Books, birds, the width of certain continents
Heya, hope you're all doing okay! It's my birthday on Saturday, which means you have to pretend that I sent this newsletter promptly and not four weeks late, thank you for your cooperation in this matter.
BOOK REPORT: Anyway, my BIG NEWS — which a bunch of you know already, but let's put it down officially — is that I wrote a novel! It's called THE HUSBANDS, and it's about a woman whose attic starts disgorging an infinite supply of husbands (one at a time, don't worry). It's coming out in mid-2024, with Chatto in the UK and Doubleday in the US.
I'm really excited about this! I've kind-of wanted to write a novel since I was a kid, but I hadn't given it a long sustained try for ages. You know, the usual reasons:
What if the people who write novels are special and have some sort of hidden knowledge that is not available to me
What if I try and it's really bad
What if I try and it's actually okay but nobody wants to publish it anyway
Once I had an idea I was excited about and gave it a go in secret and I got 20,000 words into a draft and then an acquaintance published a novel with the same plot but better, whoops, what if that happens again
What if it's a bad sign that I have read dozens and dozens of books on writing and spent a bunch of time thinking "ah yes, how illuminating" about them and yet cannot remember a single piece of advice from any one of them
Also, it seems like the bit between thinking "oh what if I write a novel" and then going "there, I've written a novel" takes fucking ages
Anyway! It turns out you don't need to be a special sort of person with secret knowledge to write a novel, but you do need time, because it does take fucking ages.
In fact, the process is still going on even now: at the moment I'm working through a bunch of suggestions and questions and tweaks from my editors.
Unexpectedly, quite a few of them are about phrases and terms that I just didn't know were Australian, and that kept slipping oblivious into my London setting.
I've been in the UK for a long time now and if you'd asked me a year ago, I would have bet up to twenty pounds that I could convincingly fake being English. Obviously, I would have said, I have long since internalised all the big differences in vocabulary: what I used to call ice blocks are ice lollies in the UK, but lollies are sweets, textas are marker pens, the servo is a petrol station (fine) or a filling station (!!). Nobody bludges or pashes or pulls a sickie, people are rarely stoked. Etc.
But it turns out there's a bunch of less obvious differences just hiding away in corners of my vocabulary and my assumptions about the world. For example, DID YOU KNOW: most English people don't know what a "fruit bun" is? I discussed some alternative cake and pastry options with my editor and she suggested: tiffin, tea cake, millionaire shortbread, Chelsea bun. I'm sorry, those are simply too English, I can't take them seriously. But I think we've compromised on "cinnamon swirl".
SPEAKING OF AUSTRALIA: A friend recently told me that Australia is wider than the moon, which is such a ridiculous piece of did-you-know trivia, I love it. What if they swapped places! Imagine, Australia just floating up in the sky, orbiting us like the moon but even bigger! (Please do not write to me to explain the physics reasons why you could not straightforwardly exchange Australia and the moon.)
READING REPORT: (I called this "book report" last time but I guess now I'm using "book report" to report on my own book)
Anyway, this week I really enjoyed Rowan Hisayo Buchanan's new novel The Sleep Watcher, about a girl who separates from her body while she sleeps. She wanders invisibly around her house and neighbourhood, watching what's going on, her friends, her family, understanding things differently. It's one of those books that feels like an immaculate whole thing, like a blown-glass sphere, delicate and strange and beautiful. It's also so good on the physicality of its main often-asleep character, what it feels like for her to trudge around a seaside town without her body.
WHAT ABOUT THE BIRDS? HOW ARE THEY? The birds in the garden are doing great, thanks! Our four or five local sparrows have had approximately a million baby sparrows, and the whole extended family travels around in a big group, and the baby sparrows (round, adorable, somehow the exact same size as their parents) bounce fretfully with their beaks open while the parents hurry back and forth from the bird feeder. There's also an orange cat who likes to watch the sparrows, and a huge crow who likes to scare the cat away.
TELEVISION REPORT: Okay, like a lot of people I know, I watch a bunch of television and not a whole lot of movies. It's not that I don't like movies when I do watch them; it's just that most evenings, I'm reluctant to commit to 90 or 120 minutes of doing one thing all at once (this is because of Society and not in any way my fault / the result of my own actions and habits).
Also like a lot of people I know, I have been watching Succession.
Anyway, apparently the finale is going to be ninety minutes long? Ninety! Minutes! That's not a television show, it's a movie! I cannot believe the long con they have pulled on us, where they have made us all excited to watch a movie about intergenerational trauma and corporate malfeasance and the role of sensationalist right-wing media in fostering fascism in contemporary American politics. If someone had jumped out at you five years ago and asked if that was something you wanted to watch, can you imagine having any answer other than "please no, I would rather watch literally anything else"? And yet here a bunch of us are with our collective breath held. I am staggered by the chicanery of it. And all they had to do to hoodwink us was to make four extremely good seasons of a television show.
Right, that's this week's (month's) news.
Best,
Holly