my sister-in-law who is married to A’s younger brother, and we will compare our romantic experiences. When I tell her that Paris changed everything, she will quip dryly that anything is permitted in A’s family so long as it happens on a different continent. When I remind A of our week in Paris, he will say, ah, that little tapestry suit. We track down our hotel, a poky place with a claustrophobic dark red staircase, our room right at the top. The key won’t open the door and we waste a lot of time finding the concierge and sorting the problem out. Then we walk around the new quartier, lost in each other. Undefined stretches of time pass in this new hypnotic state of connection.

When I finally come upon a payphone and call home, I’m aware that it is early evening, later than I should have left it. I discover chaos; my mother has been worried about me ever since I said the hovercraft might not run, and she is inarticulate and sobbing, unable to be consoled by the fact I am perfectly safe. My father must eventually take the phone from her and he is annoyed by my thoughtlessness, by the fact that I’ve left him to deal with my mother in an extreme state. It is a terrible call. I open the cabin door shaky and upset, but I can’t be the one to ruin the mood with A, who is waiting for me impatiently. We are going out to eat. I must force myself to be calm and normal, and pretend that nothing untoward has happened.

The days we spend in Paris are full. On the Quatorze Juillet we walk down a Champs-Élysées that is bordered on either side by tiers of empty seating as tanks roll through in preparation for the parade. That evening when we try to make our way back to the hotel, the mouths of the metro stations are full of smoke from firecrackers. We walk around the cobbled streets of Montmartre and climb the steps up to the white wedding cake of Sacré-Cœur, its dim interior lit by a constellation of tiny remembrance candles. We visit the Musée d’Orsay, where a huge statue by the central staircase presents a smiling face when we stand beneath it and, by a trick of composition so clever I can hardly work it out, a tragic one as we ascend the stairs. The architecture of Paris offers us an excess of sensual richness. Rococo cherubs wink from billowing plaster clouds, cool marble nudes embrace, their turned backs oblivious to watching eyes, and in the street, the curlicues of wrought iron balconies sinuously entwine.

I’m not used to such long days spent on foot and by the evenings I am so tired and so full of crowds and art and beauty and strangeness that I have no appetite and give half my meals to A. One afternoon, when even A has had enough sightseeing, we find a cinema showing The Unbearable Lightness of Being. We settle into our seats, the row in front of us full of American tourists with their feet up on massive backpacks. The film has been subtitled rather than dubbed but even so, my impressions of it are confused: Daniel Day Lewis whistling cheerfully as he sharpens his surgeon’s saw, Lena Olin outrageously sexy in black underwear and a bowler hat, the translucent beauty of Juliet Binoche’s complexion, her cheeks flushed carnation pink. And then the tanks rolling through the streets of Prague, similar and yet so very different to tanks we had seen only days before on the boulevards. The film’s emotional landscape corresponds perfectly to the way I witness this week in Paris – in a haze that is both intense and fragmented, shot through with a joy that is precarious and oddly close to anguish. What happens on the screen and what is happening in my life, as I sit in my red velvet seat with the Americans sucking coca-cola from outsized paper cups in front of me, feels both intimate and momentous.

We leave our hotel in central Paris and move out to the suburbs to spend a couple of days in a flat we’ve been lent. The flat is empty and echoey, all bare walls and tiled floors. The bed is a mattress on the floor, the kitchen rudimentary. The only standalone item is a huge old black and white television that seems to show nothing other than dubbed repeats of the Six Million Dollar Man. Even so, every time A is left alone for a few minutes, I find him glued to the screen with one hand hovering over the on switch. When he notices me he immediately turns the set off and smiles guiltily. ‘How I grew up,’ he says.

The flat can’t really be described as comfortable, but the pace of life slows, for which I am grateful. There’s no pressure here to be out and about and I can cook simple food for us rather than eat yet another restaurant meal. And so it’s very strange that it should be here that it happens. We go out to the local supermarket, which isn’t very far away, a ten minute walk or so, and as we are walking I become more and more uncomfortable. Anxiety has come from nowhere, a violent, flooding anxiety that I want to wrestle down but can’t. Having the element of surprise on its side, it has overwhelmed me, and panic is only a few shallow breaths away. I’ve been brought up never to let negative emotion show, but this is too much even for me. I am forced to admit to A that something is very wrong. We try to keep going, but I can’t do it and we eventually return to the flat, where gradually the sirens will stop going off in my head and the great tide of anxiety will recede.

I don’t understand what has happened, but it feels like an act of internal terrorism. This is not the kind of anxiety that has a rationale – an exam or an interview, for instance. This was a straight up broad daylight ambush, an attack designed to impress me with its uncontrollable power. I don’t want to make too much of it around A, and he is inclined to dismiss it entirely with a roll of his eyes and an immediate turn to other things. He assures me he is entirely indifferent about it, and it’s obvious he means what he says. I feel an abject gratitude towards him for not having drawn away in disgust and dumped me on the spot. It’s what I would have done to myself, had it been possible.

But I am stuck with myself. We are at the end of the holiday and soon I’m on the train back home. The journey is uneventful, and somewhere around the featureless fields of Normandy my nervous system finally settles. My mother, waiting for me in the kitchen, is torn between ongoing frostiness at my failure to call her and an intense curiosity to hear how things went. I usually tell her everything, but this time I don’t know what to say, and she is disappointed again at my sparse recounting. She eyes me in a way that makes me feel she can read my mind. ‘Well,’ she says eventually, ’I hope you think it was worth it.’

My mother means: I hope the lackluster week you describe was worth the distress you caused me. But as ever, she has hit on something more profound. Was it worth it?

I am in love, and in a relationship that I have no doubt is now serious, the most serious I have ever had. But I have returned with an unexpected souvenir; fear of an outlandish and random anxiety so intense that it’s like falling into the trap of a blackmailer. I’m home and I’m calm, but I know that the anxiety is in my blood. It will return now whenever I have any sense of being trapped in a situation or a demand or an expectation, any place where there is no obvious escape route, any time I want things to go smoothly.

Paris has revealed to me both the love of my life and the greatest issue of my life and the balance of worth is hard to weigh up.

Previous memoir pieces:

Elegy for a Fresher

The Unwild Child

How Things Have Been

Posted by litlove

Hard to believe, but it’s been very nearly three weeks since my mother died. I think we’re all bearing up pretty well. There were certain conventions around a family loss like this that I was dreading, but they’ve passed off better than I feared. The day afterwards, for instance, we travelled to my brother’s house, just so we could all be together. I was afraid it would be more emotion than I could deal with, but in fact it was a very gentle, calm day. My mother was the emotional wellspring of our family, and the lodestar around which we oriented ourselves. Without her, we were three people all used to holding our emotions in check in order to be responsive to others. My mother could be very dazzling, and I didn’t really realise how much she soaked up my attention. Now I find I’m seeing my father and brother in an amped up technicolour, in exceptional detail. When I was around my mother, I shifted into a higher energetic gear, and I can feel how that would be too much energy for the remaining men. It would be overwhelming, unnecessary. I wonder what the consequences of all this will be, how I will change, who we will be for one another.

On our last visit, we needed to find some photos of Mum to put in the Order of Service. I braced myself emotionally for this task too, and once again it turned out entirely different to my expectations. This time we were all at Dad’s, where the cupboard under the stairs is a kind of Aladdin’s cave of family history. My brother dragged just one of the many boxes of photographs out and hours passed as we sifted through them. My Dad was a keen photographer back in the day and the photos were good. We watched our children grow up again through family holidays, parties, outings, visits, every few minutes someone would cry ‘Oh I’ve found a good one!’ or ‘Do you remember?’ and we would laugh or sigh or say ‘Awwww’. There were photos I’d never seen before, black and white ones of grandparents I’d never met, my Dad as a young boy, my parents before they were my parents, a beautiful one of my mother, holding my brother as a baby in her arms for his christening. I really loved that one of her. When she was full of joy, she was radiant.

I read online in one of the endless stream of Instagram memes the thought that grief is love with nowhere to go. I feel that I gave my mother every bit of the love I felt for her, and I think that she gave all the love she had to me. There is nothing left undone between us. I’m sad she’s not with us but I don’t – at present anyway – actively miss her. I’m all topped up. What I feel I’ve lost is not the person my mother was – who I know better than I know myself – but the structural pillar that is a mother. The attention economy of my life has altered: in the first few days it occurred to me that there was no one now on earth to whom the things I did would matter as much. That was an odd thought because it caused both sorrow and relief. But the real change is clearly going to happen at a much deeper level. This past week I’ve felt more free-floating anxiety than I have in a long time, a signal that some kind of emotional Kraken is stirring in the depths. My inguinal muscles have been tight, which makes sense. They cradle the womb, the mother core, the place of creativity. I imagine some unimaginable ancestral foundation crumbling away. Will what I have built on it stand firm?

After all the years of CFS, I’ve grown used to my body telling me things more clearly than my emotions do. I will admit that these three weeks I’ve felt very tired. This I recognise as a reaction to the past year of drama and the last six weeks of melodrama. There’s also a lot to do and a part of me is saying, What? MORE effort? I find all I really want is to read and daydream and sleep. But other parts of me want to see what happens next, to go through this ritual of a funeral, of a family mourning, and see what comes out of it. My curiosity is both my downfall and my saving grace. And although I feel sluggish and disinclined to move, exercise has in fact been very helpful. At the end of last week, I was full of unidentifiable emotion and my yoga session just wiped it clean away, processed it effortlessly for me. Writing helps a lot, too, because it’s only when I write things down that I really get a purchase on them.

I don’t want to lose the little oddities that keep cropping up. My mother will be having her hair and makeup done for her last great party, and I find my thoughts often crystallising around the person – I’ve no idea who it will be – who will do this for her. I feel a great tenderness for this person and their task, which is so futile and yet so dignified, so loving. The other evening I realised I couldn’t face watching Who Do You Think You Are? on the television, and asked a long-suffering Mr Litlove if we couldn’t have another episode of Make It At Market, a daytime programme in which people are mentored by professionals in their craft and helped to create a business. I realised I couldn’t stomach the great sweep of family history; I just wanted to watch good parenting.

The psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan came up with the term extimacy to describe the way that the most intimate inner core of our self can often only be seen outside of us, reflected back in unexpected moments that feel uncanny. My experience at the moment is deeply marked by extimacy. I don’t know what I’m feeling; the emotions are too deep, too close, until I see them reflected back to me in something random outside of myself. We have a long wait until the funeral at the end of April, and I’m actually glad of the time. Several friends have encouraged me to just be as far as I’m able, and I can see its potential. I had empty, spacious time after surgery for breast cancer in the middle of the pandemic lockdown. No one could visit and so I didn’t need to compromise my healing process in order to reassure people that I was just fine; and I became more myself, more in possession of myself. I think I need some emptiness to allow the generational tectonic plates to shift and settle.

Reading Roundup for February

Posted by litlove

So, sadly my mother died last week, swiftly and peacefully when it came to it. I’m not sure how I feel right now, except mostly relieved that she is at peace. I didn’t realise quite how upsetting I found it to see her in a situation that I knew she would absolutely have hated, had she been more aware of it. My family’s collective attention is now on the funeral, which I must admit I’m not looking forward to. I don’t even like funerals for people I don’t know that well. Still, it is a ritual to be experienced, and I always remember reading (though I forget where) that we put ourselves at the mercy of future events because we imagine them in isolation, informed only by our hopes and fears. In the event, there’s so much more going on and our own agency to hand and many factors we haven’t imagined working in mitigation. I like that thought.

My mother’s final illness has dominated this year, really, and reading has certainly suffered. February had the added obstacle of the hellish flu-cold that Mr Litlove brought back from a Saturday morning rowing outing. We are going to have to rethink this business of him leaving the house because he’s had a run of catching infections lately. One of the oddities of CFS was that it seemed to prevent me from creating snot. I’d have colds, but dry ones. Well, this bug not only broke a thirty-year duck but decided to spend three weeks making up for it. Perhaps it was just my sinuses being in shock, but it came with a headache that made me disinclined to read. Gosh I’m hoping this year improves. I have no need of triumph or celebration. All I want is the restful banal, just a few mundane months of nothing much happening, that would be great, please.

Anyway, the upshot of all this was complete failure in the Reading Indies challenge, which was a shame because I had a lot of plans, as per usual! I did pick up Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick and read the first couple of chapters. Now, let’s be clear, I think this is going to be a fantastic book. It concerns the author/narrator and her mother and their joint experience of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The mother caught it first and then the daughter developed it too – or possibly assumed her mother’s symptoms in a strange act of symbiosis – and this book recounts the hopeless tangle of diagnoses, of medical treatment (or lack of it), of pejorative psychological aspersions cast on them, and of their own relationship to each other. Hattrick does a brilliant job of writing from the centre of this muddle in a way that makes you feel what it’s like to live with a debilitating condition that no one understands and many reject. She also manages to bring in the experiences of other women writers who suffered chronic illness like Virginia Woolf and Alice James, and does it so cleverly in a seamless way. So, I think it’s great, and it was far too good and evocative and accurate for me to read this particular February. I do intend to return to it when I’m feeling stronger.

There are a couple of books I will review shortly. I absolutely loved Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June, and was especially grateful for the sheer charm and compassion of her storytelling. I also read Sammy Wright’s Exam Nation with Mr Litlove. I have a great deal to say about this book but for now I’ll say only that I agreed wholeheartedly with its premise, but was extremely disappointed by its execution. I’m now reading Monsters; A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer and am finding it similarly mixed. It began with some interesting concepts but has now become very frustrating. It’s a look at cancel culture with particular regard to writers, filmmakers and artists and I sincerely hope it won’t turn out to be a wasted opportunity. But – for instance – after a long chapter berating male critics for taking their perspective to be universal and failing to understand the huge influence of their subjectivity, we’ve just had a long chapter on genius in which Dederer has made a ton of unsubstantiated generalisations about what genius is, what it does, how it behaves. I disagree with a lot of them – not least that women can’t be geniuses, um, hello Virginia Woolf? – and am mildly gobsmacked that she doesn’t feel the need to own this understanding as entirely subjective. The bad behaviours that men adopt are STILL bad behaviours when women do them. I’m finding the book generally to be a lot of opinion and not much evidence. Ah well, we shall see.

What I have been reading a lot of lately are books I won’t be reviewing here. I craved sheer comfort and listened to a compilation of BBC dramatisations of Lord Peter Wimsey novels (Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, Busman’s Honeymoon). Then I moved onto another compilation of Brother Cadfael mysteries. I haven’t read these since I was a teenager but have been finding their uplifting, positive spirituality to be a great solace. I’ve been grateful to have this comfort.

Finally, new books have, of course arrived.

Five nonfiction titles, all about writers writing apart from Bound by Maddie Ballard, which I came across in a brilliant review by Karen. It concerns dressmaking, at which my mother was a pro, and which I’ve recently taken up myself. Looking forward to reading all of these in better, easier months ahead.