Authors Electric

Thanks to Jo Carroll for reminding me in her recent post that travel still exists!
Almost every year on the 7th of June, Facebook helpfully prompts me to remember the night I unexpectedly spent in the Comfort Hotel, Malmo, on that date in 2014. I don't really need a reminder of it, not because it was a terrible hotel - on the contrary, it was one of the most friendly and welcoming places I've ever stayed in - but because of the effort involved in getting there and the fact that I hadn't intended to spend the night there at all but in Stockholm.

I'm not going to go into all the horrid detail here, but while still in transit to Helsinki, my ultimate destination, I wrote a live blog, with much ranting about how awful the train company Deutsche Bahn was and why I couldn't decide whether I hated it more or less than Virgin Trains. I will post a link to my trains blog at the end of this post for anyone who is interested.
I have fond memories of the Comfort Hotel. I walked i…

COVID-19 has rearranged our metaphors, especially for those of my advanced years, and co-morbidities that require lying low. Hunter-gatherer/adventure-hero idioms have taken a back seat to quieter images of fishing (online) and burrowing, surviving on deliveries from FedEx, Instacart, and Amazon. No longer able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, I am a hermit crab in a conch shell, a trapdoor spider awaiting victuals via Grubhub.

I thought about how the pandemic affects me creatively beyond material circumstances while reading Intimations, a powerful collection of six, "shape-shifting," intimate essays about the COVID-related experiences of Zadie Smith. In this slim volume, the British born, NYU literary professor, essayist, and novelist crosses the Atlantic on the high wire of writing with grace and insight about unfolding tragedy whose conclusion remains uncertain. The brilliance with which she succeeds flashed me back to Joan Didion's 1968 breakthrough literar…

Coming of Age
How many of us have a Coming of Age novel buried in the mysteries of our hard drives and anxious to be freed, or a partial hard copy in a folder of notes waiting to be worked on, or even an old notebook where the imaginary story of their life is penned in neatly styled longhand? I know I have all of these.
So, what is a coming of age novel?  Try to recall one that made a real impression on you.  It may be that you loved The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger and said to yourself, yes this is me and this explains the phoney world that I'm living in and how nobody understands me except my sister Phoebe; it may be that you recall the wonderful experience of reading The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers and completely understood why the young lead character, Frankie, wants to go to her brother's wedding and honeymoon because just like she did you wanted to belong to something.
I was once teaching a Julian Barnes course which began with his Metroland (1980 and …

Being a frightful pedant, but obviously not wishing to look like one, I always rejoice when someone else brings up the subject of grammar. So thank you, Enid, Sandra, Jan, Bill and Eden forconducting such a lively discussion on the subject on Authors’ Electric a couple of days ago. Various reasons were given for what bad grammar signifies, including poor ability to communicate (yes, often) or a general incompetence (I wouldn’t go that far – but it depends on how disastrous a person’s grammar is I suppose!). To those I’d like to add my particular aversion: intellectual snobbery arising from ignorance. So, here goes:1.WHOM. This should only ever be used in the genitive, dative or ablative case and sometimes not even then. Of whom, to and for whom, by, with, from and in whom are all correct. But you don’t always need to be so pure, especially not in realistic dialogue. ‘Who are you talking to?’ rings much more naturally than ‘Whom are you talking to?’ or to be thoroughly Victorian, ‘To w…

Apologies for the quality of the image on the right, but it comes from an Early? Mid? Nineteenth Century French children's book called, "LA POUPEE PEINTE PAR ELLE-MEME", its cover image faded almost to oblivion. It came originally from an ancient house in La Vendee, a house full of such historical treasures, and which had been in the family of our very close French friends for centuries (at least three centuries, if not four). I set one of my Young Adult novels there - "WOLFSONG", which is currently available as an ebook on Amazon, if you're curious.

The house itself, sadly, has had a dramatic end to its very long and doubtless dramatic life. When the estate was  broken up and divided - French inheritance law is quite uncomfortable and often destructive - it went on to become a hotel in a part of rural France that didn't really attract tourists, so it failed, and eventually, after a succession of owners, was abandoned to the elements and the vandals, and…

I love it when a writer emerges into the limelight and shows themselves to be entirely brilliant. Michaela Coel – the author, co-director, producer and star of BBC series “I May Destroy You”, is my latest hero.



She is young enough to be one of my children and her life experiences are as different to mine as it is possible to be while still being born in the same country, (but only geographically). Listening to her talk and watching her shows has taught me a great deal about worlds that I have virtually no personal experience of. She has helped me understand how other people feel.
Coel has had many of the most unpleasant experiences of life thrust upon her and she writes and talks about them with incredible power and humour. She appears to be entirely fearless in what she says and who she says it to. She lays bare her experiences and her feelings and those of people she knows and loves. The results are so truthful, so painful and so watchable that it is not surprising that her work h…