five for friday
one. This week, I finally finished reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking. Influenced by one of my reliably astute co-workers, potentially Didion’s biggest fan the world over, I bought a couple of Didion’s memoirs to add to my towering TBR stack.
The towering TBR stack – now skyscraper high – is the product of both over-investment in shiny new books and my haphazard reading habits. I’ve re-read vast passages of The Year of Magical Thinking quite by accident because I’ve lost my place and taken ages to cotton on.
But I don’t mind. There’s something fresh and striking to discover on each read, and I understand the hype – though I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to the casualness with which Didion refers to her family’s social milieu, a who’s-who of Malibu that seems to swap houses an awful lot.
I may be the last bookish person to discover Didion’s memoirs, but for the uninitiated, The Year of Magical Thinking is primarily about grief and the surreal quality inherent to the aftermath of intimate loss. Didion’s husband of almost 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly at the end of 2003 while the couple’s only child lay in hospital with severe pneumonia.
Didion writes not so much with affection but with frank respect for John (a man, I’ve discovered, who gained a not-so-quiet reputation for infidelity). I’d expected a memoir about grieving one’s husband to be more sentimental, perhaps. A work that details an enduring romance or lays bare a keen affection; instead, Didion describes something more akin to an indestructible creative partnership.
There’s a passage towards the end of The Year of Magical Thinking, a moment Didion recalls took place exactly 25 days before her husband’s death, on her own birthday, that caught me off-guard in its tenderness:
Before dinner John sat by the fire in the living room and read to me out loud. The book from which he read was a novel of my own, A Book of Common Prayer, which he happened to have in the living room because he was rereading it to see how something worked technically. The sequence he read out loud was one in which Charlotte Douglas’s husband Leonard pays a visit to the narrator, Grace Strasser-Mendana, and lets her know that what is happening in the country her family runs will not end well. The sequence is complicated (this was in fact the sequence John had meant to reread to see how it worked technically), broken by other action and requiring the reader to pick up the undertext in what Leonard Douglas and Grace Strasser-Mendana say to each other. ‘Goddamn,’ John said to me when he closed the book. ‘Don't ever tell me again you can't write. That’s my birthday present to you.’
By this stage, Didion was pushing 70 and had well and truly cemented her status as a darling of America’s publishing world. I wonder how often she verbalised this fear that she couldn’t write. John’s ‘gift’ brought tears to her eyes, she notes. Imagine that.
two. A short read: Lizzie Lawson on how Carrie helped her process the sexual shame of her religious upbringing (Electric Literature).
three. Claire Nichols recently interviewed Ben Elton on The Book Show, prompting a thought-provoking tirade about popular fiction and the literary establishment. When asked about being long-listed for the Booker Prize in 1997 for Popcorn, Elton replies:
Long-listed, not fucking short-listed. And I owe that, as far as I know, to A. S. Byatt.
You’ll see a lot in my autobiography of my real frustration with artistic snobbery. I think the whole concept of a ‘literary novel’ is crazy. By that standard, Dickens is not a literary novelist. John Le Carré isn’t a literary [novelist]. What they mean by ‘literary’ is slightly obscure and often boring.
That doesn’t mean all the Booker prize novels are boring. But it is a weird criteria.
I mean, I have a good old rant at Pinter in my autobiography because I think he’s really symptomatic of the kind of corrosive sort of weird elitism in British – I don’t know so much about Australia – but British arts media and the critical establishment, which eulogises the wilfully obscure and denigrates the emotionally effective and actually leads people to feel slightly ashamed of laughing or crying over a simple tune or a good joke or a simple emotion well expressed and to feel like they have to try and pretend to be clever by understanding some brittle nonsense which is deliberately and wilfully obscure.
The episode is also worth a listen for the third part, a chat with Colm Tóibín (an esteemed writer and university educator) about what contemporary authors can learn from Jane Austen.
four. I love me a good cover, and I’ve been endlessly replaying this take on George Michaels’s ‘Freedom’ by Christine and the Queens. Their album from 2023, Paranoia, Angels, True Love, is still going strong as my soundtrack of choice for long, tedious drives.
five. I’m jumping on the bandwagon and conceding that Netflix’s The Beast in Me makes for compelling viewing, despite the too-neat ending (no spoilers). On a side note: I became increasingly besotted by Aggie Wiggs’s wardrobe. Whoever styled Claire Danes for this series deserves some kind of award. Alas, I’m living in the wrong climate for so much tweed.
bonus. Daniel Lavery on ‘what it feels like to not have to write something down’ captures a familiar feeling for writers everywhere.
