misc.
Losing the Plot
I didn’t write books for the first 45 years of my life for a variety of reasons, the main one being that I was no good at plot (I’m no good at ballet or calculus either). This is not an example of false modesty — I’m really no good at How Things Work and What [...]
World’s Worst Publisher?
I’ve just finished Muriel Spark’s wonderfully acerbic novel, The Girls of Slender Means, about a group of young women living in a sort of Kensington hostel, The May of Teck Club*, “for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years, who are obliged to reside apart [...]
My friend kills people.
The premise of Nick Hornby’s How To Be Good was fantastic — self-congratulating North London liberals get stuck when ‘Being Good’ suddenly demands more than the occasional donation to UNICEF. The book wasn’t fabulous, but I thought about it this weekend while entertaining three of my favourite people – one of whom (the well-read, funny, [...]
Naming fictional characters.
She’s taking shape ever-so-slowly in my head and it’s time to name her. This should be simple, but it might be worth mentioning that my husband and I took six weeks to name our daughter. We actually received a letter from the council saying that if we didn’t register our baby, they’d assign her an [...]
QUIET PLEASE!!!!
I consider my personality to have been formed by Dr Seuss, and I have no complaints about that. The Cat in The Hat, with his sly anarchy (“I know some good tricks…I will show them to you, your mother will not mind at all if I do,”) remains to this day my role model. But [...]
Fifty-four
I know I’m prejudiced, but I don’t think it helps to be a huge success early in life. Too much struggling to keep up the good work, too many people saying (cf, Woody Allen) that they liked the earlier funnier stuff better, too much of a sense that life is a long, slow dwindling of [...]
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