a gallimaufry

Happy 2023!

A belated Happy New Year! I hope you all enjoyed the holidays and have started 2023 in the nicest ways possible.

For me, one of the highlights of Christmas this year was going to see the Royal Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker in London with my mother and daughter. It was everything you would want a ballet to be: beautiful music, expertly played by the orchestra; lovely sets and costumes, and, most important of all, exquisite dancing. Not that I am an expert, but I actually cried a bit while watching it, and more than once too. The audience was filled with little girls in sparkly velvet and net dresses and it was one wonderful, happy experience. It’s shown every year and I thoroughly recommend it.

After a frantically busy couple of months, I finally and tardily finished reading Brian Attebery’s absolutely brilliant new book, Fantasy: How it Works, which I reviewed for Shiny New Books. If you don’t have time to wade through my turgid prose, just go out and buy/borrow it. It explains why fantasy isn’t just childish escapism, and analyses lots of books to discuss how it works and what it does. All in a very readable, chatty style.

(And look at that gorgeous cover!)

For the rest of the holidays, I enjoyed lounging about reading both in the UK and here in Belgium. In fact, I have rearranged a corner of the sitting-room for maximal reading and lounging pleasure. It’s also easier for me to write there, for I have been writing (just not here).

I spent September to the endish of December following the Golden Egg Academy 12-week Write Your Successful Children’s Novel course. It was brilliant and if you are thinking of writing for children, I highly recommend it. There are no entry requirements, and week by week you learn how you actually put a book together, what to think about, what to develop and how to structure it. It is really practical, and handily it’s distance learning so you can do it at your own pace. Pretty much every week there is a Zoom or FaceBook meeting with the course leader, Imogen Cooper, who is just the nicest person as well as hugely experienced, and you can ask questions and get advice. At the end you can send in your first 2000 words plus a synopsis for one of the Golden Egg editors to evaluate. I have to say that the feedback was very helpful and perceptive.

After another busy few weeks at work I am keen to get back to work on my book. One of the elements I hadn’t been sure about was having a dual narrative, and the editor suggested that sticking to one viewpoint would be better. My book’s other massive weakness, caused by my tendency to plot as I go along rather than before I start, is that there is too much going on and not enough focus on the main theme. So it’s time to prune and plan (at least a bit) before getting back down to writing. The feedback has really enthused me to carry on. I hope to have a reasonable first draft ready by the end of the summer, so that I can re-apply for the 12-month course on developing your children’s novel.

Because of all this I have mainly been reading children’s novels, especially recently published ones. Here are some of them, in short!

The Poisoned Pie Mystery, by Nicki Thornton  

A boy to whom accidents just keep on happening, a talking cat who is also a master detective and a lot of cake… This is a brisk and chirpy novel for children of about 9+. The author does something quite daring with the parents, which I did not see coming.

The Hounds of the Mórrigan, by Pat O’Shea

An older work but a wonderful immersion into Irish mythology, as Pidge and Brigit journey through a magical landscape in search of a drop of the Mórrigan’s blood. Truly magical, the many joys of this book include the characterisation of the children, who act and speak like real children, and the creatures they encounter.

Children of Blood and Bone, Tomi Adeyemi

In a mythical sort-of version of Nigeria called Orïsha, the maji are people who used to have magical powers but lost them suddenly twelve years ago. Now they are oppressed and enslaved by the majority kosídan and their cruel king, but maybe there is a way for teenaged Zélie and her friends to restore magic and end the tyranny. This is the first YA novel I have ever read and my was it bloodthirsty! But the story is compelling and I loved the setting.

The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place, by Julie Berry

I don’t think this book is very well known outside the US? But it should be. An exciting opportunity is delivered to the students of St Etheldreda’s School for Young Ladies in nineteenth-century Ely, when their horrid headmistress and her brother both drop dead: poisoned. Rather than informing the authorities, the girls decide to continue as usual and enjoy their freedom, pretending that the two victims are still alive. Of course, this becomes increasingly farcical and meanwhile the murderer is still lurking about. A bouncy entertaining read and the American author gets pretty much everything British spot on and believe me that is high praise.

 

Golden Egg Academy

Once again I have been ignoring this blog… Increasingly, I wonder what it’s for, maybe it will just peter out… 

My latest excuse is that my free time is being hoovered up by the Golden Egg Academy’s 12-week course Write Your Successful Children’s Novel. An embarrassingly long time ago now I actually completed a children’s book which was, in retrospect, objectively terrible on pretty much every level. But I did finish it, which is something! Anyway, I sent it to a few agents and unsurprisingly none expressed the tiniest amount of interest.

I didn’t give up, and started writing another book which I think has more promise – at least this one has some dramatic tension, for a start. However, I kept changing my mind about fundamental aspects of it and starting again and faffing. Eventually I conceded that I really didn’t have much idea what I was doing and if I wanted ever to produce something a child might want to read, I would have to pull myself together, inject some discipline and get some help.

The Golden Egg Academy was set up by Imogen Cooper, who used to be Editorial Director at Chicken House. She felt frustrated that she received many interesting submissions which had promise but needed much more work and guidance than a publisher could give. In particular, there were talented writers who did not understand the craft of writing, or how writing for children differs from writing for adults. The Academy offers courses and workshops for picture book writers as well as novel writers, of different lengths and for writers at different stage of their writing process. It is unusual in that it is specifically for children’s books and the team is made up of industry professionals rather than writers or academics.

I am really enjoying the course I’m following. There’s one module per week, with videos, slides and tasks, and at the moment we are grappling with my great bugbear, structure. (One of my great bugbears, should I say.) Although there are live Zoom and FaceBook sessions (yes I have finally joined FaceBook but only for this course!), plus feedback on the beginning of your novel, you can do most of it at your own pace and the materials remain accessible for the duration of the universe. This is a terrific bonus if you have a job, a family or other demands on your time. There’s also a FaceBook group for everyone on the course where we can talk shop, which is fun. Everyone is lovely and friendly. I mean, if my novel would just write itself now I would be in heaven.

So for now I am going to go back to my post-it notes and my 32,000 flabby words. I will also try and write a bit more here, and I have two books to review for Shiny New Books which both look exciting. But you’ll have to wait for those...

 

is a writer obligated to give readers the pleasures they expect?

In the comments on last Monday’s post on The Flint Anchor, Lory asked this excellent question:

‘Is a writer obligated to give readers the pleasures they expect?’

I have many Thoughts about this, which I couldn’t really cram into a reply to her there; instead, I’ll bore you with them here. As Sir Humphrey might say, ‘Well, yes and no.’

(Constantin Hansen, The Artist’s Sisters Signe and Henriette Reading a Book, 1826; Statens Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Denmark; found here)

A writer is of course not obliged to anyone in their writing, they are completely free. I am still pottering about writing my second attempt at a children’s book and I am doing whatever I please. I cannot say, however, that the results so far are anything I’d want anyone else to read. The characters are weak and keep shifting about, they mess up the vague plot I am trying to follow, or I change my mind, or I realise there’s a massive hole in it, or it gets just dreadfully boring. If a reader bought it from a bookshop or borrowed it from a library, they would be appalled.

Therefore, I would argue that a writer does have to fulfil a few obligations if they expect readers to read their work. And I termed those obligations as ‘pleasures’ – not perhaps the best word to use. However, I do believe that a novel, like any work of art, should provide a form of pleasure to at least some of its readers; and by ‘pleasure’ I mean it should provide some sort of aesthetic, emotional, intellectual or even educational satisfaction. And when you slide a book off a shelf and open it, you do so in expectation of one of those forms of satisfaction.

That satisfaction might take the form of characters who feel ‘real’ to you, it might be a delight in the language the writer has used, it might be in the recognition that the writer has expressed something true about the world, it might be an eagerness to find out what happens next, it might be learning about life in sixteenth-century Florence... When you read a novel that provides you with no form of satisfaction on any of these levels, you feel that the novel is ‘bad’ or ‘poorly written’. And this is what I mean by ‘pleasure’, ill-chosen as the word is.

Some of these pleasures – the emotional ones, I’d say – are more easily evoked in the reader. Bestsellers tend to provide them: excitement, fear, identification with the characters. Others are harder to discern or are those that many readers don’t enjoy. We might here think of the difference between Riders and The Waves, both of which offer pleasure to readers but of different sorts, reflected in their respective sales figures.

The ‘expectation’ of such a pleasure is not unreasonable in a reader, and so to that extent I would answer, yes, the writer does have an obligation here. But this is one interpretation of Lory’s question and it’s not I think what she meant by it. (I could be wrong! Lory – tell me!) She is, I believe, thinking of readers’ expectations in terms of dictating how that pleasure is delivered. And to that I would answer, with her, ‘No’.

Does a novel have to have characters who feel ‘real’ to you? No. Nor does it have to have characters who are likeable or admirable. It doesn’t have to be moral or tell you how to live. It doesn’t have to have a compelling plot, or beautiful writing, or strike you at a deep emotional level. A reader might expect or hope for or want these elements, and might be annoyed if they didn’t find them in a novel – but that might well be a failure of reading. We don’t read Agatha Christie for complex characterisation; we don’t read James Joyce for unicorns; we don’t read Tolstoy for laughs.

There are plenty of writers, like Sylvia Townsend Warner, who choose to subvert expectations in their work. This may upset some readers. It can lead to novels which are challenging, not easy to read, but it can create exciting fiction. A ‘good’ writer does this while retaining some element of pleasure, even if some or perhaps many readers do not notice it: a ‘bad’ writer makes a mess. A ‘good’ reader, in my opinion, tries to approach every book with an open mind and let the book show them how to read it. (This doesn’t mean we should all ‘enjoy’ every novel published but if we want to pass an informed judgement on it we should be alert to ‘pleasures’ that we may not personally enjoy.)

Here’s an example of the difference between the expectations a writer should satisfy and the expectations a writer should not. You want to read a detective novel, you’re in the mood for it. Detective novels have certain conventions, the most obvious being: there’s a crime and the detective solves it. You, an avid reader of detective fiction, understand these conventions.

The novel proceeds in the usual way, crime, detective, but then, at the end – the author doesn’t tell you who the murderer was! You’re outraged! But that’s the point. Now you’re thinking about why you’re outraged, you’re re-evaluating what you’ve just read... The novelist has subverted your expectations but in a way that causes you to question them, to re-categorise the novel not as a whodunnit but as something else... It’s a form of satisfaction.

Now you pick up a second detective novel. The writing is ridden with clichés, the characters are stereotypes and the reason for the crime implausible – the whole thing is silly. On no level are you satisfied. This book has abided by the conventions, the expectations of a detective novel, but it has failed to deliver any form of satisfaction.

What do you think? How would you answer the question?

And many thanks to Lory, for posing it.

hello 2020!

Happy New Year (belatedly). I hope that you all had lovely holidays. I did!

I don’t usually make New Year’s Resolutions because in the past I tended to make a massive list which was a complete overhaul of all my foul habits and terrible personality traits, and then after two days I’d have failed massively and would spend the rest of January, generally my least favourite time of year, feeling depressed and frustrated at what a total LOSER I was. (In addition to all my other terrible personality traits.)

However, 2020 seems rather a special moment, perhaps it’s the pleasing rhythm of the digits. It may be counter-intuitive to be cheerful when the year has begun with climate apocalypse, Australia on fire, Iraq and the US squaring off and authoritarianism on the rise around the world, and yet I am. And in this cheerful mood I have made some Resolutions! My cunning plan: to keep them small and on the vague side.

1. give more attention to a gallimaufry

I am going to find more time for this blog. Writing book reviews is very time consuming and I find mine tend to plod rather, and in any case I like the conversational aspect of blogs. So I might change what I write about a bit. (All right, this is VERY vague but I think it’s something that will evolve rather than be imposed.)

I also intend to run Sylvia Townsend Warner Reading Week again – watch this space!

2. read more widely

To break out of my fiction addiction I am going to read one non-fiction book, one long poem or one play a month. (At least one – I can read more.) This month I finally opened Alan Clark’s Diaries, which has been sitting shrink-wrapped on my shelves since 1994. (Alan Clark was a Tory MP who served in Mrs Thatcher’s and John Major’s governments, during which time he kept diaries which he subsequently published, I wouldn’t say they were scandalous but they did ruffle a few feathers as I recall.) I intend to post about this.

Loosely associated with this plan is a resolution to go as long as possible without buying any new books! This is actually Chris’s idea, which I have filched. (I had already bought a book when I read his post, so I am starting now BUT I am not sure I shall publicly announce when I do buy my next book because it might just be too shaming. I am a very weak person.)

3. finish my novel

I’m going to finish writing my second book (I started it in the summer holidays but have had so much work to do I’ve been unable to touch it since). Perhaps it will be better than the first one!

4. have more fun

It occurred to me that I am turning into a boring humourless middle-aged git. Oh no! Therefore, I am going to spend less time obsessively reading and ranting about politics and more time having fun. To this end I have already got drunk on fancy beer (the cats were very lucky that I couldn’t find the Marmite when I got home as I intended to smear them with it, one of my friends told me it was a flea-deterrent, though since then I’ve discovered that the cats are supposed to eat it not wear it) and bought some sheet music so I can start playing the piano again. This has got off to a good start.

What about you? Do you ever make New Year’s Resolutions – or are you already perfect? Heheh. If you’ve made any this year, what are they (or the ones you’ll publicly confess to, anyway)?

writing progress

(Alas, this painting is untitled and uncredited but bears an uncanny resemblance to me in writing mode)

In February I wrote that I had revised the children’s book I wrote and, filled with hatred and loathing for it, submitted it for The Times/Chicken House Children’s Book Competition. The long list was released on the last day of May and my book was not on it. Frankly I was not surprised and had been telling myself it would not be listed since the moment I had submitted it. But still I was illogically a bit disappointed, I suppose I had hoped that it did actually have some merit I just hadn’t noticed.

I had also submitted it to a couple of agents but failed to garner the slightest interest. Two agents (or was it three?) aren’t that many but since I had lost faith in the book it seemed wrong to expect other people to slog through it.

Anyway, onwards and upwards and I’ve started on a new children’s book and am enjoying working on it. After the first chapter (not the first chapter any more) it progressed slowly as I was reading and thinking and planning some of it, but I had time in July to write down quite a lot of it, it really felt as if I was just slapping the words down on the page and much of it came more easily than the first book had done. This felt good. At the moment I am writing to find out what happens. I have some characters and a rough plot but I don’t know how it ends yet. I think about each chapter and then write it down and then think about where the next one will go. I don’t mind if it’s rough, but when something feels flat or boring, I don’t persevere with it I scrap it and try something different. This is a difference to the last book, in which I was quite wedded to the plot and I think it got dull in places but I didn’t want to change it. I am also trying to keep description to a minimum...

It’s strange and exposing writing about this here because I am shy of showing either of the books to anyone. I want them to be read but also never read. When it comes to writing books, if they are never published then it’s easy to consider yourself a failure and it’s very likely that these posts about my fiction writing are just going to turn into a very public account of my failure. But I think that’s important. Trying and failing are what most of creative work consists of, yet we prefer to speak publicly only of the successes.

I’d also like these posts to be a reminder to myself that I am writing for my own pleasure as much as anything else. And the more I think about how the story might go and what shape it might take, the more I notice and appreciate this in novels I read. Having studied English Literature at university, I am always to some extent aware of how a novel is working as I read it, but now I am stopping and analysing bits more consciously again, and going back and finding books I’ve read and looking at how they create certain effects, or move between scenes, or build up tension. And this is a good thing in itself to do. To look at the craft of the novel. It seems more physical than words in my head, on the page.

writing progress

As I mentioned in a previous post, I decided to enter my novel in The Times/Chicken House Children’s Book Competition. Before I could do this, I had to revise it. After I first owned up to having written it, both my mother and a kind but also very knowledgeable blogger offered to read and comment on it. Their feedback indicated revisions and I got started on this. Alas, my teaching hours from September to the middle of January gave me no time to continue and it’s only in the last few weeks I’ve been able to get back to it. The deadline for submission is the end of February, not a great deal of time.

And I found, going back to it, that I had completely lost faith in it. It’s hard to judge your own work, I think; at times I thought it was all right, at least in places, but now I think that it just isn’t any good not all the way through, like a stick of rock with ‘this isn’t very good’ written all the way through it. I’ve revised it but not enough really, even if the original idea were strong enough the rest of it isn’t. The other day I just got really fed up and submitted it anyway (then instantly realised I’d forgotten to resolve something, only a very tiny detail but still, sloppy, oops). I suspect it isn’t terribly professional to submit something just because you hate it so much you don’t want to see it any more, but then the advantage the amateur has is that she is not professional. Then I stuffed the final draft and my notebooks into a box and closed it. Joy!

Now I am feeling very cheerful and free. I am having lots of ideas for the next book, maybe they’re better and stronger. One thing I have learnt from writing the first book is that no matter how much you want to fling yourself into your chair and start writing, it is much better to do some research (in this case, because it’s going to be a sort-of historical novel) and planning – the world you’re going to write about, the characters, where roughly the plot is going. Though not too much planning because that would kill it for me, and as long as I’m an amateur, writing as a hobby, the main point is for me to enjoy doing it as who knows if anyone else will ever read it anyway. So, onwards!

(Sadly this is not me writing but Christine de Pizan, an illustration in The Book of the Queen (c. 1410) in the British Library, BL MS Harley 4431, fol. 4r; from here)

goodbye to january

Hello and happy February!

Sorry I haven’t posted for ages. January and February are my least favourite times of year, dreary and grey, all the fairy lights have been packed away and winter seems to stretch on for ever. I did write a few half-posts, on Brexit, on a couple of the books I’d read, but I lacked the will to finish them.

Anyway, today the sun has been shining and I’ve just baked some flapjacks! Do have one. I hope your 2019 has started well.

(You’ll need a fork.)

I don’t know why I felt the urge to bake flapjacks. Previous attempts have always ended up with something that had to be ‘broken into bars’ with a hammer, proved impermeable to teeth and could have been used as flooring had they been more evenly shaped; the odd pan had to be binned too. But I was inspired by the surprise discovery of two tins of golden syrup at the back of the cupboard. The 2008 ‘anniversary’ tin had been opened and half-used, the contents were now completely hard and blackened, but the ‘use by 2013’ tin was still sealed and what was within looked as I imagined golden syrup to look, so off we went.

(For those who are interested, I used a Mary Berry recipe I found on the internet, but with my previous mishaps in mind I ignored Mary’s advice to cook for 25-35 minutes and instead removed them from our (tiny fan-assisted) oven after 20 minutes. Hence the need for a fork.)

(Also they are very sweet and all your teeth will immediately fall out in horror.)

The Christmas holidays were lovely and I had a fantastic time at New Year as well. I stocked up on some books in charity shops (my favourite find being a 1947 Cresset Press edition of Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne, which I’ve always wanted to read: this edition is illustrated with lovely wood engravings by Claire Oldham). I learnt that just because a ‘journey planning website’ gives you directions to walk along a road doesn’t mean that it’s safe to do so after dark (because it’s actually an A road with no pavement and cars whistling by at 70 mph). I visited Sissinghurst which might not seem the obvious thing to do on New Year’s Day but it is actually very beautiful with no leaves or flowers but patterns of branches. Of course, I had forgotten to bring my camera. It was nice to see Vita Sackville-West’s writing room again and I was charmed to see honey leaking down one wall of the tower – apparently from an old beehive that someone kept on the roof.

To get through this time of year I stockpile ‘easy’ reading, novels with compulsive narratives and not too much darkness, and I reread a lot too. Here are some of my favourites:

• Folk, by Zoe Gilbert
  I loved this, though much of it is very dark. It’s a collection of sort-of fairy-tales about an island community, focusing on different characters in turn and spanning a couple of generations. Like traditional fairy-tales, these are unsentimental and concerned with birth and death, sex, transformation, cruelty and strange kindnesses, but unlike fairy-tales the characters within them have individuality and when misfortune befalls them it is painful to read. The beauty of the natural world is celebrated even though the life scraped from its woods and seas is a hard and difficult life.
• The Gardener and the Carpenter, by Alison Gopnik
  Gopnik is a child psychologist and philosopher, and in this book she examines developmental psychology and evolutionary biology to demonstrate how modern-day ‘parenting’ is wrong-headed. She characterises a lot of parents as being concerned that they must develop a product: control pretty much every aspect of a child’s life so that it will become a happy, socially-acceptable and preferably high-achieving adult. Instead, parents should focus on their relationship with their children and on creating a ‘garden’ where children can learn and explore and become themselves. I was in agreement with her argument before she even made it, and I particularly enjoyed reading about all the evolutionary biology. It’s also made me very slightly less anxious about the amount of time my daughter spends in front of screens.
• The Dragon Hoard, Tanith Lee
  This was an impulse-buy in a charity shop and is a children’s book. On their seventeenth birthday, royal twins Princess Goodness and Prince Jasleth are cursed by Maligna, a distant relative and wicked enchantress. Princess Goodness becomes insanely good and starts giving away everything her family owns; Prince Jasleth turns into a raven every day, but at varying times and for varying durations. So the prince sets out to seek his fortune, which involves joining a quest to recover a dragon’s hoard. A cheerful, bouncing story, it put me slightly in mind of M.M. Kaye’s An Ordinary Princess.

A couple of weeks ago we reached the end of a fifteen-week course I teach every year. It’s a course with fantastic students but I find it very challenging and I have to spend hours and hours finding and making material and preparing for it. So suddenly I have a lot of free time, and this free time I’ve been devoting to revising my children’s book at breakneck speed in order to enter it for The Times and Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition, the deadline for which is the end of February. I am now completely disenchanted with my book but I decided to enter it anyway, what the hell, sorry judges for foisting it on you but at least it’s quite short. Then I am going to get started on another book which I am very excited about writing.

So for the foreseeable future, I’m going to be revising my book. I’m also going to making some cushion covers as we replaced our existing but broken Hideous Sofa with an even more Hideous Sofa and I plan on disguising it as far as possible if I can just find the fabric I have in mind for them.

I won’t be baking...

that mutton-eating, public-hanging junkie Chas Dickens

I know that practically everyone on the internet has already read this quotation, but every time I see it I start laughing…

Writing a novel – actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs – is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV’s so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it’s damn near impossible. That should be taken into account when ranking the all-time greats. Somebody like Charles Dickens, for example, who had nothing better to do except eat mutton and attend public hangings, should get very little credit.

Steve Hely, from How I Became a Famous Writer

Black Milk: On Writing, Motherhood and the Harem Within, by Elif Shafak, translated by Hande Zapsu

The past six months have been a funny time for me, reading-wise. While I have read some amazing books and loved every word of them, I’ve also had uncharacteristic longeurs, when nothing on my shelves (or what I can see of them) fitted my reading mood. During the most recent of these slumps I worked my way through the last year’s archives of Tales from the Reading Room and picked out a few books which appealed to me; when they arrived, I put them safely aside until A Moment of Great Need (approximately two weeks later). Then I settled down with a cup of tea, a poorly, sleeping child and the first of the books: Black Milk. litlove’s discussion of it with Dark Puss, is here.

I am a writer.

I am a nomad.

I am a cosmopolite.

I am a lover of Sufism.

I am a pacifist.

I am a vegetarian and I am a woman, more or less in that order.

That is how I would have defined myself until I reached the age of thirty-five.

Up to that moment, first and foremost I saw myself as a teller of tales. Once upon a time, people like me shared their stories around a campfire, under a sky so wide you could never be sure where it ended, if it ever did. In Paris, they scraped together the money for rent by writing for newspapers. In the palace of a despotic sultan each story earned them the right to live one more day. Be it the Anonymous Narrator, Balzac or the beautiful Shehrazat, I felt connected to these storytellers of old. The truth is, like many other novelists, I felt closer to dead writers than to contemporary ones, and perhaps related more easily to imaginary people than those who were real – well, too real.

That was how I lived. That was how I planned to go on living. But then something totally unexpected, miraculous and bewildering happened to me: motherhood.

Elif Shafak is a very successful Turkish novelist and one of the few who have been published in English. Black Milk is an inventive, witty account of her change in heart from determined spinster to wife to mother and her reconciliation of all the apparently competing elements of her psyche. Within ‘the labyrinth of [her] soul’ is a ‘harem’ of ‘Thumbelinas’ – tiny women representing different selves – Little Miss Practical, Dame Dervish, her spirituality, Miss Highbrow Cynic, her intellectual persona, and Miss Ambitious Chekhovian, the driven novelist. They bicker constantly (and entertainingly) and govern her through uneasy and shifting alliances, oligarchy, monarchy, dictatorship. Later she encounters two suppressed aspects: Mama Rice Pudding, her maternal side, and Blue Belle Bovary, her sensuality. Interspersed with this story are accounts of other women writers – Jane Austen, Louisa M. Alcott, Simone de Beauvoir, Toshiko Tamura, Zelda Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, and more.

(Portrait of Elif Shafak from here; her website is here)

The Thumbelinas might look like a nauseating idea, but in fact I found them charming, funny and the highlights of the book. They allowed Shafak to explore her complicated persona in an amusing but perceptive way. You don’t need to be a writer or, I think, a woman to appreciate her fears about parenthood and its pressures on self-identity. The rest of the book was enjoyable but in my opinion less successful. I found the summaries of other women writers’ lives and the ‘lessons’ they offered Shafak wore a bit thin after a while, some of them felt a little pat. But what really disappointed me were her accounts of postpartum depression and motherhood. After the birth of her daughter, the Thumbelinas are banished to a box by the djinn of postpartum depression, Lord Poton. While vividly described, he offered little to illuminate Shafak’s experience to me and I felt no wiser about the condition after reading it than before. And then, once Lord Poton is defeated, Shafak’s husband Eyup suggests they hire a nanny and it’s the end of the book! What of the conflicting demands – self-introspection against selflessness, restlessness against stability, the energy and time for writing against those for mothering – over which Shafak and I had pondered for so many pages? Do the Thumbelinas really live harmoniously together? How does she manage such a successful writing career, two children (and a husband!) and a life divided between London and Istanbul? Is Shafak suggesting that actually it is easy, after all?

Despite my complaints about the ending, I loved Shafak’s humour, wild imagination and lively style and will definitely be seeking out her novels. Does anyone have any favourites to recommend?

And many thanks to litlove!

Also, happy Friday the Thirteenth...

i'm in conversation with an authoress, please advise

Have you ever found yourself, after attending a reading, standing speechless and gormless before the Authoress? Have you ever cornered a Lady Writer and had your compliments on her needlework savagely thrown back in your face? Fear not – there is help.

(Pensive female, writing – treat with caution; ‘Yes or No’, steel engraving by unknown artist, plate from unknown book, 1882; found here)

While practising work-avoidance techniques instead of writing one of my papers for the teacher-training course – the actual task isn’t so bad, but having to look up every other word in the dictionary in order to write it in Flemish has turned it into a job of monumental tedium which makes me want to cry and scratch at the walls, an entirely grown-up response of course… Anyway, while surfing the internet I found the answer to your problems: Chapter 20 of Miss Leslie’s Behaviour Book: A Guide and Manual for Ladies as Regards their Conversation; Manners; Dress; Introductions; Entree to Society; Shopping; Conduct in the Street; At Places of Amusement; In Traveling; At the Table, Either at Home, in Company, or at Hotels; Deportment in Gentlemen’s Society; Lips; Complexion; Teeth; Hands; The Hair; etc. etc. (originally published in 1834, I believe) (via this piece from the Huffington Post). This handy chapter explains to you the conduct proper towards female writers. Don’t say that you think her plots are improbable. Don’t ask her to dish the dirt on other writers. Miss (Eliza) Leslie’s tone is pleasingly cutting:

Never tell an authoress that ‘you are afraid of her’—or entreat her ‘not to put you in her book.’ Be assured there is no danger.

And most important of all:

If, when admitted into her study, you should find her writing-table in what appears to you like great confusion, recollect that there really is no wit in a remark too common on such occasions, ‘Why, you look quite littery,’—a poor play on the words literary and litter.

That’s a mistake I make all the time. But now we all know better, eh?

Actually, I don’t mean to mock Miss Leslie. It’s hard not to believe that she herself has been on the receiving end of these inanities, and one cannot but marvel at how insensitive people can be. Nor can one help noticing that there’s no chapter on dealing with literary men. I would like to think this is  because Miss Leslie doesn’t give a tinker’s about the feelings of the writing gentleman, but fear the real reason is that, while literary men did come in for their fair share of jokes about littery desks, they were treated with a tiny bit more respect than their feminine counterparts.

I looked up Eliza Leslie on Wikipedia, the fount of all knowledge. She was born in Philadelphia in 1757 and lived to the respectable age of seventy. Wikipedia rather charmingly notes:

Her first compositions were in verse. In her fortieth year she published her first prose work, a cookery-book, which met with a large sale. Later, after obtaining a prize for her story ‘Mrs. Washington Potts,’ which was published in Godey’s Lady’s Book, she adopted literature as a profession.

She seems to have written one novel, Amelia; or, A Young Lady’s Vicissitudes (1848), which I hope is racy (alas, it is not available on Project Gutenberg although another work, Stories for Helen, is). And here is a picture of Miss Leslie, also from Wikipedia: