2020s

Recommended! by Nicola Wilson

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Sometimes there comes along a book you never even hoped you’d get to read – something so totally up your street that it feels almost like a personal kindness that the author was willing to write. Such is Recommend! (2025) by Nicola Wilson – subtitled ‘the influencers who influenced how we read’. It is a history of the Book Society, which began in 1929 as one of the UK’s first book-of-the-month clubs, and went on for many more decades.

The idea was simple: notable authors of the day would read advance copies of books and pick a choice for their growing number of subscribers. If they didn’t want that, there would be alternatives they could substitute in. Each book would come with the Book Society News, including reviews and articles. The everyday, normal reader could have what highbrow literary groups had had for generations. They even had a ‘literary club’ in London that any subscribers were welcome to visit and use, though who knows how many did. Forgive a long quote, but I enjoyed this aspirational look at what a dinner between five literary minds could and would turn into:

For as the red wine was served out, followed by whiskey and cigars for the men, cigarettes for the ladies, the writers’ plans began to take shape: month by month, book by book, they’d change how people thought about reading. As judges their tastes would be broad and eclectic, embracing popular genres and literary fiction, as well as history, travel writing, and memoir. They would not take themselves too seriously; books should be enjoyable and for everyone. By supporting new authors and encouraging a habit of book-buying, they’d break the back of the private subscription library market, enabling ordinary, busy people to build their own collections of first editions. They would help those without nearby bookshops to keep up with new writing and ideas, creating a wide Anglophone reading community. Their selections and recommendations will be bestsellers, making publishers, agents, and booksellers take note. They’d shake up the staid book world with their expert advice, allowing wider audiences, with a growing appetite for books, better access to a world from which many felt actively excluded

Along the way, they would gain enemies. Personal attacks and jibes about their integrity would haunt them, threatening to topple their careers. They would be accused of dumbing down, mocked as ‘middlemen’ for ‘conferring authority on a taste for the second-rate’. Not all five would stick it out. But the Book Society they began that night would serve tens of thousands of readers worldwide for the next forty years, steering a course through the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and the devastation of World War II. Hundreds of what we now think of as twentieth-century classics would first reach readers wrapped in ‘Book Society Choice’ yellow bands.

The initial group included names still known today. The head of the selection committee was Hugh Walpole; alongside him was J.B. Priestley and Rose Macaulay, though the latter dropped out before the first novel was published. Replacing her was Clemence Dane (pseudonym of Winifred Ashton), and the others on that initial committee are perhaps less remembered – writer and reviewer Sylvia Lynd and academic George Gordon, lending the group some critical respectability. Later judges who get a lot of space in the book include Cecil Day-Lewis and Edmund Blunden.

Wilson takes us through the set up of the group, its advertising and some initial pushback, and how the first books were chosen – which seems not to have been plain sailing. ‘For Hugh, the club’s first choice was a mess’, she writes. His father died in the midst of the decision making, and so he had to leave it to others – who were debating between Helen Beauclerk’s The Love of the Foolish Angel and Joan Lowell’s non-fiction The Cradle of the Deep. The former was chosen – which turned out to be a relief, as Lowell’s book was exposed as a hoax.

The book is structured chronologically, but with different judges taking centre stage at different times. I was a little sceptical about this at first – after all, if we delve into Hugh Walpole’s life (for instance) only for the initial chapter, then how would Wilson deal with significant things happening to him later? How would it work to only learn depths about Sylvia Lynd in chapter four? Well, and not for the last time, I’m very impressed by Wilson’s handling of her material. Somehow, it works. She expertly manages to assess when we really need to learn more about a judge’s personal life – whether that be affairs and divorce, substance abuse, or merely the shifting literary fortunes that gave them more or less time to devote to the Book Society. It works brilliantly, and Recommended! becomes rather a page-turner.

I’m skimming the surface of the details in here (you’ll just have to read it!) but, to be honest, I’d have been captivated if Recommended! were only an account of the mechanics of starting and running a book-of-the-month club. And it’s so much more. Wilson doesn’t tell us about every single choice at length, there are plenty of satisfyingly detailed sections exploring why books were chosen, what that did to their reputation, who squabbled with whom, etc. And the choice of titles is certainly varied. While book-of-the-month clubs now tend towards popular, pacey fiction, the Book Society were unafraid to recommend hefty history books – and, indeed, many of the leading highbrow writers of the day.

I said it on Tea or Books? when mentioning Recommended! and I’ll say it again – I was blown away by Wilson’s research. I wrote about the Book Society for my DPhil and spent quite a lot of time researching it – and I know how extremely difficult it was to find any information. It was a struggle even to find a list of the books they chose, and indeed I failed to find a complete list – but Wilson has found far, far more. The newsletters, the relevant correspondence, the detailed understanding of the judges’ lives throughout the decades – there is so much expert research presented in an engaging way, and it never feels like anything is missing. It is extremely impressive, and I doff my cap to Wilson.

While the Book Society continued until the 1960s, Wilson’s book takes us up to the end of the Second World War, with a postscript and some appendices covering the later years – which is rather a relief, to be honest, as we could stay in the heyday. The only thing missing from this exceptional book is a full list of titles as an appendix – they are listed at the ends of chapters, but that does require quite a lot of flicking about, and I’d have preferred to have a full list to consult.

The Book Society may never have numbered millions of subscribers, but it truly changed the way that society – or a certain section of society, at least – chose and read their books. It could have been a curio of literary history, left to explore in the shadows by students like me. I’m so glad that Wilson has rescued The Book Society from that fate with this captivating, fascinating book that garlands its incredible research with an approachable chattiness. In conclusion: Recommended! is heartily recommended.

Eastwards and Far by Chris Lee-Francis – #ABookADayInMay Day 27

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I think I stumbled across Eastwards and Far (2023) by Chris Lee-Francis on Lee-Francis’s Twitter profile, and was intrigued enough to order a copy pronto. As a memoir of cycling across Canada, it combines something I love reading about (Canada) with something I felt fairly ambivalent reading about (cycling) – but, on balance, I liked the idea of seeing Canada through the eyes of an adventurous traveller enough to give it a go. It’s been 25 years since I got a bicycle and I feel, if anything, less likely to get on one after reading Eastwards and Far, but I loved the experience of reading it.

Lee-Francis got the idea while cycling around Ontario in 2013. He spotted a sign for the Trans Canada Trail, and wondered if it would be possible to cycle all the way from Vancouver to the furthest West point of the enormous country – only later realising that the trail wouldn’t be completed until 2017. That gave time for a plan to formulate – and he and has friend Kristian ended up starting their three-month journey in Vancouver by the middle of 2017 (a third friend wasn’t able to get three months off work, so joined in for the final month). Eastwards and Far developed from the journals that Lee-Francis took during that time – turning into an endurance travelogue, documenting the experiences, the beauty, and the Canadians they met along the way.

For the most part, there are not significant dramas. Along the way, some vital belongings go missing, there is a near encounter with a bear, and misreading of a map leaves them with only six eggs to eat and nowhere to buy food – but this is not a memoir about overcoming great hazards and dangers. Rather, it is a memoir of the wonders that can be encountered by undertaking something like this. The highs and lows of battling all weathers and environments to achieve something momentous. And, above all, the interest and kindness of strangers. There are countless people along the way who may only appear for a few paragraphs or a page, but are indelliby part of the men’s experience – whether offering food, somewhere to camp, or simply company.

As the stories continued I realised our bikes had let us skip several layers of social interaction usually required to be sitting in someone’s kitchen talking as friends. A few hours ago we’d not yet met. Now, after nothing more than asking where we could safely violate several byelaws to spend a night sleeping rough without getting caught, we’d been invited over the threshold into their home.

There are definitely amusing moments in Eastwards and Far, but it isn’t played for laughs. This is no attempt to create a Three Men in a Boat style narrative. I’d, instead, describe the tone as warm. Chris Lee-Francis comes across as a thoroughly decent guy – and I suspect a lot of the kindness he and Kristian receive from strangers is because of that decency, and a capacity and willingness to embrace positives encountered every day. What else would possess someone to cycle for thousands of miles?

Of course, hearing about the challenge probably raises lots of logistical questions in your mind – and I enjoyed learning about the answers, particularly the Very Canadian ones. How, for instance, do you deter bears?

At the end of each day in bear country, when you’re nice and relaxed, tent ready and waiting, with a meal and maybe a beer inside you, comes the time to hang your food bags from a nearby tree.

The collective recommendations of friends, park rangers, information pamphlets, and numerous other knowledgeable sources was to suspect all food and cooking gear at least four metres off the ground, a safe distance from camp. Sounds easy, but this part of the day had often become more of a rigmarole than I felt it should’ve been.

The first step was to establish how far away to hang the bags. Received wisdom says at least a hundred metres, which we measured early in the trip to estimating Kristian’s running speed, calculating how long it would take him to run that far, and me timing him while he sprinted off into the distance. Bags would be suspended from a suitable tree somewhere beyond the perimeter.

“That was twelve seconds!” I called to Kristian the first night we did this. “Probably not a hundred metres?”

He looked wounded. “It could be!” he called back.

“Isn’t the world record just under ten?!”

“True! I guess the ground is quite uneven!” He ran a bit further and stopped again.

“That looks good! Probably fourteen seconds total?!” We used this time on subsequent nights.

One aspect that intrigued me, and wasn’t covered in any detail, was what it was like to spend three months constantly with a friend – and high-endurance three months, too. There are very few people I could spend that much time with, without going mad or severing the friendship. The two men seem to still be firm friends by the end, so it was obviously a success – and perhaps scarcely a cross word was spoken between them on the trip. Or perhaps Lee-Francis drew a veil over it.

He keeps the pace up well through the narrative. Something that could have become quite repetitive is somehow compulsive to read – even though he resists any urge to introduce sustained jeopardy. There is never really any doubt that the cyclists will complete their challenge, and do so in one piece. By avoiding any false tension, we can instead enjoy the journey as an adventure into curiosity. I’m still unlikely to ever get back on a bike, let alone undertake any significant challenges, but I really enjoyed reading about it from the comfort of my sofa.

As a sidenote, Eastwards and Far is by some distance the best-quality self-published book I’ve ever come across – French flaps and all! I would have appreciated the font being a little larger, as it is quite tiny, but it was certainly readable. If you’d like to read it yourself, you can get hold of it from Chris Lee-Francis’s website.

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams – #ABookADayInMay Day 22

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Careless People

Today I finished the audiobook of Careless People (2025), the recent memoir-exposé by Sarah Wynn-Williams about her time at Facebook. After a chapter about surviving a shark attack as a child, seemingly only included because how could you not mention something like that, we whizz forward to her petitioning Facebook for a role in policy and politics. The only problem is that neither the role nor the department exists. And yet, eventually, they are worn down – or at least see why the role should exist.

And what follows is a terrifying look at how Facebook runs. I’m only writing a short post today, because it’s late and I just got back home after going to Bristol to watch The Room, but a quick mention of some of its contents is chilling enough. Sexual harassment goes unchallenged (and, indeed, Wynn-Williams seems to have been fired partly for raising it); Cheryl Sandberg insists on assistants sharing a bed with her; Chinese Government’s human rights violations are accepted as a pesky necessity; Facebook lies under oath to Congress; Mark Zuckerberg barely cares when his employees are imprisoned for following his advice; a convulsing and bleeding employee is ignored by her manager and others around them because they are ‘too busy’.

None of us will have believed that Facebook was a force for good – it’s been clear since The Social Network and before that Mark Zuckerberg et al are ruthless, immoral, and selfish. But what Careless People exposes so well is exactly what the title (quoting The Great Gatsby) says: they are careless. They simply do not care about the terrible impact they are having – whether on their subordinates at work, teenage girls being deliberately served ads for weight loss products when they delete selfies, or human rights activists whose data will be given to people who will violently quash them. They are careless. It’s a new example of the banality of evil.

Sarah Wynn-Williams comes out of the book extremely well – so well that you have to conclude she is editorialising. I don’t doubt that the people around her were awful (she is even chastised for not responding quickly to work emails – while on maternity leave and in a coma) but I suspect she is not quite the tireless ambassador for morality that she suggests. It’s never quite clear why she takes so long to leave after she is disillusioned about the company – she mentions health insurance, but other companies have health insurance. Facebook/Meta are, of course, trying to tar her and say the book is all lies. I expect it is all truth, where they’re concerned. And this is just from one woman’s access to information – who knows what else they are hiding.

It’s a page-turner (or whatever the audiobook equivalent is) of a book, well-paced and unsparing. If you can cope with the info, since we all know that immoral powerful people are seldom likely to be held to account, then I recommend it.

#ABookADayInMay: Days 14,15,16

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Playing catch up with some quick thoughts about three books – one of which was excellent, one of which was very good, and one of which is absolutely not my cup of tea.

Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops : Robey, Tim: Amazon.co.uk: Books

Day 14 – Box Office Poison (2024) by Tim Robey

I downloaded the audiobook after a mention by Marina Hyde on The Rest is Entertainment podcast, I believe, and very much enjoyed Robey’s forensic look at big movie flops over the past hundred or so years of cinema, chronologically. The criteria was solely financial – meaning some notorious ‘flops’ like Waterworld don’t get in (because it actually broke even) and critical mauling isn’t sufficient, if the film did well. And, indeed, some of these flops were actually decent films, ably defended by Robey.

I’ve only seen one of the films that gets a chapter – the truly unbearable Cats. That’s probably largely because big blockbusters don’t appeal to me, and the sort of films I like were never going to have £100m to lose. But it didn’t matter – I loved delving through the decisions that led to each failure, the unjustfiably crucified ones, the very justifiably crucified ones, and the aftermath and legacies for those involved. Robey has clearly devoted his working life to this world and is hugely knowledgable, as well as having a diverse and non-snobbish taste, and I ended Box Office Poison feeling curiously more affectionate for the medium as a whole.

The Trouble With Sunbathers eBook : Mills, Magnus: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

Day 15 – The Trouble With Sunbathers (2020) by Magnus Mills

Are there other examples of well-regarded novelists – shortlisted for the Booker, no less – who leave mainstream publishing and start self-publishing? I don’t know for sure, but I’d be surprised if Mills were forced out from traditional publishing. His final book from Bloomsbury, the excellent and unnerving The Forensic Records Society, got a lavish edition in 2017. But, from 2020, he has been doing his own thing – and The Trouble With Sunbathers was his second self-published novel.

It is very recognisably Mills, and I mean that as a compliment. We are in a world that is both recognisable and surreal, and we can’t quite put our finger on what makes it surreal. The premise is certainly unusual: America has bought the UK and turned it into a National Park. Almost all the population have moved to the coastline, where they sunbathe 24/7, and there are various gates to let people into the non-coastal UK – gates which are supposed to be always open, but still have gatekeepers. The narrator, alongside his friend Rupert, performs this function.

Rupert and I had done quite well out of ‘the purchase’ (as it was known at the time). We were in charge of the western gate and enjoyed all the benefits that went with the job. The four main gates had been inaugurated on the day Great Britain was officially declared a national park. They were elaborate structures of wrought iron and looked rather imposing when they were closed. Their purpose, nonetheless, was largely symbolic. The park was supposed to be open to anyone who wished to visit, and it followed that the gates should likewise remain open at all times. It so happened that the gates were fitted with locks, but there were no keys because keys weren’t required. The gates stood open on a permanent basis and it was the role of the gatekeepers to greet people as they passed through. Or at least give them a friendly nod. It was undemanding work, but Rupert and I performed our duties without complaint.

Of course, things do not remain that simple. They start to get visitors from higher authorities, and there are rumours of an important visit from the US. There is mysterious vandalism, and some experimentation with closing the gate for periods of time. The stakes are somehow very low and very high simultaneously – because the reader doesn’t truly know the ‘code’ of this world, or what might signify a crisis.

Mills has such an individual worldview, and I can’t think of any who are imitating his approach, let alone imitating it well. The prose is sparse and plain, but he gets such extraordinary mystery into it – even scenes that, on the surface, seem resolutely ordinary. I love all his books, and The Trouble With Sunbathers is absolutely as good as anything else he’s written – and, judging by titles alone, it looks like there are a couple of sequels.

Mills may not get the attention that he used to from critics, and I doubt these books are being shelves in Waterstones any more, but he is on top form – and I think there’s a strong argument that he’s one of the best, and certainly one of the most distinctive, writers alive today.

I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest with You: From bestselling author and the nation's favourite comedian: Amazon.co.uk: Hart, Miranda: 9781405958332: ...

Day 16 – I Haven’t Been Completely Honest With You (2024) by Miranda Hart

I enjoy Miranda Hart’s brand of middle-class, silly enthusiasm (I can’t call it schtick because it’s totally genuine) and I thought a memoir about her decade-long experience of ME-like symptoms from Lyme disease would be a good mix of poignant, educational and amusing (because a good comic writer can make anything amusing). It was those things, but it was mostly a self-help book – a genre I find incredibly trying. This one wasn’t really for me.

Rabbit Foot Bill by Helen Humphreys – #ABookADayInMay Day 12

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When I was in Canada a couple of years ago, I was on the hunt for Canadian writers – but with the proviso that I wanted them to be writing about Canada. On the plane on the way home, I read one of my new purchases: Helen Humphreys’ brilliant memoir about her late brother, Nocturne. But I wasn’t particularly interested in reading her best-known novels, as they were set in the UK, and that wouldn’t quite scratch my Canadophile itch.

Thankfully, Debra very kindly stepped up! She posted Rabbit Foot Bill (2020) across the ocean to me – a novel by Humphreys that is firmly placed in Canada. Saskatchewan, to be precise.

The novel opens in 1947. The narrator is 12-year-old Leonard Flint – a misfit in his community, bullied at school and without any friends. Except for one: Rabbit Foot Bill.

The reasons why people don’t like my being friends with Bill are these: first, because he is a man and I am a twelve-year-old boy; and second, because he is a man who is not like other men. He doesn’t talk much. He doesn’t live in a house. He doesn’t have a real job. He doesn’t have a family. People say he’s slow, but as I’ve already said, I have to run to keep up with him.

Rabbit Foot Bill has his nickname from one of his ways of earning money: he kills and cleans rabbits, then sells their feet for good luck. Leonard has amassed six of them from his friend, for free. There is a real friendship between the two of them, though it is unusual – more a sympathy of souls than anything based on conversation or even shared activities. Somehow, proximity between them is enough. There is no suggestion of anything sordid. They simply enliven each other, in a calm, undemonstrative way.

This all changes one day when there is a shocking, sudden murder. And there ends the first section.

We fast forward to 1959 and Leonard is now a young doctor, starting working at a psychiatric hospital. Many of the patients have lived there for decades, and some have even been born in this place. One of the staff estimates that half of the patients (who are more or less inmates) have no real mental health problems, but have become so conditioned by their surroundings that they would struggle to survive outside of the hospital anyway. Leonard’s job is to help the men get work and get used to the outside world, as well as monitoring them from a medical perspective.

And who should one of the patients be, but… Rabbit Foot Bill. Leonard is shocked, but perhaps the reader isn’t. They stumble back towards a form of friendship. Bill doesn’t seem to remember much of his life before penitentiary, which has clearly been torture, often literally. Leonard doesn’t quite know how to relate to this man who is his patient but was also a sort of silent mentor. Humphreys does this beautifully. She is so good at the strange nuances of their relationship, often deeply moving even when you aren’t exactly sure why.

I think there are moments when the human soul is visible, and what I was seeing when I looked over the side of the bed at Bill curled up on the floor, was a glimpse of his soul. And what is a soul? Something between the inherent nature of an individual, and their desires – a tangible truth and a reaching, all bound up together. Like the movement of the rabbit in flight, how it runs so fast that its feet don’t touch the ground.

You can see that Leonard is not your stereotypical doctor. And, indeed, he struggles in his role. There is little guidance and he is left to his own devices – and his own devices repeatedly take him back to Rabbit Foot Bill. It means that he scarcely gets to know the other patients, and he feels like an inconvenience whenever he does approach them. Humphreys is very good at conveying the feeling of being useless and unsure in a workplace, which perhaps many of us have experienced in different workplaces. She is great at uncertainty in general.

Uncertainty develops more and more, particularly as Leonard revisits the unhappiness of his childhood. There is no rug-pulled-out-from-under-our-feet moment – simply the gradual unravelling of a complex life, without the chance of firm conclusions. It’s all written in spare prose that felt tonally very different from Nocturne, and initially I wasn’t sure what I thought of it – but it wasn’t long until I was totally captivated. Humphreys doesn’t put a foot wrong in character, tone or style.

There are a couple of sub-plots I haven’t mentioned – one is Leonard’s affair with his boss’s wife (the unforgivably named Agatha Christiansen); the other, more substantial, is experiments with LSD as an attempt to cure patients. The doctors dose themselves to a lesser amount, in the name of science, and this was an interesting element of the novel – Humphreys does the near-impossible of narrating a drug trip without becoming tedious – though I’m not sure it entirely cohered with the main story.

What makes Rabbit Foot Bill succeed so well is Humphreys’ control of voice and the restraint she shows in almost everything – it’s a subtle novel, even with its shocking moments, and she keeps steady reins on everything she includes. It will stay with me, and I’d love to know if any other of her novels are set in Canada. I’d snap them up.

Alison by Lizzy Stewart – #ABookADayInMay Day 8

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It’s been quite a while since I read a graphic novel, and A Book A Day In May seemed like an excellent opportunity to remedy that. I bought Alison (2022) by Lizzy Stewart last year, on the basis of having seen it mentioned on various blogs and Instagram accounts. And also because I was in the lovely Caper bookshop in Oxford, and I don’t feel I can leave there empty handed.

The Alison of the title is Alison Porter, our narrator. In the opening pages, she tells us that she was born in 1958 in Bridport, Dorset – a town, incidentally, that some of my relatives live in. At 18, she marries a local boy a handful of years older than her. “He was nice. I was fast-tracking my route to an ordinary life. It made sense; an ordinary life seemed like the right thing to do.”

Before long, a much older man called Patrick meets her – and woos her away from her short-lived marriage.

I loved Patrick Kerr as a trapdoor out of my life long before I found I could love him as a man.

She has only experienced provincial mundanity. He represents bohemia, London, art – and she is swept away. But even in Stewart’s first illustrations of Patrick, he seems creepy – almost vampiric. We suspect long before Alison does that this will not be a happy ending.

Patrick affects to encourage Alison’s art, while also using her as a model for his own paintings, but he doesn’t seem to want her to have her own artistic voice. He insists on hours a day of drawing practice, trying to turn her into an imitator of his own style. Disillusionment seeps into Alison’s mindset. But she is encouraged and enheartened by a friend she makes – Tessa, a young Black sculptor. She is the only true friend that Alison meets in the maelstrom of artists who gather around Patrick and (deliberately or otherwise) make her feel ignorant, wrongly dressed, and inadequate.

Alison doesn’t end at the disillusion there. It covers many years, and it’s really about finding and flourishing in your own identity – though remaining clear-eyed. Her self-discovery doesn’t prevent her having problems, whether that be detachment from her parents or tragedies that befall people she loves. It is a very honest book – so realistic that I had to look people up to see if they were real (which they are not).

In a graphic novel more than anywhere else, the medium and presentation are fundamental. For the most part, Stewart uses simple line-drawings with (I think) watercolours that are somewhere between sepia and grey. You can see some examples in the Guardian review. There are pages of many frames, where they hold a conversation. Others have chunks of first person text alongside the drawings, and these are written in a beguiling manner with enough psychological depth to lend weight to the overall story. And then some spreads in the book are wholly illustration, and the only moments of colour in the book; in these, Stewart has more opportunity to play with style and format. It all works together very well.

I found Alison a moving graphic novel, dodging some platitudes and cliches even while telling a familiar story – the naive woman who is taken advantage of by a powerful man, and creativity that has to force its way through conventions. My only query is why the cover art is chosen – so different from the style found inside. Why wouldn’t they have used one of the many illustrations of Alison herself?

Anyway, I very much enjoyed the experience, and I won’t leave it so long before I pick up a graphic novel again.

Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul

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I first came across Letters to Gwen John by Celia Paul simply by browsing in Waterstones Piccadilly. It was on one of those display tables, and I was struck by how beautiful it was. Jonathan Cape have done a lovely job. It’s a chunky hardback with thick paper, and a striking photograph on the front from Celia Paul’s studio. Everything about it feels luxurious and artistic and interesting – but I didn’t know anything about Celia Paul or Gwen John, and so I felt I couldn’t indulge.

A few blog posts and instagram posts and whatnot later, it was firmly on my wishlist. My friend Clare bought it for my most recent birthday – and it was the perfect book to read in the period between Christmas and New Year. I absolutely loved it.

If, like me, you’re not familiar with Paul or John – Gwen John was an artist who lived 1876-1939. She grew up in Wales and later studied at the Slade School of Art, becoming one of the foremost female artists of her generation – indeed, many would argue simply one of the foremost artists.

Celia Paul, meanwhile, is an artist who is still painting today. She grew up in a vicarage and, like John, studied at the Slade School of Art and is (according to her author blurb) ‘recognised as one of the most important painters working in Britain today’. Importantly, she was born twenty years after Gwen John died – and so Letters to Gwen John is not a collection of letters as we might be most familiar with the concept. Rather, Paul is writing to a kindred spirit who will never read the letters or write back. It is an imagined sisterhood between women with a great amount in common.

Besides their profession, there is a significant commonality that Paul writes a lot about in this book: both women were associated with more famous, male artists. Gwen John’s brother, Augustus John, seems to have been very supportive – and she was in a relationship with (and model for) Auguste Rodin, who was 35 years older than her. Paul, meanwhile, had a ten-year relationship and a son with Lucian Freud – starting when she was 18 and he was in his mid-50s. This is not overtly a ‘me too’ story from Paul, but it’s hard to imagine any sexual relationship between an 18-year-old and a 55-year-old that doesn’t have, at the very least, a severe power imbalance.

Paul doesn’t shy away from the non-painting elements of their lives. Or, rather, much Letters to Gwen John explores how these preoccupations and the demands of powerful men can interfere with the main purpose of your life: your art. There is something both refreshing and shocking about the way she is clear that nothing – including her son – is allowed to interefere with her art. The brutality of her determination shouldn’t feel any more shocking because she is a woman – Lucian Freud certainly didn’t let paternity interfere with his work – except that she also fixates on the maternal guilt she feels.

I devoted myself to him at these times. I think he might have preferred it if I had been less intense and more casual, like the other mums he observed when he went round to friends’ houses, who spent a lot of time speaking on the phone or were preoccupied with housework. I didn’t spend much time on either of those things. My mother mostly shopped and cooked for us all. Generally the mothers of his friends didn’t leave home to go to work. Most of them didn’t work. I felt ashamed of my ambition, and I felt ashamed to be a single mum, I was ashamed of being younger than them. I couldn’t explain to most of them what my work involved. When I told one of them that I was a painter, she said, ‘That must be very relaxing.’ I know you were indignant when people reacted to your work with similar incomprehension. I didn’t feel indignant; again, I felt only shame. How could I excuse myself by saying that I often lay curled up on the floor of my studio, just thinking and planning and trying to quiet my soul, until I was focused enough to start work?

I appreciated the total honesty with which Paul writes. It felt genuinely like letters to a friend – letters that expose the soul, that are stumbling towards a philosophy. She exposes her self and her decisions with a mix of determination and uncertainty. Paul is sure that her art has been worth sacrificing everything to – and yet, simultaneously, unable to escape guilt. As she writes of John, in the sections between letters that are more exploratory biography: ‘Despite her apparent timidity, Gwen was always certain of her talent.’

This is the personal side of Letters to Gwen John – but what made me love the book so much was the way John treats her writing as the meeting of minds. There is so much about the artistic process in here – about the choices that can make or break a painting; about the rationale behind decisions and what composition or colouring are intended to convey. She writes often of the fear of ‘killing’ a painting, or of a painting ‘coming to life’. I loved how she combined very practical concerns – the exact paint colours she uses, and the techniques – with something much more nebulous.

I mixed Prussian Blue, Chrome Green, Vandyck Brown, Payne’s Grey and Brilliant Yellow and spread it in a thin layer across my willow tree. It already suggested water. But then I started to feel haunted by the loss of my tree, and I scraped off the grey layer of paint with this scraper that I’d bought from a hardware shop. It left horizontal lines across the image, suggestive of water, and my willow appeared like a ghostly reflection. I thought maybe I’d discovered a mystical new interpretation to a way of painting. I want to do more paintings of reflections in water. I thought I needed to intensify the gleaming highlights of the watery streaks across the tree. I couldn’t leave it alone, and I fear I may have killed it. It took all my courage to take it off the easel and place it, stretcher side out, against the wall. I’ll look at it again after a while.

One of the most special things about the luxury of this book is how many paintings – both by Paul and John – are reproduced. Often they are placed next to each other in a way that feels like a conversation between images. Paul’s self-portrait by John’s, for instance, or two domestic interiors. More paintings are discussed than included, unsurprisingly, so I did turn to Google images often – but it’s wonderful to have so many of the paintings that Paul writes about available to see in between chapters.

I enjoy painting sometimes but am certainly not an artist – yet I loved this glimpse into an imagined community, a sorority of artists who have had to battle forces external and internal – and who remained totally committed to their integrity and purpose as creative artists. Paul writes beautifully (annoyingly well for someone who is only latterly a writer!) and Letters to Gwen John is a special gem of a book.

A Body Made of Glass by Caroline Crampton – #ABookADayInMay Day 11

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A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria

When I was shopping in Blackwells bookshop last weekend, I saw A Body Made of Glass (2024) by Caroline Crampton on a display table and was very intrigued. As the month had rolled over, I had my 15 hours of audiobook listening time renewed on Spotify – and during the week, I spent 9.5 of those hours on Crampton’s excellent book.

A Body Made of Glass is subtitled ‘A History of Hypochondria’ and it’s in a genre that I really appreciate – non-fiction that merges historical research with personal memoir. Crampton is self-professedly a hypochondriac, which is also called (or at least strongly overlaps with) health anxiety. It is recognised in a couple of different variants by modern medical reference books and likely to be taken more seriously by doctors than it would have been a while ago – depending, as Crampton discusses, on your gender, race and class.

So what is hypochondria? It’s one of the questions Crampton poses and explores at length, and there isn’t a simple answer. It may vary between people, but the main things are hypervigilance about symptoms, and extreme anxiety about them. It may manifest as a lot of googling and fixation on possible illnesses, including genuinely developing symptoms that you are concerned about. It often includes medically unexplained symptoms – tests will show the all-clear, but that might not allay the anxiety. The hypochondriac is likely to fear that something has simply been missed,

Crampton’s own medical history can partly explain her anxiety. She had cancer as a teenager, and had to start chemotherapy at a time when most teenagers are concerned with far more trivial matters. As she explains, it means her fear about symptoms is always taken seriously. She gets rushed into tests that others might have to fight hard to get on a waiting list for. But it also means she knows her health is not guaranteed. She knows the truth of the hypochondriac’s fear that this time the slight twinge could be the first signs of something drastic.

But, at the same time, she knows her anxieties are not an accurate representation of reality. She has the brilliant line: “I become an unreliable narrator of my own body.” But how else to judge something as subjective as health? Especially when it comes to the complex, unclear tapestry of the interplay of mental and physical health.

A Body Made of Glass is not exclusively a memoir, though. Often Crampton uses her own experiences to set the tone of a chapter, returning to it when apt – but this is a work of history. The title refers to one form of historical hypochondria – people who believed that their bodies had become glass. King Charles VI of France was one of the most famous sufferers from this delusion. Victims of it would be terrified of touching other people, lest they splinter – or would sit on piles of cushions to avoid breaking. It’s interesting to see how the particular manifestations of hypochondria have changed over times – strongly influenced by the culture. People didn’t have this glass delusion before glass became a common household item. Fast forward centuries – there was a spate of people developing the ‘tic’ symptoms of Tourette’s after TikTok videos about the illness became extremely popular during the pandemic.

Crampton goes right back to Hippocrates, and has done a brilliant amount of research into different theories of health over time, and about how hypochondriacs were treated. To pick a handful – there was the period where the womb was believed to travel around the body, causing mischief. At another time, physicians believed the nose was a microcosm of the body, and treating part of the nose would heal the relevant part of body. She traces the way treatments have been sold and mis-sold over time – from quacks deliberating fooling 17th-century London society to the way in which placebos can be used in genuine medical treatment.

It’s a really brilliant combination. The deep history comes mostly in the first half, interspersed with Crampton’s own experiences. As the book continues, it becomes more philosophical – while tethering discussions about how you diagnose illnesses and how you consider the ‘reality’ of symptoms to the concrete world of the GP’s office. It is a book with a lot of heart and care for people with health anxiety, and a subtle clarion call for them to be respected.

This is one of the reasons I so appreciated A Body Made of Glass. Hypochondriacs – particularly in popular culture – are so often mocked and derided. Think Mr Woodhouse in Emma. His fears about health make him a sweet but tiresome figure of fun. There’s no real consideration about how these anxieties weigh on him. Hypochondriacs are often portrayed as ‘doing it for attention’, or dismissed simply as making things up. I saw so much of myself in what Crampton writes, and it was really encouraging and refreshing to feel seen and understood.

Crampton gives sufferers from health anxiety the dignity and voice they/we deserve. The autobiographical sections were the ones I most liked, but it is overall a well-measured balance of the subjective and objective. It’s an absolutely fascinating, brilliantly written book – and I hope many doctors are among those who read it.

Days 9 and 10 of #ABookADayInMay

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Some super quick thoughts about two days of books! Both are books I finished, but did not start, on the respective days.

The Thursday Murder Club (2020) by Richard Osman

What is there to say about this extremely popular novel that hasn’t already been said? Its the first in a series of cosy(?) crime novels set in an old people’s home – Osman says he was inspired by seeing his mother in a similar home, and recognising how older people could observe and deduce while being underestimated by everyone around them.

The best thing about this novel is definitely the characters. Elizabeth used to be in the police, and is now a wise, sharp, kind retiree. Her friend Joyce is less confident of her cleverness and a bit fluffy, but every bit as sharp in her own way. There are several other people in the Thursday Murder Club (the group who gather to solve cold cases in their spare time, not expecting anyone to take notice) but they are the best two.

I will say that the murder plot itself isn’t very good. The red herrings are too red and too complex. Without spoiling the end, there’s really not much reason why it’s that solution over any other – it would be equally convincing if he’d picked someone else at random. One of the brilliant things about someone like Agatha Christie is that the eventual solution, though a surprise, is satisfying: it’s the only one it could have been, you suddenly realise. That’s absolutely not the case with The Thursday Murder Club.

But it works because of those characters, and because of Osman’s warm, funny writing. There were more genuine villains than I was expecting, and perhaps the wider cast isn’t as cosy as I’d imagined, but it was really enjoyable for all that. I’m not sure I’ll necessarily read another, but it’s certainly much better than other books which have runaway bestsellers.

Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (1942) by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough

I read this years ago and was all set to link to my review, but apparently I never wrote one? Which is a shame, because it is an absolutely brilliant, hilarious memoir that I have just reread – or relistened to, as part of Audible’s free ‘Plus’ catalogue. It tells of Cornelia and Emily travelling to Europe during the 1920s when they were both young and naive. With a couple of decades’ hindsight, they are willing and able to poke an awful lot of fun at themselves. The people they meet may come in for a joke or too, but it is chiefly self-deprecating – and they are brilliant at self-deprecating humour. They also have a brilliant turn of phrase which, since I listened to it, I haven’t noted down. You’ll have to take my word for it.

Along the way, they have disastrous moments – Cornelia catching measles on the boat across the Atlanic and having to cloak her face to get through customs, for instance, or accidentally staying at a brothel under the delusion that it was recommended for Young American Women Abroad. Incident after incident is described with liveliness. Some are genuinely unusual or embarrassing moments. Others are rather more normal, but feel special because of the way they’re described. Some, I suspect, have been exaggerated out of recognition. I forgive every exaggeration and deception, because I love the book so much.

Reading this in 2011 or so set me off reading everything else I could by the pair, particularly Cornelia Otis Skinner’s comic essays. There’s a lot to love, but nothing will equal Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. It is suffused with nostalgia for a period that was clearly exciting and uncomplicated for the two – and it is also suffused with a friendship that has clearly lasted many, many years. It’s a special book and I can’t recommend it enough.

How To Be Multiple by Helena de Bres

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When I discovered there was a new collection of essays out about the philosophy of twins, and that it was written by an identical twin, I couldn’t resist. Having tweeted my excitement, Manchester University Press kindly sent me a review copy – it’s been out in the US for a while (published on my and my twin’s birthday!) and is just out in the UK now.

You may well know that I have an identical twin, and that relationship is the most important one in my life. Of all the things I’m grateful for in my life so far, having the good fortune to be born a twin is right up near the top – I still can’t quite get my head around the idea of having a sibling who is a different age to you. Must be weird, huh?

I’m not sure I’d have raced towards a collection of twin essays written by a singleton, but I had confidence that I’d be in safe hands with another identical twin – and these aren’t objective essays written solely with academic philosophy in mind (though Helena de Bres is a professor of philosophy at Wellesley College, a liberal arts college in America). She draws deeply on her relationship with her own twin sister, Julia, who also illustrates the beginning of each chapter.

But what makes How To Be Multiple so interesting to me is that it goes beyond the twin’s point of view: this is about what twins tell us about identity in general. That comes across in the five chapter titles: ‘Which one are you?’, ‘How many of you are there?’, ‘Are you two in love?’, ‘How free are you?’ and ‘What are you for?’. It’s also about how the singleton’s gaze informs the ways in which twins are perceived and discussed.

So many of our cultural ideas about twins are driven by the perspectives and priorities of singletons. Given the numbers, maybe that’s inevitable, but it’s an unfortunate restriction on humanity’s intellectual resources. […] When twins aren’t treated as indistinguishable, they’re often cast as binary opposites, on one or more axes. One twin’s the Chaos Muppet, for instance, the other the Order Muppet; one’s the empath, the other the narcissist; one’s the tomboy, the other the femme. This tendency to binarize twins is rife in individual families, and in myth, art, and culture across the board.

Yes, Helena! The first chapter is largely about this binarising, and our broader human desires to define ourselves in opposition to other things – and to understand other people partly by understanding what they are not. The complexity and clever arguing of her chapters is too detailed to reproduce here, so I’m only going to be able to hint at the contents – but de Bres does a brilliant job in this first chapter at demonstrating how many of our anxieties about identity are crystallised in the way we treat twins. And by ‘we’ I mean, of course, ‘you’. Unless you’re a twin.

I’m going to slip little bits of twin autobiography into this post; hope that’s ok. Because I’ve certainly found that people fixate on the personality/interests differences between Colin and me, and make them loom larger than they do – and I’ve done the same thing myself as I’ve grown up. One studied English at university and one studied Maths? One loves football and one hates it? One is vegetarian and one chooses pizzas based on ‘what has the most meat on it’? There are definitely areas where we are miles apart – but far more where we overlap, without comment.

One way to see the widespread tendency to binarize twins, then, is as a panic response, a knee-jerk defense to the social, moral, and existential threat they pose. Twins remind us, consciously or not, of how frail human identity-detectors can be, and therefore how slippery our associates and our own selves might be. Tagging twins as binary opposites is a way of corralling their disturbingly similar bodies and minds into easily distinguishable ends of the psychosocial field. The lack of subtlety is the point.

The differences between me and Col seemed big to me as I was developing and maturing because I wanted to find areas where I could distinguish myself. But the reason they seem significant to singletons is, I think, because singletons expect twins to be exactly the same. When people have the childhood fantasy ‘what if I had a twin?’, I imagine they are thinking of themselves multiplied by two. When they encounter traits that challenge the one-person-doubled hypothesis, this vision is undermined. In order to cope with this disruption of the fantasy, these differences are magnified into opposites. Good twin / evil twin being the nadir of this particular way of thinking.

This persistent tendency to binarize twins is striking, especially in light of the exactly opposite companion tendency to portray twins as highly similar.

Try thinking of the twins you read about in literature – and identical twins feature far more frequently in literature than we do in real life. They probably fit this line adeptly, and only occasionally does someone do it brilliantly. The greatest example is Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker, at least from the books I’ve read.

More unsettlingly, it is strange how often authors include ‘twincest’ in their books, and this is something de Bres mentions in the chapter ‘Are you two in love?’ I’ve read some very good novels that include twins having sex, but (a) it doesn’t happen in reality any more often than any other two siblings – which is to say hardly ever at all – and (b) it says so much about the way Western writers conceive of closeness. Two people have a closer relationship than most have experienced? The only paradigm for expressing it is romantic or sexual. It shows a great limitation on the capacity of people to comprehend the wide range of love.

At this point, I’ve realised that all the quotes I noted down are in the first chapter – which perhaps did have the pithiest bits to excerpt, but the other chapters were equally interesting. The second looks at ‘how many of you are there?’ – coming from the idea that identical twins are one egg split in two, so have some claim to being one person. De Bres also looks at the experiences of conjoined twins, and the way that all twins seem to threaten the concept of individuality a little. No, there are no proven examples of twins mind reading (though some conjoined twins can apparently see out of each other’s eyes) – but twins do offer some counterpoint to the idea of people as unique identities.

I was a little sceptical about this chapter at first. One of the very few times that de Bres’s philosophising got a little too abstract and scholarly for a layman like me to understand was when she writes about theorists who believe all humans may externalise some of our mental processing, thus (?) having our brains outside our body in calculators, computers, and even other people. It was getting a bit high-falutin’ for me. Surely nobody thinks two twins are fewer than two people?

But then I thought about last year. More autobiography here. I started getting strange neurological symptoms in my feet and hands. A few months later, Colin started getting the same symptoms. Long waiting lists later, it turns out we are thankfully both ok – but there was a period when we were both quite worried about more serious neurological issues. And I cannot tell you how strange it is to simultaneously worry about yourself and the person you love most, waiting to see if our shared DNA has the same trapdoor in it. It is the nearest I have come to questioning my individuality – when my body and its possible flaws are both me and not-me. (As it happens, Helena and Julia de Bres both have a connective tissue disorder, and much of How To Be Multiple also considers life as a disabled person – as disabled people – and particularly how that identity is partly shaped by other people’s perspectives. It’s also interesting on the ways the disability differently affects Helena and Julia, and what that is like for them.)

I enjoyed the whole collection a great deal, though the final two chapters perhaps a bit less than the others. ‘How free are you?’ looks at the fact that twins separated at birth often find, when reunited, that they have followed similar paths. Reports of such things always highlight curious similarities – they both walk into the sea backwards! they married women with the same name! – but, of course, you could find any two random people and they’d have a handful of odd coincidences. But twins (whether identical or non-identical, raised together or apart) are fodder for nature/nurture debates and always have been. This essay is interesting, but it re-treads familiar ground. If you’ve ever considered free will vs fate, or nature vs nurture, then this chapter isn’t particularly ground-breaking – and certainly felt like it had the least personal content about Helena and Julia’s lives, which is the strong through-line of How To Be Multiple. And I have to admit that the final essay, ‘What are you for?’, felt quite like a miscellany for various other philosophical ideas that Helena de Bres had that didn’t fit into other chapters. The only other criticism I wanted to mention is that de Bres is a bit lazy in her assumption that her readers will all be atheists, or in suggesting (even flippantly) that nobody believes in God anymore. It feels like quite a Western-centric view, ignoring the huge numbers of the Global South who have theistic faith – and, of course, plenty in the Global North too. Indeed, only 15.6% of the world describe themselves as non-religious. Maybe all academic philosophers come from that percentage, but I suspect not.

But I certainly won’t end on a negative note, because I loved this book. I enjoyed feeling chimes of recognition in what de Bres writes. ‘For the first few years of elementary school,’ she writes, ‘Julia and I wore our initials pinned to our clothes’ – snap! Colin and I had ours stitched onto the front of our pullovers for the first few years of primary school. More trivially, we were also due to be born around Christmas, and were in fact born more than a month earlier. And I had to message Colin my favourite line in the book, which I absolutely agree with: “We had the standard twin view about triplets, quads, and other ‘supertwins’, which is that they take a good idea and overdo it.”

More generally, there are constant touchstones for what it is like to be a twin. I’ve only been an identical twin for about a decade – well, that is to say, I have only known I was an identical twin for about a decade, after almost 30 years believing I was a non-identical twin. It’s an interesting divide, in terms of having slightly different philosophical experiences of twinship and identity. But I’ve never been a singleton, and I feel so seen and understood by How To Be Multiple, as well as realising new things about my experience of the world – and other people’s experience of me as a twin.

De Bres weaves in philosophical understanding so fluidly, and balances autobiography and objective analysis perfectly. It’s quite a fun and funny book, aimed at a non-academic audience more interested in anecdotes than footnotes (though there are plenty of endnotes for people wanting to explore more). I would particularly recommend it to a twin – but, then, I would also particularly recommend it to a singleton. Because you might get a bit more of a glimpse into what twinship is like – and also be a little less likely to ask the same questions that every singleton asks when they discover you’re a twin. I suppose the only people I wouldn’t recommend How To Be Multiple to are triplets. You guys need to calm down.