On the fear of committing
As in living, so in writing
I didn't mean to take a break from writing this newsletter, but I was made redundant in April and so had to fling myself into the wholly exhausting and mostly thankless task of job-hunting. Which, after a 3-month contract with a lovely team, I'm now doing again. What larks.
Apparently, the hardest part of a marathon falls somewhere between miles 18 and 23. If you’re going to hit an emotional brick wall during the race, you are most likely to do it when you’re well past the halfway mark. When you’re too far in to quit, but too far from the end for the finish line to feel real.
Similar seems to be true of writing anything longer than about 10,000 words. You hit a point where you’ve done most of the groundwork, and you know that completing the job is well within your capabilities, but the actual end is still hovering out of sight. A bit more pushing through would get you there. Teeth gritted, sleeves rolled up, coffee at skull-rattling strength, and you’d do it. But it’s hard to believe that it’s possible. It’s fascinating, really, how self-doubt threatens to topple us at the last moment before the finish line appears on the horizon.
During the winter lockdown, bestselling author Marian Keyes did a series of Instagram Lives on writing a novel (which were a complete and utter delight, and are still available on her Instagram page). One viewer asked her about the problem of knowing, or not, whether the idea you’re chiselling away at is any good. If it “works” as a story.
“How do you know?” mused Keyes. “Well, you don’t. It’s like… life.”
As in writing, so in living. You rarely know exactly how a big decision is going to pan out – a job change, say, or a house move, or a new relationship. You just have to choose something, and tolerate the knowledge that by choosing one thing, you’re closing the door on the alternatives, at least for a while. There is no “knowing”, there is just getting on with the work.
We write because we’re anxious control freaks who need realms of which we are kings. We love nothing more than writing our own endings, weaving narratives out of chaos. Deskbound despots, every last one of us. But sometimes I think to reach an end point, you have to stop thinking about it, and shrink your focus a little. Take it second by second, sentence by sentence, stride by stride.
You can't always know precisely what a finish line will look like - just that you'll reach it, and in getting there, you'll learn something. You'll grow.
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Fiction: Wild Pets, Amber Medland
This is the book people think Sally Rooney has written. This is the perfect millennial novel. Class, politics, mental illness, painfully accurate social observations - everything that has been breathlessly projected on to Rooney's work is actually here in Wild Pets.
Set between August 2016 and October 2019, Wild Pets follows Iris as she begins a creative writing MFA at Columbia, deals with the realities of opening up a long-distance relationship with her musician boyfriend Ezra, and battles with debilitating episodes of depression - all against a backdrop of Brexit, Trump and the Me Too movement.
I will admit it took me a little while to get into, but that's only because I'm not crazy about stories of girls in their early twenties who are dating musicians. If I wanted to read that tale, I'd simply go back and read my diaries from seven or eight years ago. But about 50 or so pages in, Medland's eye for detail and devastating turn of phrase got under my skin, and a low-level obsession took hold. The only false note is Iris's first therapist, who doesn't feel quite as believable as she should.
But God, what this novel does well, it really excels at. The part where Iris enters a period of mania is so skilfully written, you don't fully realise what's happening until she's almost out of control, which feels achingly plausible. There is a depth to Medland's writing that feels effortless, and an emotional intelligence I can only dream of bringing to my own work. I haven't been this excited about a new voice in fiction for a while; it feels lazy to sign off with "I can't wait to see what Medland does next" but the fact is, I can't.
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Non-Fiction: Nobody Ever Asked Me About The Girls, Lisa Robinson
I wasn't sure whether to write about this book because, well, why be negative in your own newsletter? But I think the sheer extent of the missed opportunity here is in itself worthy of discussion.
One of the only disappointing things Dylan Moran has ever said runs roughly thus: "women can have everything they want. Equal rights, equal pay, everything. But only when they stop bitching about each other." The Irish comedian is the godfather of my entire sense of humour, but he's utterly wrong on that one. The argument that feminism can only 'win' when women achieve some sort of preternatural sisterliness is specious at best and by now, we should all know it.
Having said that, if you're going to write a book that purports to shine a light on the realities of being a hugely successful woman in music, you should probably at least attempt to empathise with your subjects just a tiny bit. Drawn from the many interviews with the great women of pop conducted by Lisa Robinson during her time as a music columnist, Nobody Ever Asked Me About The Girls could have been a properly juicy, insightful read, with some great analysis of the culture and expectations that surround those women. Alas, there are no insights or analysis here.
Robinson calls Taylor Swift "the single most overtly ambitious musician I ever met outside of Madonna", then admits she never interviewed her and "never wanted to" — and calls Swift's music "inane". Why Robinson finds ambition worthy of derision in some female artists but not others is never examined, nor is the wider issue of why ambitious women are still eyed with suspicion the world over. Robinson also really dislikes Madonna, going so far as to accuse her of "ruining the culture", without ever explaining precisely what her issue is. The chapter on female musicians' use of make-up and fashion is Peak Cool Girl — Robinson only has time for women whose style seems effortless, and everyone else is trying too hard, but if you're hoping that she might attempt some critical thinking and ponder why they might be trying so hard to look a certain way, then you're going to be disappointed.
Internalised misogyny's a hell of a drug, and maybe I should cut Robinson some slack, given that she has spent her working life in some of the most male-dominated spheres you can think of. But in a post-Me-Too world — a movement Robinson makes explicit reference to in her epilogue! — you have to do better than this. Or you should want to do better than this, at the very least. If nobody ever asked Robinson about the girls, it was probably because she never showed any interest in wanting to talk about them.
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