The feeling of being understood

A round of reading from July-September

Hello friends, familiar and new, and welcome to a house in a hamlet in a forest. I’m Jan and I hold spaces for those on journeys of transformation. I believe story is powerful and that the earth offers healing through our daily connection and herbal allies. My Sunday posts are always free. Let’s create a little alchemy together.

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Reading list July-September

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us

Kafka tells us.

We read for so many reasons but always there is the fascination with another creature, human or non-human. Jeanette Winterson puts it like this in the introduction to the audible version of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit:

Reading is an adventure. Adventures are about the unknown. When I started to read seriously I was excited and comforted all at the same time. Literature is a mix of unfamiliarity and recognition. The situation can take us anywhere — across time and space, the globe, through the lives of people who can never be like us — into the heart of anguish we have never felt — crimes we could not commit.

Yet as we travel deeper into the strange world of the story, the feeling we get is of being understood — which is odd when you think about it, because at school learning is based on whether or not we understand what we are reading. In fact it is the story (or the poem) that is understanding us.

Books read us back to ourselves.

This reading back to ourselves has felt particularly strong in the last few months of reading. I'm fascinated by identity, by what we mean by the self, by how we story our lives and how we change those stories. And my reading over late summer to early autumn has (accidentally or unconscously) reflected this fascination. To encounter creatures, places, times, and circumstances completely other and at the same time to read ourselves — this is alchemy. We can enter these alchemical portals over and over, discover so much and return to the world a little changed, with a feeling of being more understood.f

Novels

Karl Ove Knausgaard, Summer

There is something deeply mesmerising about Karl Ove Knausgaard's prose. He looks at ordinary objects and keeps a diary and in the midst of the precise, concrete images a life unspools with a good deal of sadness and a huge amount of beauty.

This series of seasonal books is written to his youngest daughter and built across fragments. It's summer — the last book in the cycle — and there are ice creams and sunshine and ladybirds, but there is also longing and loss. And above all there is the sense that the quotidian matters, the sanctity of everyday objects, small encounters, daily rituals and how we create in a messy world sings of every page...

To read something that is at once grounded and ordinary and yet utterly transcendent is a gift that is elevated all the more by Anselm Kiefer's exquisite illustrations. In the book Knausgaard recounts going the Keifer's Paris studio to select the illustrations and talks about how he is drawn to them for

the principle of transformation. That something is what it is as the result of a determination and that with a flick of the wrist it can become something else.

Poetic, and insightful, these fragments cohere into a book that is full of fresh perspectives on parenting as well as on subjects from bats to tears, mosquitos to slugs, but above all woven into life. The intimacy and vulnerability can be breath-taking and we know we have encountered a real creature like ourselves.

Columbe Schneck, The Paris Trilogy

In a trilogy of three auto-fictive novellas, Columbe Schneck takes us on a journey across a life. In Seventeen, Scheck's life is charmed — from a well-off Parisian bourgeois family, left wing and liberal, she is untroubled by gender until, at 17, she becomes pregnant. There is no judgement, no problem in obtaining a safe abortion, but for the first time she is 'a girl' realising that her female body marks her differently.

Drawing inspiration from Annie Ernaux's novel Happening, that details her earlier and illegal abortion, the prose is clear and matter-of-fact, an interesting blend of cool distance and intimate detail that is compelling and accessible. We are taken into another life, another world, but feel its details and Schneck is an excellent world-builder so that every scene is crisp and filmic. What is shocking about the abortion is the lack of emotional engagement of those around her — a huge life event is handled like she has toothache. Yet the impact goes on resonating as she counts the unborn's life across decades long after she becomes a mother.

It's a novel firmly on the side of bodily autonomy but is also honest about the way her privileged upbringing has not prepared her for what it is like to live in a woman's body.

In the second novella, Friendship, the opening scene is a dinner with her oldest friend, Héloïse who has cancer and anounces she is not going to make it. The most novelistic of the trilogy, told in third person, this story of female friendship is told with candour and depth.

In Swimming, the final novella, we return to the first person voice to explore an affair with a man Schneck had first met in childhood. The swimming pool is a recurring theme in their relationship, but also an extended metaphor for her discovery of a different sense of autonomy. Poignant, honest and with a final epiphany learnt from swimming, the trilogy is a deeply satisfying read from an intelligent writer. I'm grateful to Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrer for the translation and hope that more of Schneck's work will appear in English.

Anita Desai, Rosarita

This short novel packs in so much more than seems possible in under 100 pages. It begins with an epigraph from Fernando Pessoa's Songbook to set the tone:

I'm sorry I don't respond

Each of us is many persons.
To me I'm who I think I am.
But others see me differently
And are equally mistaken.

"Don't dream me into someone else,
but leave me alone in peace!
If I don't want to find myself,
Should I want others to find me?"

And it opens with a seemingly bizarre act of mistaken identity, when Bonita, a young Indian student enjoying being in Mexico to studty Spanish, meets an extravagant stranger. The womaninssists she knew Bonita's mother and regales her with stories of her mother's art. But her mother never left India. Her mother never painted a thing. Surely her mother...

As Bonita journeys deeper into Mexico's landscape, her memories begin to crack, uncertainties arise. Fragments of other stories — of the violence of partition, of her mother's life, of loss and of how we reconstruct others compete with Bonita's own attempts to find an identity. And all of it in told in second person so that we feel implicated as readers, pulled into this strange and shifting narrative where there may be always more questions than answers.

Haunting, intriguing and beautifully written.

Rachel Cusk, Parade

Rachel Cusk seems to be a writer who invites strong feelings. I love her work, but Parade asks its readers to work hard and the fragmented, episodic and intense narrative took some time to draw me in. It's met with some cold reviews, been derided as 'miserable' and 'pretentious' as well as 'plotless and introspective', but all of this misses the point that Cusk is making about what it is like to not confrom and particularly what it is like to not conform as a creative woman. Her protagonists are artists and film makers but could easily be replaced with writers or other creatives.

In this experimental novel, Cusk has four protagonists, each an artist, each called G, all different. Each G makes strange decisions. 'The Stuntsman' paints upside down —

perhaps because he could find no other way to make sense of his time and place in history,

'The Diver' explores the work of another G, but does so over a dinner party after G's exhibition is abruptly ended by a man diving to his death from the top floor of the gallery.

'The Spy' is a film maker (once a writer) who turns to film.

to see without being seen: for [him] there was no better definition of the artist’s vocation”.

Each of these third-person sections is interspersed with a first person voice, that sometimes becomes a plural 'we', whilst 'The Midwife' charts another G’s career interuppted by a series of holidays to an increasingly bizarre and dysfunctional farm in a a stranfe country, all told from the perspective of 'we'.

'We' also closes the book, telling the story of a death — a mother who has never shown love and whose loss is all the more heart-breaking for this.

Protagonist, point of view, place... none of these are stable. The one constant is that these disparate people are all 'G'. And in this ambitious exploration of identity we are left with a sense that all artists, perhaps all people, endure the same challenges.

This is a demanding book but deeply rewarding. Cusk's first person narrator ponders, in the novel.

how far people have been prepared to run the risk of not being understood

And it's a risk the author clearly knows she runs every time she writes. Long may she continue to be so bold and exploratory.

Yael Van der Wouden, The Safe Keep

This debut is a mesmerising novel that kept me awake at night. There is so much going on in it — the legacy of Nazi occupation of the Netherlands being played out in 1961; the difficulty of gay and queer relationships; the nuances of family relationships and all that goes unspoken between those who both love and resent one another...

Isabel lives in the rural family home, the custodian of her dead mother's beloved possessions, especially the family silver and the beautiful plates decorated with hares. Repressed and cut off from her own sense of self and body, she disapproves of her younger brother's relationship with a man and despises the women her older brother inflicts on family gatherings and then dumps. But when Louis, who will inherit the house from their uncle, the owner, brings Eva to stay, her world begins to unravel.

Questions of memory and stories told to cover more unpalatable truths begin to surface. Guilt and love weave together in haunting, precise and deeply embodied prose. There is so much hurt in these finely drawn characters, but so much tenderness. I'd love to tell you so much more — but better that you read it.

Deborah Levy, August Blue

Identity is certainly at the heart of this intriguing and compelling novel, which I read in two sittings. The opening is haunting and strange, watching a woman who might be her double buy two mechanical horses at a market in Greece. As the protagonist, Elsa, moves across Europe we piece together her life after she walked off stage in Vienna, ending a career as a world-class concert pianist.

Full of loss and questions, the story reminded me of the line from Georgia O'Keeffe,

I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.

Elsa waits to be herself across several seasons, teaching piano in strange homes where parental relationships intersect with her own search. Lyrical, full of vivid places — from Greece to London, Paris to Sardinia — and told in an embodied first person voice who is as sympathetic as she is troubled, this is an accomplised novel with an oneiric feel that adds such richness to the prose.

Mojgan Ghazirad, The House on Sun Street

Woven with epigraphs from The Arabian Knights, and beginning in early childhood when the protagonist's grandfather began reading the tales at night out loud, The House on Sun Street is a tender, memoir-infused novel.

Told through the details of daily life the tension of the narrative builds slowly. This is the time of the last days of the rule of the Shah in Iran, then revolution and the devastating Iran-Iraq war. The reach of politics and ideology into the minutiae of the every day is insidious and chilling.

There were moments when I held my breath as a Moji, emerging into her teens, rubs up against a regime of increasing repressions controlling education and women's bodies. And the sense of waiting for news during war, how air-raids are experienced and descriptions of battles are visceral and immersive.

I'm grateful to

Elissa Altman

for her breakfast interview with Mojgan Ghazirad, which is where I discovered this gentle, tautly-written, tender novel.

Rebecca Gisler, About Uncle (trans. Jordan Stump)

To describe this novel as 'visceral' is an understatement. Uncle is elderly, disabled and long past caring for himself. He shares his home by the sea in Brittany with his nephew and niece, who veer between struggling to change his habits -- gorging on sweet foods, never washing (and worse)... and being drawn into his world.

There's a sense of consuming stasis in the story, a kind of paralysis in which decay is normalised, accentuated by the prose which is both descriptive yet matter-of-fact. And also heightened by the recurring metaphor of Uncle vanishing down the toilet which opens the novel:

One night I woke up convinced that Uncle had escaped through the hole in the toilet, and when I opened the door I found that Uncle had indeed escaped through the hole in the toilet, and the floor tiles were scattered with toilet paper confetti, and hundreds of white feathers...

The stuckness and the bodily functions are not always an easy read, but there is a great deal going on in this compact story. Written during the pandemic, it picks up the sense of being suspended with and the ways in with our sense of time irretrievably changed, but also comments on the way our lives are filled with useless things. Uncle collects odd gadgets that have no obvious application, but become part of the terrifying piles of detritus in his room.

Childhood and animals are also important themes. The ways in which childhood remains potent is constantly emphasised, whilst the niece (who translates pages for a pet products site, observes Uncle as an animal, trying to make sense of him from his habits.

A highly textured, fascinating read.

Hanne Ørstavik, Ti Amo (trans. Martin Aitken)

This short novella is an intense and powerful meditations on love, grief and truth. I love you, the protagonist says to her husband, her lover, over and over as she accompanies him towards death. I love you, he says to her, over and over, as their life together contracts around hospital visits... visiting the pharmacy in the hope of getting the morphine tablets he needs so much and which so often fail to turn up... the small rituals of a shared breakfast... the daily rhythms of her exercise routine and writing, his sleep and sleep interspersed with moments of writing a novel on his phone...

The precision of the writing, the attention to the tiny and vital details, the simplicity of the structure – no chapters, only line breaks as one scene of life seagues into another... are the bones of this tender, intimate, effecting novel. The flesh is a delicate rawness of how this feels, told not through abstractions and disembodied musing, but through the surprises of how the protagonist encounters her own vitality, her commitment to life even as she faces an unspeakable loss.

As life-affirming as it is deeply sad, Ti Amo, is a book that will stay with me.

Poetry

Kerri Ni Dochartaigh & Micheál McCann, Waking Light

As someone who has run an indie press for almost 20 years, I love the work of small presses doing innovative projects and this limited edition, handbound collection from Skein Press is exquisite. The poetry is spare, tender and vulnerable. And is woven with imagery from Michelle Moloney and Éilìs Murphy. The accordion-style layout also adds to the sense that this is an artefact as much as a collection. The collaboration made all the more cohesive by the lack of the writer and artist's names on the individual pieces in the book. Bare branches against a lapis sky. A winter pregnancy. A birth that feels like a drowning, a vanishing. An object that soothes and sings.

In the spring I gave birth I watched the planet going about its daily work as if from a place underwater, from a part of the world which cut me off from those I knew (and did not).

(Night Night Garden)

Hannah Copley, Lapwing

Lapwing is achingly sad. In this lyrical account of loss and confusion the lapwing becomes an extended metaphor for an addicted father, who is absent or vanished. He is named for a bird "falseste of alle", a bird of shifting identities.

At the heart of the collection is the daughter, Peet, trying to make sense of the wreckage left by a parent, trying to construct safety and identity in an unsafe world.

She is done
with this wintering
ready for the earth
to give, poised
to scratch for a more tender language

The love expressed is as immersive and fiery as the anger and pain, but there is no projection here — we are invited in to a messy world where questions and honesty sing off the page.

Karin Karakasli, Real

Translated by Canan Marasligil and Sarah Howe, Real is a selection of Kararkasli's poetry across 15 years. An Armenian-Turkish poet who works across many genres, her writing is dextrous and supple and ranges across emotional and political landscapes, moving fluidly between the interior and exterior.

You drag your country behind you
like a suitcase filled with pain
To love means always to fear something

will happen to those whose every hair on their head you cherish.

[...]

The dead don't die in us but are laid down in successive strata
of emptiness, as you fade
into the most familiar geography of the skin.

(The Woman in the Doorway)

What comes across most powerfully is a sense of persistence, an unwillingness to be overwhelmed by the powers of history, to go on advoacting for freedom in the face of whatever odds are against us.

You offer each other faith among all the lies
It's like reading under an oil lamp
shadowy, it takes a steel will, the light trembling with the strain
to be so unshielded in making a promise, that is the real vulnerability.
Pay no attention to those empty words floating in the air
To make a promise is language's white magic
The ground under your feet
will catch you
if you should fall.

(Oath)

Tamar Yoseloff, Belief Systems

Tamar Yoseloff also begins from a world in freefall in which we noneless insist on making meaning and beauty. Inspired by artists like John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Eardley and John Latham, she observes the impulse to create at the margins, the determination to restore and renew. This is a collection that has transformation at its heart and finds its metaphors in music and nature, art and imagination. It's a collection that loves language and uses it with skill to interogate and dive deeply into how we make and live in the world we find ourselves in.

A wonderful example is the poem 'Tacet' which opens with an epigraph from John Cage:

It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make as seductive the color and shape and fragrance of a flower.

And continues:

He wanted the hear the sound of our own
breathing, the pin-drop quiet, the vacuum
we typically fill with muzak, endless voices
urging us away from the toughness of alone.
There's no place we don't occupy without
our buzz and rumble: stop, he tells us,
stop

and let silence come
like a roar, the longest sigh that stretches
beyond words; he knew there's no such thing
as an empty space, even when we're gone:

There is sorrow here, but so much hope, crafted by an outstanding poet who writes with freshness and surprise.

Harry Josephine Giles, Them

Lively, formerly-inventive, risk-taking bursting with energy, Them is the second collection from Harry Josephine Giles. Moral panics about trans people seem to abound currently. Massively out of all proportion to this tiny sector of society. So many of us are currently trying to live in a world that is challenging with grace and creativity. But not all of us have the added presssure of being one of the scapegoats of choice for a society in chaos.

For Giles, poetry is a conduit for transforming anger and she does it with wit and verve. There are pages blotted by ink stains, a poem laid out as a spell with a ring of 'salt salt salt salt...' around it, four directions marked by playing cards, that begins

Spells are desires in clear enough action
to turn the elements. Here is a spell:
when the bargain we are made to make
for food and shelter is to force
our bodies beyond their own wants, to place
the gold of our agency at their service
of another's thirst, to give up the gifts
of time and breath to clocks and smoke,
then those who say they value life
shall pay in return enough for life.
And when you do not we will take it

Other poems use erasure or overwriting to indicate the turmoil of life, ecological degredation and the impact of technology. And others spread across the page, use imagery or tumble down the page in indented fragments. This is a distinctive, bold and important collection from a voice with extraordinary range and power.

Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things

I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.

Ada Limón writes. A line that resonates through this collection bursting with poetry of place and of heart. New York, California and Kentucky jostle alongside poetry of loss, of moving into mature adulthood, of relationships. Always what unites the pieces is a distinctive voice -- sharply observant, raw, and honest and full of the thingness of life. The carrots she killed as a child by picking them too early -- the bright dead things of the collections title... the wounded possum on the road... the pitbull bitch at a wayside garage that seems to be saying

Girl, no one's going to tell me
when to take a leak, when to bow down,
when not to bite...

(Service)

And throughout the collection relationships take centre stage, the lost parent, the ex who died of heroin overdoses, the wreck of relationships...

Isn't it funny? How cold numbs everything but grief

If we could light up the room with pain,

we'd be such a glorious fire

(Lashed to the Helm, All Stiff and Stark)

Yet through the wreckage and the grief, it's being alive that wins out every time as the final poem, 'The Conditional', insists:

Say tomorrow doesn’t come.
Say the moon becomes an icy pit.
Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified.
Say the sun’s a foul black tire fire.
Say the owl’s eyes are pinpricks.
Say the raccoon’s a hot tar stain.
Say the shirt’s plastic ditch-litter.
Say the kitchen’s a cow’s corpse.
Say we never get to see it:
bright future, stuck like a bum star,
never coming close, never dazzling.
Say we never meet her. Never him.
Say we spend our last moments staring at each other,
hands knotted together,
clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.
Say, It doesn’t matter.
Say, That would be enough.
Say you’d still want this:
us alive, right here, feeling lucky.

Non-fiction

Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time

I relished every chapter of The Garden Against Time and was in awe of Laing's ability to weave so much research, history, politics, myth and advocacy for the land and for equity into its pages without didacticism.

The story of her own garden and how she restored it, it is also the story of how we relate to land, how ownership operates, how many stories of slavery and oppression are contained in beautiful places and how we ever came to conceive of gardens in the first place. But it is also about the garden as a place of sanctuary, a locus for change and resistance.

The writing is fluid and beautiful, the material completely enthralling and the honesty and willingness to live with difficult questions is refreshing.

Olivia Laing and her partner moved into their new home and garden between Covid lockdowns when:

The weather was balmy, tender, almost foolishly lovely. As everything else contracted Spring brought a counter surge of beauty, a non-stop froth of cherry blossom and cow-parsley

And later:

Gardening was grounding, soothing, useful, beautifying... It was a way of surrendering to the present moment in which we were all trapped.

A sentiment so many people shared during the pandemic. But Laing extends the thoughts with her investigation of the original Garden of Eden and how this is reflected in Miltons Paradise Lost, in which Eve wants to work alone:

the only possible way to dissolve back into relation with the vegetal world and yet, ejected from the garden, the first humans know:

"The world was all before them." Whatever they have suffered, whatever damage has been done, the future lies ahead of them.

Above all, the garden becomes the metaphor of transformation and hope, of perpetual new starts. And I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Lauren Elkin, no 91/92: notes on a Parisian commute

From a wonderful small press that largely does translations of French books into English, I loved the concept of this book and was delighted to find it delivered its promise.

The narrative is a series of iPhone notes recorded during busy commutes on two Parisian bus lines. It's a record of a place in microscopic detail but also has the range of a journal or of daydreams as we travel — thoughts of life, pregnancy, community and separateness, the books we are reading, the politic events of the day... jostle with how crowded a bus is, who we get to share a seat with, how work is going...

In the ordinariness and everydayness momentous things happen and we are given an inside view of a city with as many layers as there are people. It makes compelling reading, helped by the immediacy and groundedness of the lucid prose.

Nina MacLaughlin, Summer Solstice

This essay in chapters, published in an elegant chapbook edition by Black Sparrow Press, began life in The Paris Review Daily. The writing is gorgeous. And it conjures so much that we associate with summer — long, warm days, wild swimming and eating outdoors, fat ripe tomatoes and romance...

The precision of MacLaughlin's observation and imagery is breath-taking and is enhanced by her ability to make connections between the elements of this season as she experiences it. It's also elevated by her handling of time — in how time moves in this languid season and how we experience pinpoint moments and arrange and rearrange them in memory.

I loved reading this and loved the slightly melancholy ending of the sequence and the addendum on herbs of the summer

St John's Wort
Lavender
Vervain
Calendula
Mugwort
Yarrow

And I also realised that somewhere along my own timeline, I've lost my sense of summer as a sanctuary of relaxation and long sunlit days with loved ones. Perhaps it began with the break up of my first marriage in summer. Perhaps my sense of this season shifted when I no longer had summer days with young children. Perhaps it was the timing of a loved one becoming ill and another dying as the light stretched to its longest. Perhaps it's simply a run of rather grey wet summers. This beautiful book got under my skin and made me examine how I relate to summer, and for that I am grateful.

Nina MacLaughlin, Winter Solstice

I was eager to continue with Winter Solstice after reading Summer Solstice, despite being out of season. It's written with the same elegance of phrase and depth of thought. And I was in my element in this book — soothed by candlelight, willing to explore the darkness where so much germinates, immersed in the writer's sensual descriptions and rich connections...

The tone is meditative and in the midst of darkness there is always the glimmer of light.

Come. Come closer, Here, sit. Get warm. Do you want honey in your tea? We'll share an orange.

The tip of the wick grows orange and curls to black. To watch a flame is to see something inside.

And in facing the darkness there is also the promise that the light returns. Already from Solstice onwards the days lengthen by two or three seconds each day.

As in Summer Solstice there is another beautiful addendum of 'plant matter':

Holly
Blessed thistle
Mistletoe
Cinnamon
Yew
Oak

Corinne Boyer, Under the Dragon Root

I read lots of herbal textbooks but few of them are distinct as Corinne Boyer's trilogy on the folklore, medicinal and personal ritual practices of herbs. All three are described as folk grimoires. Under the Bramble Arch, Under the Witching Tree and Under the Dragon Root move from wayside plants to trees to witches' garden plants.

Each book is arranged seasonally, beginning in autumn and each one is a treasure-trove of European and North American folklore, folk remedies and a history of the magical uses of herbs. The books are also packed with recipes and I've used several from the first two books, adapting them and making my own versions.

I don't imagine making many of the recipes from Under the Dragon Root — many of the featured plants are poisons and have legal restrictions on their uses. But there are recipes for Vervain and Valerian, for red poppy, angelica and artemisia that I'll explore.

Illustrated with mediaeval woodcuts of the plants and a central section of evocative black and white photos of the author and some of her remedies and charms, taken by Claude Mahmood, the book if beautifully presented (Troy Books is another indie press, specialsing in occult titles). It's also a fascinating discussions of plants that are often overlooked: wormwood, valerian, poppy, autumn crocus, mushrooms, mandrake, bay laurel, daphne mezeron, hellebore, periwinkle, henbane, angelica, lily of the valley, rue, ferns, vervain, belladonna, aconite, foxglove and thorn apple.

For me the appendices on graveyard apothecary, or making plant charms and powders are not my area and I choose not to work with poisonous plants, aside from them raising legal and eithical considerations. But Under the Dragon Root preserves arcane knowledge and is a fascinating read.

Heather Christle, The Crying Book

Facing grief after the suicide of a friend while contending with depression and about to become a mother, Heather Christle decides to investiate evey facet of crying. As she weaves together fascinating facts and mesmerising fragments with her own experience what emerges is kaleidoscopic.

But most of all it works because it makes meaning and connections in the landscape of sorrow. Tender, poetic and sometimes strange, this is ultimately a book about consolation and how important it is to listen to our tears.

'Solstice' or 'sun-stilled'. The still point twice a year. At the heart of both is the inextricable conjunction of life and death, joy and grief, movement and stillness, expansion and contraction... As T S Eliot puts it in the first of the Four Quartets:Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

Sarah Fay, Cured

Cured is the first book I've read on Substack. I thought I'd read a chapter or two but was there hours later and ended up reading the whole book in 2-3 sessions, telling myself, 'just one more chapter...'

It's an extraordinary story that begins:

I have only a vague sense of when I recovered.

But I do remember the moment I realized that after twenty-five years of serious mental illness, I’d been recovered for some time.

That 25 years involved a series of misdiagnoses and a long process of moving away from living in the many myths there are about mental illnesses, including that they are impossible to recover from.

Setting out why there has been so little discussion of recovery, Fay is clear that the path is hard, is often hampered by societal inequity and isn't a formula. The story here is written for encouragement. It gives insight and so much to think about. It's powerful, honest and moving.

And there is nothing being sold. There's no 10-step plan to recovery at the end of it because Fay respects the huge variety of experiences and context that go into making big life changes. It's wonderful to read something full of hope that isn't saccharine or simply avoiding reality. Cured is an intelligent sharing that offers hope, which as Václav Havel says, is

...above all which gives the strength to live and continually try new things.

You can find Cured on Sarah's writing Substack.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Summer we Crossed Europe in the Rain

Poetry or creative non-fiction? Neither really. This beautifully illustrated book with evocative artwork by the Italian graphic and comic artist, Bianca Bagnerelli, is a compilation of song lyrics. I'm a huge fan of every novel Kazuo Ishiguro has ever written and loved the film, Living, which he wrote the screenplay for. Apparently the Nobel Prize winning author has also been writing songs since her was fifteen.

It's a book I doubt I'd have come across online -- that serendipity of bumping into a book in a bookshop (in this case in Hay on Wye) is a magic that only works in the real world. A testimony to indie booksellers.

The songs were written for the jazz singer Stacey Kent, whose voice is supple and silky, full of warm tones and clear light. In the introduction Ishiguro says she told him she loved his books but would like the songs to be a bit more hopeful, even if they were sad. The sadness is certainly there, but the bittersweet hope also winds its way into the scenes he's created.

When the hero turns his back so stoically
On all the happiness they might have had
You always considered it so romantic
But I just considered it sad

[...]

To live in a state of hoping
When hoping seems so utterly mad
I can't help but consider that so romantic
Though I know I should consider it sad

The book is a beautiful object. It's full of love and loss, yearning and memory. And the album from it can be found on Spotify under the same name as the book.

Kerri Ni Dochartaigh, Cacophony of Bone

This book is making its third appearance as I'm reading it in real time. Resisting the urge to read ahead has not got any easier. There's a huge life change in this section of the book, which is written with such tenderness and grace. And the freshness of the writing is so immersive.

It is starting, a little, to rain. Small specks of it, like sparks from a fire, are landing on my skin.

Or this weaving together of Rilke with the observations of a wet August day:

Torrential rain, icy breeze and Rilke. "The uncertainty out there, this flickering world." ... oh my.

The first tomatoes! And kale & chard, viola and nasturtium.

Supple prose, lucid images and emotional depth make this such a joy to read. And if you haven’t yet subscribed to Kerri ní Dochartaigh’s Substack, do it now. There is truth-speaking and solace here.