2020s

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.

The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

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The Dictionary of Lost Words: Amazon.co.uk: Williams, Pip: 9780593160190: Books

I go to my village book group because I enjoy discussing books and getting to know people. I don’t particularly expect to enjoy the novels. It leans much more modern than my taste, and often towards the sort of historical fiction or issue-driven novel that are relatively well written and not (to me) at all interesting. They probably won’t be remembered in a decade’s time, and they’re often written in a very similar style.

Well, I’m more than happy to say that The Dictionary of Lost Words (2020) by Pip Williams is a pleasant exception to my rule. Yes, it’s historical fiction. Yes, it’s new(ish). And to be honest, yes, it probably isn’t going to enter any sort of canon – but I really enjoyed it. All 400+ pages of it, and we all know how I feel about books over 300 pages.

It helps that Williams is writing about a world I have known well. As the book opens, Esme is the daughter of a widowed man who works on the embryonic Oxford English Dictionary. He works under Dr James Murray, sorting slips of paper with quotations illustrating words. Each of these slips, stored in specially designed shelves in the Scriptorium, will contribute to evidence of how a word is used. Eventually, of course, every single word will be included in Murray’s ambitious OED.

The reason this is familiar to me is that I used to work for Oxford Dictionaries. I was in the marketing department, running a now-sadly-deleted blog about language, but we were all steeped in the lore of Murray and the origins of the dictionary. Williams has clearly researched all of this well, and I understand that one of my ex-colleagues was a consultant on the novel, making sure that it is a broadly accurate depiction of the early days of the dictionary.

But this is not a work of non-fiction, and so of course a lot is invented – not least Esme herself. As a young child, she is fascinated by what her dad is doing. The slips of paper have a special lure for her – and she can’t help but take one slip, for ‘bondmaid’, when it falls onto the floor. Bondmaid was, indeed, a word missing from the first edition of the OED. Williams’ suggested reason is fanciful, but I enjoyed the possibility.

It was a word, and it slipped off the end of the table. When it lands, I thought, I’ll rescue it, and hand it to Dr Murray myself.

I watched it. For a thousand moments I watched it ride some unseen current of air. I expect it to land on the unswept floor, but it didn’t. It glided like a bird, almost landing, then rose up to somersault as if bidden by a genie. I never imagined that it might land in my lap, that it could possibly travel so far. But it did.

[…]

I held the word up to the light. Black ink on white paper. Eight letters; the first, a butterfly B. I moved my mouth around the rest as Da had taught me: O for orange, N for naughty, D for dog, M for Murray, A for apple, I for ink, D for dog, again. I sounded them out in a whisper. The first part was easy: bond. The second part took a little longer, but then I remembered how the A and I went together. Maid.

As Esme grows older, the dictionary remains a mainstay in her life – but she is also interested in the words that are not included. Quotations in the early OED are disproportionately drawn from books by men – partly, of course, that books were disproportionately written by men. They also often represent upper- and middle-class authors. Esme – living as close to the servants as she does to her societal ‘equals’ – becomes interested in the words that are used by women and by working-class women in particular. She convinces a servant to accompany her through Oxford’s Covered Market, listening to the words of stallholders, noting down what they say on her own set of slips. While spoken sentences don’t ‘count’ for the OED, she stores them in her own treasure chest. She compiles her own dictionary of lost words.

I enjoyed all this dictionary stuff because I am fascinated by the creation of the dictionary – and by language, and by words. But Williams knows that not all her readers will find this sufficiently interesting – and The Dictionary of Lost Words incorporates a great deal more. Being set around the turn of the 20th century and following Esme as she grows older, we see all manner of contemporary issues – particularly the suffrage movement, and later the First World War. At times it does feel like Williams is ticking off the key contemporary topics – Esme is mistreated at boarding school, visits wounded soldiers, she goes to suffragist events, she is a lens for Stopes-esque sexual discovery etc. etc. It all works well, but I do wonder if a novel a hundred pages shorter with slightly less incident would have been even better.

In Esme, Williams has created a sympathetic, intelligent, rounded character that it’s a pleasure to spend time with – particularly for any likeminded reader who shares her fascination with words. Some of Williams’ attempts to de-patriarchy the dictionary are far from treading new ground – I mean, I did an undergraduate thesis on the same topic – but there’s no denying that turning it into an engaging novel is likely to reach a much wider audience. There aren’t really any villains here either (bar one sniffy lexicographer who doesn’t want Esme near the Scriptorium) and it’s a refreshingly sincere, well-researched and often heart-rending look at a fascinating time in history.

Day by Michael Cunningham

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Cover image for Day by Micahel Cunningham

If you read my Top Books of 2023 or listened to the ‘Tea or Books?’ episode where Rachel and I shared our favourite reads, you’ll have already heard that I really loved Day by Michael Cunningham. It came out last year in N. America but has only just been released in the UK – so my review has gone live over at Shiny New Books.

Here’s a quote from the review – read the whole thing at Shiny New Books.

To the casual reader, Cunningham probably remains best-known for The Hours, with its three parallel storylines of Virginia Woolf writing Mrs Dalloway, a mid-century housewife reading Mrs Dalloway and a 1990s woman whose life very much resembles Mrs Dalloway’s. Day follows the theme of having a timespan in the title and taking place in three sections – though following the same group of 21st-century people. The first section takes place on the morning of 5 April, the middle section is the afternoon of 5 April, and the third section is the evening of 5 April. The twist on this idea is that the first part is 2019, the second is 2020, and the third is 2021. It’s the same day, but it is emphatically not the same day. This is, of course, Cunningham’s Covid novel.

Blight by Tom Carlisle

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Decorative image

One of the interesting and fun things about friends writing books is that they take you in all sorts of places you wouldn’t necessarily expect. Would I have picked up a novel described as folk horror if my friend Tom hadn’t written it? Probably not – but I thoroughly enjoyed Blight (2023) and was relieved that it lent more into gothic than horror. My tolerance for horror is very low and I wasn’t traumatised, so hurrah!

Set in 1883, James Harringley has been summoned back to the Yorkshire mansion he grew up in by his brother, Edward. They parted on bad terms and do not feel very brotherly to each other – but James is persuaded to return because of two things. One is his ailing father – the other, more importantly, is the groundkeeper’s missing baby. The family, and the village, are sure it’s connected to the horrifying tale of the Tall Man – a being that possesses a great void beneath the house, and demands human sacrifices.

You can imagine that I was a bit of a fish out of water with that premise, but what I liked most about the novel was the insight into family. The dynamic between the brothers is particularly well-observed, and work independently of the supernatural element. While they may talk about extraordinary things, there are the ordinary resentments of two brothers who no longer share a common belief system or set of priorities, and both feel judged by the other. (Interestingly, James has his own unconventional relationship back home – I would have liked more attention paid to that, to learn more about its progression and what day-to-day life was like.)

Edward spoke more quietly now, but his lip still twitched, as though at any second it might twist into a sneer. “That’s always been your problem,” he said bitterly. “You want to throw away our history. Everything that made this family who we are today.”

“Not throw it away. Just – examine it. Update our traditions, if need be.”

“Those aren’t the words of a man who believes in this family.”

“My God,” said James, unable to hide his exasperation, “would you listen to yourself? A family’s not a matter of faith – it’s here, no matter whether we believe in it.”

But of course the supernatural is there. We get hints very early, and I think the reader is asked to fairly quickly suspend any disbelief. This isn’t really a novel about trying to work out whether there are natural or fantastic explanations – rather, we are given the apparatus of the genre and left to get on with it from there. Since Tom Carlisle’s home-from-home is literary writing rather than the more schlocky edges of genre-writing, it is given with neat and precise turns of phrase. The writing isn’t trying to be opaque, but there were lovely little spins on sentences and dialogue – like the end of this section:

“You said they went away,” James said. “Went away where?”

“He took them to the pit,” said the man, swallowing hard. “Gave them to the void.”

“Who?” said James desperately, his curiosity a knot in his guts.

The man sucked on his teeth, thought for a moment. “He doesn’t have a name,” he said eventually. “Or else he has too many.”

I tend to be very scared by novels I think contain feasible threat. I won’t read about serial killers or home invasion or anything like that – but I naturally don’t believe any of the Thin Man mythology, and so was able to read the progressing horror without feeling too uneasy. A few paragraphs were a bit gory for my squeamishness, but I managed to skim through them.

The tension builds, and there are a series of climaxes that are paced very well – I don’t think I’ve a convert to the genre, necessarily, but I certainly enjoyed reading Blight. Anything with a strong investigation of family dynamics is likely to win me over, in whatever form it’s presented.

Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau by Sheena Wilkinson

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I mentioned Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau is a recent weekend miscellany, and I might have mentioned there that I tend to say no to offers of review copies nowadays. I realised years ago that I wanted to protect my reading time – making sure that I only read things I wanted to, rather than the hit-and-miss of review books. That’s particularly true when an author gets in touch themselves, because I’ve had a couple of not-so-nice experiences with that.

BUT rules are made to be broken – and when Sheena Wilkinson got in touch to ask if I would like a copy, I was very much tempted, and indeed said ‘yes please!’ It helped that she mentioned Dorothy Whipple in her email, and clearly knew my reading tastes well – unlike the press releases I get with ‘I love [your most recent post]; would you like an article about children’s playmats?’

I’m waffling. Let’s get onto the book. Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau is set in 1934 and the heroine is April McVey – she has come to England from Northern Ireland, intent on finding a career and not at all interested in marriage. She is a bundle of energy – and we first meet her when she is late for an interview to work at a marital bureau run by Martha Hart.

April rushed on. “I know I’m late. I got lost. My Aunt Kathleen said the hotel was just by the station, she said you couldn’t miss it, only I went to the wrong station.” She sounded close to tears though she faced Martha with a jaunty chin.

“I can see that would be easily done,” Martha said. “But, my dear, you’re three hours late.”

“Och, I know. But when I got here and I worked out you were you, if you know what I mean, I could see you were busy and I didn’t like to interrupt, so I waited till you were done. I never knew I could make a pot of tea last that long. It’s great the way they bring you fresh water, isn’t it, but I didn’t like to ask more than twice. And” – she lowered her voice – “it’s awful dear. You could get dinner for a family of six for that in Lisnacashan.”

It isn’t the last time we’ll hear about Lisnacashan (a made-up town) – April seems able to connect anything she sees with an experience or relative back in her hometown. April won me over instantly by her choice of reading material while she waited: ‘the new E.M. Delafield’. Naturally I had to get into the details and find out what the new E.M. Delafield was in 1934, and her only book that year was The Provincial Lady in America, so I can imagine April was having a lovely time.

Martha (middle-aged for the 1930s – i.e. younger than me) is a bit uncertain at first about hiring April as her assistant, but she is won over. There is certainly something winning about this talkative, slightly indiscreet, very well-meaning young woman. She combines competence with her chaotic energy, and is ready to give her all to matchmaking. (April tends to consider herself more of a partner in the company, and gives herself different job titles when explaining the work to others – she is technically solely an administrative assistant, but watch this space.)

Mrs Hart’s Marital Bureau (curiously a slightly different name from the title of the novel) has been running for a decade. In an era long before dating apps, this was one of the ways that people tried to find prospective partners – a step more discreet and customisable than putting an advert in a lonely hearts column. As Wilkinson notes at the end of the book, the first marriage bureau in the UK wasn’t licensed until 1939, but we can certainly forgive that anachronism. It’s a very entertaining and intriguing premise for a book.

April is a little shocked by the dated nature of Martha’s marriage bureau. She says the name will be off-putting (suggesting True Minds instead), and points out that the people on their books tend to be a little old and often left unmatched for a long time. People are combined simply because there aren’t enormous numbers of locals who want the services of a marriage bureau, and there are far more women than men – partly, of course, because the legacy of the First World War meant there were more women than men in the general population. The bureau has had a fair amount of success, and Martha treasures the stories of couples who have tied the knot – but it needs some updating.

The two other key cast members are Fabian and Felicity – adult brother and sister. April meets widower Fabian when she thinks he is trying to steal her taxi, and remonstrates with him – she doesn’t recognise him when they meet again in the community. Felicity, meanwhile, is April’s landlady. She lives in a slightly insalubrious part of town, and is a delightfully bohemian, intellectual character – a writer who mystifies April with some of her secrets and the confusing comings-and-goings of her finances. Both Fabian and Felicity play important roles in April’s life, and both come with surprises.

In an article in the Belfast Telegraph, Wilkinson describes the book as feminist feel-good, and that’s exactly right. She says: “I wanted to write something uplifting, but I also wanted it to be smart, feminist and kind of politically engaged with it, with a small p.” Well, Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau is bang on the money. I found it really fun and funny, without being frothy. There are some more serious undertones that give the novel depth, and Wilkinson obviously has a deep appreciation and understanding of the 1930s.

I’m sometimes dubious about reading a novel set in the 1930s (as opposed to reading one written in the 1930s), but it pays off when the novelist is doing something a contemporary writer couldn’t have done – Wilkinson incorporates our knowledge of what would develop in the next few years, as well as the brilliant idea of the marriage bureau. There are other elements that a 1930s novelist wouldn’t have felt comfortable introducing, and which enhance the novel without pulling it too much from its context.

But most of all I enjoyed Mrs Hart’s Marriage Bureau because of April. Give me a spirited and garrulous heroine and I’m sold. I love the delightful chaos of a character who combines good intentions with putting her foot in it. It’s a real treat of a book, and I had a lovely time reading it.

Seven Cats I Have Loved by Anat Levit #ReadingTheMeow2023

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When I saw that Mallika was inaugurating a week devoted to books about cats, you know I had to join in. Books! Cats! Basically my two favourite things, as anyone who follows my Instagram will attest. Then I had to read Barbara Trapido for book club, but now I’m getting onto the cat books.

I had a few on my shelves, and the first one I finished is this little memoir, Seven Cats I Have Loved (2022) translated from Hebrew by Yardenne Greenspan. It turns out all three of the books I was eyeing up for this week are in translation – do people write more about cats in other languages, or is there sufficient faith in a market for them that cat books are disproportionately translated?

Levit is an Israeli poet and author who has won various prizes, though I note she doesn’t have a Wikipedia page (in English, at least). So this isn’t a book by an unknown person who happens to love cats – rather it’s a look into a fascination of an author people already love. And it does what it says. The book is about seven cats that Levit has lived with and loved devotedly.

Five of these cats come quite quickly. After not really intending to ever get a cat, she is persuaded to do so by her two young daughters when her life faces a bit of a crisis. She falls so fast and so hard for Shelly that she almost immediately goes and adopts four more kittens. Each is a purebreed who is kept indoors and treated like royalty. All cats should be treated like royalty, of course, but I will have to prevent Hargreaves from reading Seven Cats I Have Loved because he will consider himself terribly hard-done-by in comparison. They get an elaborate ‘buffet’ of different types of expensive cat food, with much of it being thrown away uneaten. As a result, one of them is unhealthily overweight.

I always knew it was impossible to deny my cats food. The buffet served all the cats, and there was no way of preventing access to one of them without making his or her life miserable, which I was incapable of doing. Closing the buffet, and diminishing the lifestyle the cats had grown accustomed to, was also not an option.

I’m certainly not going to judge another cat owner for how they look after their cats – let’s just say that many things in Seven Cats I Have Loved show that Levit does things differently to the way I would/do. But she also loves them very, very much. In philosophical interludes, she talks about the love between cat and human (sometimes wandering into over-optimism, to my mind, in relation to the love she gets back from them); she even compares the love she has for cats and for her daughters, and the ways in which the former is greater – or at least simpler.

The final two cats to come are Cleo, a male Siamese whom she impetuously buys from a neighbour – and perhaps my favourite, Mishely, because she is a stray. She seems to live in a box at the bottom of the stairs, and only occasionally creep into the house for rare treats. But I’m not a purebreed-cat kinda guy, so the stray moggy has my heart. All of them have my heart.

I had read (and commented on) Rebecca’s review of this book not long before my friend Lorna gave me my copy, but I had forgotten her warning that ‘Unfortunately, I felt the most attention is paid to the cats’ various illnesses and vet visits, and especially the periods of decline leading to each one’s death.’ And this is certainly true. Each decline is detailed laboriously, and movingly. Levit seems to choose never to euthanise her cats, so they live out every last minute before finally dying. She has very strong opinions on some health issues (she won’t take them to the vet hospital when they are dying) and curiously lax on others (they all get matted fur, and she believes clipping this away is torture to them).

So, this was hard to read. Like Levit, I find I can’t help being very alert to any sign of cat illness – particularly since I don’t know how old Hargreaves is. She tends to rush them to a vet; I tend to fret to myself while Hargreaves continues cheerily along. (And never mention anything online, because people love to try and make cat owners anxious with their own horror stories and warnings.) So I found I Levit a very empathetic memoirist, and even if we don’t treat our cats the same, we certainly both love them deeply. I would have liked more little reflections on the nature of cats, like this one of discovering missing Jesse:

Finally, I found the cat stuck behind the fridge. He’d made it in but couldn’t make it out. I quickly pushed the fridge away from the wall, picked up Jesse in my arms, and kissed him, trying to reassure both of us. I had no idea if he’d only slipped behind the fridge that morning or if, God forbid, he’d spent the entire night back there. I knew I would never be able to answer that questions, and took solace in the notion that perhaps cats knew how to skip from one event to the next without carrying the burden of human memory, which accumulated unhappy experiences.

Indeed, a few minutes later, Jesse returned to prowling the apartment with his usual ease, as if no serious trauma had befallen him.

On the whole, I loved this little memoir when it was talking about the foibles, behaviours, and eccentric demands of the cats. I wish there had been a lot more about their lives than their deaths, and that it would have felt a more joyful book. It’s not as good or as sharply observant as a similar book I’ve read, Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats, but I enjoyed it nonetheless and will happily keep it on my cat shelf.

London, With Love by Sarra Manning #ABookADayInMay No.29

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Jacket for 'London, With Love'

I’ve been e-friends with Sarra Manning for years, and have read some wonderful books on her recommendation – but somehow I have never got around to reading one of her own books. There are lots to choose from, and I chose London, With Love (2022) more or less at random from the ones available on Audible. I went in a little nervously, for reasons I will explain shortly, but I finished it a complete Manning convert. What a delightful book.

London, With Love tells the story of Jennifer (/Jen/Jenny, depending on her stage in life) and Nick over the course of two decades. They meet as teenagers in the early 1980s, where Jennifer is an intelligent, bookish, uncool girl desperately seeking somewhere to belong – and Nick is (in her eyes) a cool, handsome, unknowable boy far out of her league.

Somehow, despite the abyss she perceives between them, they do end up becoming friends – and then best friends. But while she never recovers from that crush that snowballs into love, she never wants to chance telling him about it. He seems simply a dream that can’t come true.

Not that Jennifer is entirely boy-focused. One of the most impressive things about London, With Love is that Manning creates a heroine who is completely fixated on a boy but is still independent, determined and ambitious. Her love may revolve around him, but her life does not.

As the years go by, we see Jennifer trying desperately to get into publishing, and find a role that fits the love of books that never leaves her. I relished every time Manning got in a literary reference, and you could tell that she the list of books Jennifer recommends for a teenage girl to read is a list close to Manning’s heart. And this isn’t one of those novels where the heroine achieves everything she puts her mind to – as someone who also tried to get work in editorial publishing, I recognised and winced at how many obstacles are in the way, and how publishing seems set up for people who can afford to do unpaid internships. I was following Jennifer’s path a few years later, but not a great deal had changed.

Nick and Jennifer lose touch after an early misunderstanding, but (unsurprisingly) he is not then absent from the novel. Over those 20 years, their paths cross time and again – the friendship is picked up, and sometimes it wanes and sometimes it is violently discarded. Sometimes we don’t see Jennifer for a handful of years at a time, and pick up with her at the next significant Nick encounter. Other partners come and go, sometimes people that Jennifer believes she could be happy with forever – but Nick is always there at the back of her mind. Sometimes they are friends. Sometimes they are too hurt to talk to each other. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is awkward. While there is admittedly a little bit of coincidence about how often they run into each other, more often it is believable – through mutual secondary school friends, or because their parents have been talking to each other.

Another success in London, With Love is how both characters develop and mature, while still having recognisably the core of the person they always were. Some of the things that drive them change; some stay the same. And I loved Jennifer – annoying and foolish as she can often be, particularly when she ditches her friends to spend all her time with a new boyfriend (and hurrah, Sarra Manning, for pointing out this all-too-common unkindness!) – and I loved her because she is so vividly real.

And now onto the thing that made me a bit nervous. ‘London’ is right there in the title, and I knew that different tube stops and underground lines would be significant features of the novel. Since I don’t really like London, or any city, I wondered if that would put me off. And, yes, I’m sure Londoners or Londonophiles would recognise a lot of sites and situations in this novel that passed me by, but it is not so dominant that the country mouse feels alienated.

Similarly, I was born in 1985 and so quite a few years behind Jennifer – the fashions, songs, politics, experiences that she has in her teens and 20s would doubtless be nostalgia-inducing for some readers. I enjoyed them without that same sense of recognition.

Perhaps the perfect reader is a Londoner approximately the same age as Jennifer (i.e. in their 50s now), but it is certainly not a requisite to lap it all up. I want to write something about the patriarchy and how David Nicholls’ One Day is a huge deal when this book has a similar sort of theme and is every bit as good, but that’s a whole other essay that you can imagine for yourselves.

What a lovely, memorable time I’ve spent getting to know these characters, and I’m very open for recommendations for which Sarra Manning book to read next.

A Flat Place by Noreen Masud #ABookADayInMay No.18

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I knew Noreen Masud a bit when our paths overlapped in Oxford, and we’ve stayed in touch on social media, so I was really interested when I saw she’d published A Flat Place: A Memoir (2023) – and I’m so glad I bought it. A Flat Place is an extraordinary memoir, told with honesty, insight, and exactly the right sort of vulnerability.

As Noreen explains the notes at the end, this was initially intended to be solely a book about flat landscapes – whether that be expansive fields she remembers seeing in Lahore, Pakistan, where she spent the first decade and a half of her life, or in Ely, Orkney, Newcastle and other places where Noreen has lived or ventured in search of flatness. But the book quickly became about much more than that. It is about her experiences growing up have given her a longing for these flat spaces, and have left a very difficult legacy – including cPTSD, complex post-traumatic stress disorder. More on that in a bit.

As Noreen is quick to point out, her experiences in childhood are not shared by all Pakistani people, or all Pakistani girls brought up in a Muslim household. Her father didn’t want Noreen or her sisters to leave the house or engage with neighbours. She saw so little of life outside of her English-speaking school that she wasn’t even fluent in Urdu. And while her father wasn’t ferociously violent, she describes with aching exactness what it feels like to grow up in a house of fear and tension. Not always in detail – there are many things that she cannot remember, and has no wish to unearth. There are other things that perhaps she does remember, but deliberately obscures in the telling. But it is enough for us to begin to grasp the long reach throughout her adult life – after she was disowned by her father and came to the UK with her Scottish-born mother, studied English literature and became an academic.

The only life I knew was hot and dirty and crowded, bodies pressed against each other: oil sizzling, loud music on my grandmother’s TV, my uncles arguing. Between fourteen and twenty-five people lived in my house in Lahore at any one time, coming and going. So did, at various times, rabbits, goats, chickens, geese budgies, dogs, cats, turkeys, peacocks, chicks and parrots. My father had his own bedroom; the rest of us – my mother, me and three sisters – lived in another, piling over each, shouting and fighting in hushed voices so as not to wake him while he slept. There was nowhere to run.

Much of A Flat Place is about these childhood experiences, but there is also a great deal about her travels around the UK in search of flatness. Like many people, I am drawn to views with mountains, hills, and variety, but Noreen Masud explains poetically what it is that draws her to flat landscapes – the refuge she can find in them, the sense of identifying with them. Here, she is writing about the fens in Cambridgeshire:

But I knew that, here, there was no right or wrong way to look. I could just be with the landscape, be in it. And because the landscape was the same for miles and miles, I could give it the time it needed. I didn’t have to ‘take it all in’ at once. I could let it seep slowly into me as I walked. I could get to know it, like a dear friend, over a long time, rather the forcing a sudden overwhelming intimacy which couldn’t be sustained.

It is too detailed and thoughtful an exploration to summarise with one quote or paraphrase, but I thought she handled a complex, almost metaphysical element to the memoir with adeptness. Many of her readers won’t be able to connect with her experiences, either in her upbringing or in her adult life, but she bridges that divide beautifully.

Complex PTSD is, I learn, difficult to diagnose – difficult to recognise in oneself, and difficult to convey to others. PTSD usually relates to one, or a few, traumatic experiences and periods. CPTSD is different:

It was particularly difficult to treat, because – like a flat landscape – it didn’t offer a significant landmark, an event, that you could focus on and work with. Complex post-traumatic stress, according to the psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman, is the result of ‘prolonged, repeated trauma’, rather than individual traumatic events. It’s what happens when you’re born into a world, shaped by a world, where there’s no safety, ever. When the people who should take care of you are, instead, scary and unreliable, and when you live years and years without the belief that escape is possible.

Another strand to A Flat Place is Noreen Masud’s responses to the racism that is deeply woven into British life and history – partly the shambolic history of the British role in dividing India and Pakistan, but also the ways in which the experiences of Pakistani people are considered less significant than those of white British people. This comes to a head during the pandemic lockdown, where people became deeply agitated over experiences that they took for granted were acceptable in another country, for another people.

I had to bite my mouth to stop myself from being unkind. Because I knew which children mattered and which didn’t. What children in other countries were expected to endure as standard parts of life – cramped conditions, imprisonment, periods of separation from loved ones – must not be tolerated for British children; unlike their counterparts abroad, they are fragile, precious, capable of infinite sophisticated development.

I’ve only touched the surface of the many themes and accounts that Noreen Masud manages to combine so elegantly and wisely into A Flat Place. Among the most moving, to me, were the sections where her mother asked if they could travel to Orkney together – their time together is shared with such candour, without trying to come to any smooth conclusions about what their relationship has been, is now, or could be.

This is not a misery memoir, nor is it a tale of overcoming adversity and reaching perfection – it is an exploration, and a continuing one. I love memoirs that incorporate unusual lenses for exploration of the self, and flat places is an ambitious one – the ambition more than pays off. A Flat Place is something special.

The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight #ABookADayInMay No.17

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The Premonitions Bureau: A Sunday Times bestseller: Amazon.co.uk: Knight, Sam: 9780571357567: Books

I didn’t know anything about The Premonitions Bureau (2022) by Sam Knight when it turned up in the Audible sale – but the title, the cover, and the unexpected subtitle telling me that it was a true story were enough for me to take a gamble on it.

The story starts with the Aberfan disaster in 1966 – I’m sure you all know about it, but
it’s when a colliery waste tip atop a Welsh hillside suddenly fell down into the valley with devastating effect. 144 people died, including large numbers of pupils in the village school. And several people claimed to have predicted that the tragedy would happen.

‘Claimed’ is perhaps the wrong word, since apparently two of the people who predicted it also died in the disaster – neither of them apparently having any sense that they were having a premonition. One of the children in the school told her mother “I dreamt I went to school and there was no school there. Something black had come down all over it.” Another had drawn a picture of people digging at the hillside, with the words ‘The End’.

John Barker, a psychiatrist who ran a mental hospital in an old Victorian asylum in Shropshire, was fascinated by the possibilities in this phenomenon. He had already been deeply interested in unusual psychiatric issues – such as Munchausen syndrome, or the idea that people could literally be scared to death.

Being a scientist, he decided to go about this systematically. He set up the Premonitions Bureau, inviting people to send in any premonitions they had – whether in dreams, visions, or convictions. They got hundreds of replies from all over the place – some trolling them, but others very serious. Few seemed to be particularly specific – more along the lines of ‘something terrible will happen to a plane’ – but each was catalogued carefully. The hope was to be able to present their findings to the Medical Research Council and perhaps, in turn, set up a system to warn people of impending disasters. (Though there was also a debate about whether you could have a premonition of an event that then doesn’t happen – a Catch 22 for any way of using this tool to save lives.)

I had never heard of the Premonitions Bureau, and I did find Barker a likeable, fascinating and curiously impenetrable person. And I found much the same with Knight’s book. It goes on so many tangents, exploring interesting side-roads to the main discussion – often spending large chunks of chapters talking about these other matters in great detail. And some of them are certainly interesting, but by contrast, the bits about the actual bureau seem a bit flimsy. We don’t learn much about the hundreds of contributions or contributors, or what happened when they were right or wrong (though, as an exception, we do get a lot of detail about a train crash that was apparently predicted and which one of the BeeGees survived). It does feel as though there isn’t enough material to give a thoroughly researched book about this bureau – that it is an enthralling and enticing topic which isn’t quite followed up by what we learn about it. The bureau is there throughout, but sometimes as a shadowy thread at the centre of a lot of other topics.

And Knight is careful in not committing either way to whether or not he believes premonitions can happen. There are moments which seem to defeat any scepticism, but not much on probabilities of success or alternative explanations of the ‘accurate’ premonitions.

I did finish The Premonitions Bureau having found it interesting and well-written, but thinking that I might prefer to read a fictional story that could equally well be invented for this eye-catching title. Perhaps truth is stranger than fiction, but I think fiction could have been more satisfying.

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe #ABookADayInMay No.2

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Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty: Amazon.co.uk: Keefe, Patrick Radden: 9781529062489: Books

Day two of this project will reveal two things that I had previously left unstated. My aim is to finish a book each day in May, but that doesn’t mean that I have also started that book. I did not read all 560 pages of Empire of Pain (2021) by Patrick Radden Keefe in one day. In fact, I didn’t actually read any pages at all – I listen to the audiobook, and finished the final hour of it today.

When I downloaded the book, I thought it was about the opioid crisis in America and the court cases surrounding it. And it sort of is about that, but opioids don’t even exist until we’re a considerable way through the book. While a large chunk of the end of the book is about attempts to address the terrible cost of opioid addiction through the courts, Keefe takes us decades and generations back in the first half of the book. He is documenting the Sackler family’s rise from nobodies to billionaires right from the beginning.

As I’m writing this quite late in the day, and it’s an enormous book, I’m not going to detail all that much of it. But Empire of Pain is certainly a book of two halves. The first is about Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler and their humble origins – and how Arthur Sackler’s genius for advertising led to him being the first to advertise medication directly to doctors. He was, indeed, the first in many fields of advertising – he basically appears to have invented the idea of medical advertising, which still has such a stranglehold on the American healthcare system.

This half of the book documents every rung of the brothers’ steps to success, as well as all their feuding and pride. Their various marriages, dalliances, children and personal tragedies. Arthur’s obsession with art collections is dealt with in astonishing detail. Everything is dealt with in astonishing detail.

In the second half of the book, the Sackler family and their in-fighting gets a little sidelined as Purdue takes centre stage. This company developed research into opioids which would then turn into Oxycodone – and Keefe shows us, again in rigorous detail, how the marketing of the drug in a completely ruthless way led, incrementally (Keefe argues), to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people – and how the company sought to tarnish those who were lost as wilful addicts rather than victims of their determination to prescribe higher doses for longer to as many people as possible. The end of the book looks at how the untouchable family start to become hate figures, as the truth about their tactics and deceit becomes wider known. It also shows how they’ll probably get away with everything.

I’ve skimmed the surface of this book. It really is researched to an astonishing degree. It will leave you furious about the total lack of ethics behind this company, and the granular way in which Keefe unpacks their lies and manipulations, and the way that good lawyers will let you get away with everything, will certainly infuriate most listeners. Even if, like me, you thankfully don’t have any connection to the opioid crisis. (It is worth noting, though this comes late in the book, that Purdue weren’t the only company to market opioids aggressively – apparently they never had more than about a third of the market – so Purdue and the Sackler family are certainly huge in this arena, but not lone wolves.)

Is all the detail necessary? I will say that, like almost any book over 500 pages, it would have been better if it were shorter. In the first half, where the level of granular detail has no bearing on showing injustices, I’d say that two out of every three sentences is extraneous. We hear about the lighting that someone chose to hang above their artwork. We hear about the graffiti on an archaeological item that Sackler paid to ship to the US. There is seemingly nothing that Keefe learns that he doesn’t include.

In the second half these details feel more like they are building a court case – and, in this half, Keefe leans a little towards repetition. We hear the same lines repeated over and over again – for instance, that Purdue marketed Oxycodone as giving pain relief for 12 hours even though their own studies had shown it wore off after eight. That fact must have been in the book at least six times.

It’s hard to fault somebody who has done years and years of research, and risked the notoriously litigious Sackler family, so I will say that this overlongness doesn’t lessen from Empire of Pain being a masterful and extraordinary work. It doesn’t make for fun reading – but, since opioid addiction is now the leading cause of preventable deaths in the US, it fees like essential reading.