What do you mean, you’ve never seen them?? Mummified corpses, preserved in the bog for centuries or even millennia. Seeing them might change your life.

2. Drink a martini in the Horseshoe Bar

Sort of unbelievable that they let just anyone in here!

3. Have a coffee and a sausage roll outside the little cafe in Palmerston Park

Maybe the most verdant and peaceful cafe in Dublin?

4. Eat lunch in Assassination Custard

Actually let’s back track. First. Follow Assassination Custard on Instagram. Then wait for them to post a story around Tuesday lunchtime, announcing that bookings are open for that week. Call the phone number. Book your table for Wed, Thurs or Fri. Then, finally, you may enjoy the best lunch in Dublin.

5. Do a loop of the Phoenix Park on your bike

   

It doesn’t need to be summer for this. You can witness the changing seasons in action! Just please leave the deer alone. Also you can rent a bike and do this.

6. The WB Yeats exhibition in the National Library is very good

And if you haven’t seen it, so is the absolutely massive scale model of the library made out of Lego.

7. Try the best yoghurt in Ireland

https://www.mossfield.ie/

I dunno you guys I just love it. It is bankrupting me slowly but it is delicious. Imagine how happy these cows are.

8. Drink some wine on the pavement

   Get in loser, we’re people watching. Your call where, there are so many options: Brindle, Marlowe & Co, Frank’s, Row Wines, Fíon Eile, Notions all great choices.

9. Or you could “do Drury Duty”

I generally feel slightly too old for this but I’m glad it exists.

10. And while you’re in the area

Go have a look in Jenny Vander’s. Best vintage in Dublin and you never know what you’ll find in there. We love the element of surprise!

11. Go to the seaside and pretend you’re extremely wealthy

A different seaside from usual, if you swim regularly. Just pick a fancy seaside suburb, then figure out where the locals have their coffee, get their sandwiches, and have yourself a nice afternoon pretending you live in Sandycove or Howth.

12. Collins Barracks has some great permanent exhibitions

It’s maybe not my favourite museum in terms of layout or legibility but it’s an interesting building and there’s lots to see, including the work of fashion designer Ib Jorgensen.

13. Kilmainham Gaol!

History. It’s really good! Maybe you haven’t been since school. Maybe you’ve never been! Can be paired with a trip to one of Dublin 8’s great neighbourhood pubs: The Royal Oak, the Glen of Aherlow.

14. Try whatever Scéal’s seasonal Danish is

I’m confident it’ll be delicious.

15. Oysters, lots of them.

I’m pretty sure there’s a happy hour midweek at the Seafood Cafe.

16. Buy a copy of Normal People in Books Upstairs

Look, I already own a copy of Normal People. I think most people in Ireland do. But every single week it’s in the Books Upstairs top ten bestsellers - sometimes it’s number one! - so there must be something more to this specific combination of bookshop/novel.

17. Long walk on the Dublin Port Greenway

Personally I recommend doing this on a day without horizontal winds.

18. Get the Bird ID app out while you’re at it

Let’s log some cormorants!

19. Take an Irish class

I did this two years ago at Conradh na Gaeilge and it’s been a mind-expanding and hugely fulfilling journey.

20. Go and look around the art collection at the Merrion Hotel

    

    I’m pretty sure they just let you do this for free, as long as you’re not bothering anyone. There are some of the truly great 20th century Irish paintings in there!

21. Antiques browsing on Francis Street

Some incredible shops along here. Easy way to spend a whole afternoon. I like rooting around O’Sullivans and pretending Killian McNulty’s showroom is my actual house. And, of course, the huge and excellent Oxfam.

22. Hotbox Sauna in Inchicore, followed by a pint and a pizza in Rascals

Genuinely this will cure what ails you. Also, good place to overhear juicy gossip concerning people you will never know. I can’t believe Nuala did that??

23. Go to anything you can at the Dublin Theatre Festival and/or the Fringe.

Doesn’t matter if it’s good. What’s good is having opinions! I also like to use these as chances to go into buildings I might not otherwise be able to i.e., The Lir.

24. Botanic Gardens followed by pint in the Gravediggers

Classic combo. The type of pub to make me sad I don’t drink Guinness anymore

25. Actually just get out of the city centre

September in Blackrock is a really nice spot. This can be combined with a swim of course, and also with a little of number 11 above.

26. The National Gallery’s permanent collection is really good.

It seems to get better every time I go back. Also the Clare Street entrance makes me feel like I live a glamorous life in a big cosmopolitan city.

27. Do a tour of the Abbey Theatre

The lore you might discover!

28. The Sunday set lunch at Comet

I think this is probably the single fanciest experience you can have in Dublin for under €85. Sorry I know €85 is a lot of money, but what I mean is you get a lot of fanciness for that price.

29. Assemble a historic pub crawl

Did you know Brendan Behan drank his last pint in Harkin’s on Echlin Street? You can cobble together literary facts for almost any central Dublin pub that is more than 20 years old. In fact I have a book about this that might help.

30. Relatedly… Did pubs almost kill Irish literature?

I need to know the answer to this. I’ve been to a public lecture by Prof Morash before and it was very fun. (It was actually about Sally Rooney’s Dublin.)

31. These gigs at Dalymount Park look very fun

It’s a really vibesy place for live music and definitely worth a gander before the redevelopment.

32. You could get the bus to Glendalough

It’s like a whole different planet up there. Very beautiful! Leave your cares behind and go for a hike.

33. Big roundy dinner table evening

Get some mates and go to Good World or M&L and order lots of everything. This is a GREAT thing to do on a depressing rainy night.

34. Walk the River Dodder from Rathfarnham to Ringsend

I would like to do this and stop into Ashton’s, where I haven’t been since it had its glow-up. Maybe have a Sunday roast.

35. Spend the whole afternoon like this: Secondhand bookshop followed by snug

I suggest The Last Bookshop and Fallon’s but other pairings exist. Chapters and Flowing Tide?

36. I’ve never been but I’m so intrigued by The Lobster Pot

Lobster thermidor! Coquilles St Jacques! What year is this? Does anywhere else in Dublin still have a sweet trolley? Please report back if so.

37. Apparently if you go to Spitalfields on a not-weekend evening they’ll let you sit at the bar and just order a cocktail

I’ve never managed it but something to remember if you’re in the area.

38. The Lighthouse does semi-regular late-night screenings of Stop Making Sense

Maybe will be life-affirming and good?

39. Have you been to Mac’s Warehouse? Or Pete’s Antiques?

You could spend hours getting lost in there and maybe you’ll even come home with some reclaimed pine flooring.

40. Cycle up to the Blue Light

This has been on my list since I moved home and I still haven’t done it, partly because I’m scared of the hills. Maybe this autumn is the time at last.

That’s forty items for you! I like living in Dublin a lot as you can tell. I’m running out of room so consider this a first instalment, but more to come in future.

Since the book was published in May, the thinness of that line has become a little more clear. It doesn’t bother me that many readers have responded to Frida Slattery As Herself in this way. But it’s got me thinking more broadly about the idea of likeability in books.

All July I’ve been rereading the Neapolitan novels and there are no characters in these huge, sprawling novels that I hate. There are characters, including the narrator and her brilliant friend, whose fictional actions I am shocked or confused by. There are people behaving badly from the very first page. And of course, there is Nino Sarratore.

I joke about Nino Sarratore being a war criminal but he’s also the engine of much of the plot of the novels. Without him it might just be 1700 pages of Lenù and Lila playing with dolls together and comparing themselves to one another. And that’s not to say I put up with how terrible this one character is because it gives good plot. I’m not putting up with anything. I think I actually like that Nino is a war criminal (of the heart). I love a difficult person. Life, you know, is filled with them.

And to be honest, I do like being riled up. I spend quite a lot of time reading novels. I do that because I love it, and I find novels to be immensely entertaining. To be entertained for me is to be gripped by what I’m reading, to be given some way to feel emotionally connected to the world of the novel and characters I’m reading about. For that to work, sometimes those characters have to be a little fucked up. If everyone in the book was capital-g Good, wouldn’t that book all be a bit boring?

A genre I don’t read much of but am interested in, conceptually, is weird girl lit, characterised by difficult unreliable or frankly weird girl protagonists.

Fans of weird girl lit deeply want their female protagonists to be bad, or messy, or chaotic, or evil. They want them to be obstreperous, unloveable, to think fucked-up thoughts and do terrible things. These protagonists are given a lot of room to be bad people, room that is not really afforded to male characters in the same way right now.

(Wait, was Leopold Bloom the original literary weird girl?)

If you want a lot of five-star Goodreads reviews you don’t write a book about a difficult man. (If I was writing a novel to market right now I would probably write a weird-girl retelling of something like Citizen Kane from Susan’s POV.) But that was never something I cared about when I was writing Frida Slattery. Actually, I wasn’t writing with any idea that the novel might be read, nor that those readers might bring their own opinions about gender and art to the text. I wasn’t even thinking there would ultimately be a text. I was basically interested only in the very first line of Wilson’s The Odyssey:

Tell me about a complicated man

I had that line pinned to the corkboard over my desk while I wrote the novel. Because to me, a huge amount of both life and literature was contained in that line. Last month, I said this to a bookshop full mostly of women readers and was met with plenty of nods - I said that it’s a very common experience in life to have someone you’re close to, or who you respect, who nevertheless does things you wouldn’t approve of or do yourself. And I was interested in how frustrating that is, especially for women. I was not interested in writing characters who are moral templates or virtue, or who are punished for their bad actions, or who experience redemption neatly before the narrative is tied up in a bow. Because none of that felt true to my life, nor to my own experience of the pleasures of reading, and so none of that was all that interesting to me.

(That event was in conversation with Jem Calder, whose excellent novel also features an unlikeable man and who wrote a great essay about the topic in last weekend’s FT.)

Also, there’s another aspect to this. My novel is about making art. And despite it being the major focus of cultural criticism for much of the 2010s, I am still not sure what we are supposed to do with the art made by problematic men.

Personally, I’m a woman who has been obsessed with the art of various problematic men since my early teens. Over the years I’ve thought about the topic plenty and I still don’t know how best to react when someone says something like, Well, you know David Foster Wallace pushed Mary Karr out of a moving car, right? I agree that’s terrible. It’s a violent crime and one of many he is alleged to have committed against women... I don’t know if it can stop me from thinking that Infinite Jest is a masterpiece… I don’t know if that terrible fact is an eraser that can take away the indelible mark that reading that book (three times!) at 20 made on me. I don’t know if not knowing that makes me a bad or immoral person…

Even now, after all those years of cultural criticism in this vein, I still don’t have a definitive take on what we should do with the good and enduring art made by dickheads and criminals. I think, maybe, it’s a question of holding multiple contradictory things in my head at the same time.

But I find it interesting, creatively, that I don’t know what to do with all of that. And since I find it so interesting, it’s going to end up in my fiction.

Now, the above is sort of a separate issue - the author does bad things vs the character does bad things - but also, is it? Obviously the author doing bad things is objectively worse, and to me as a reader far more troublesome. But both assume that I am looking to the art I consume for moral clarity, and that my enjoyment of something depends on a sense of virtue that I can associate with it.

The truth is that as a reader I don’t care about the virtue of it all. I love a grey area. One of my favourite things is when I get to discuss a novel with friends, share our interpretations of characters and behaviours and plot, and contrast how different our responses are. (Maybe that’s why I’ve found it fascinating rather than torturous to read my own Goodreads reviews!) I don’t think I look to fiction for moral clarity, or that I believe characters should either be punished or redeemed for their bad behaviour. In fact, I think I kind of like to read about the bad behaviour sometimes. I want things to be complicated. Complicated things, messy things, draw me in as a reader - just like the chaotic weird-girl protagonists do for their readers.

And what does that mean for me as a writer? Well, right now I am writing a novel again. I started it at MacDowell last year and put it aside for a bit when Frida was coming out. For a little while earlier this year, I tried to think about the characters on the page in terms of how readers might feel about them. Then I decided I didn’t care about any of that, that nothing truly good comes of wondering about such things, and I got back to work.

Last week I was in Italy for my friends’ wedding, a glorious and romantic affair on the Ligurian coast. This is my favourite part of Italy, in part because the food and wine are so good and in part because this stretch of coast has an incredibly efficient train network and so you couldn’t need a car less. The trains are frequent and zip in and out of tunnels along the coast for miles and miles, with gorgeous views of the sea. You can hop on and off with ease. They’re cheap, air-conditioned, punctual and comfortable, more like a Japanese urban metro system than anything else. Trenitalia, they could never make me hate you. Allontanarsi dalla linea gialla.

2. Seafood pasta

The last time I went to Italy I was under the impression that I was allergic to molluscs. This followed an incident in lockdown where I had what definitely seemed like an allergic reaction to molluscs. Several years passed, during which I avoided anything that comes in a bivalve shell until last autumn, when I finally saw an actual allergy doctor who told me that I am definitely not allergic to molluscs. Since then, I’ve been hitting the clams pretty hard, as you can imagine.

3. Potatoes

My husband grew these in our garden. I’m eating them right now. They’re really good.

4. Rereading the Neapolitan novels

It’s been ten years and it is the perfect time to reread these bad boys.

I came to Ferrante in a very funny way. It was a couple of years before hashtag Ferrante fever hit and I was going to Stockholm for a couple of weeks for work. I was in the WH Smith in Gatwick airport looking for something to read and to my snobby 23-year-old eyes there was nothing on the shelves that I could imagine reading. Like actually nothing. I was there for ages, scanning book covers and finally I settled on a small novel translated from Italian. I’d never heard of the author. It was Days of Abandonment. I read it, enjoyed it, was struck by how much it reminded me of The Bell Jar, and then put it aside. I remember thinking, ‘Great book, but I probably won’t read another by her.’

Anyway I love to be wrong. I’ve had to re-purchase or borrow the Neapolitans because they were so hard to find when they came out, sold out everywhere, that I gave all of them away to friends as I went. These novels are so worth rereading. I find them genuinely difficult to put down, an intense driven-to-distraction kind of reading pleasure that I sometimes forget exists.

5. A life-affirming bike ride on a hot day

God, cycling is so good in hot weather. I’ve been looking for any excuse to be on my bike over the last few weeks, doing loops around the Phoenix Park when there’s nowhere specific I need to be. In Italy we rented bikes and zipped through some old railway tunnels that had been converted into a coastal bike/walking path connecting several beach towns. The tunnel periodically opened out to a panorama of glittering blue Mediterranean, and there were many spots to lock up and go down the stairs for a dip. The whole thing made me hungry for another kind of life in Dublin, one I don’t usually long for - life by the sea, days that start with a cycle and a swim every morning, even in the winter.

6. Early mornings

Speaking of mornings, I’m increasingly convinced that getting up early is the key to eternal happiness. 6am on weekdays and 7am weekends. Not sure what the science is but it’s definitely true for me.

7. Writing by hand

This isn’t a new one as it’s something I do every single day already, but I’ve been thinking more about it. Writing by hand feels like it’s doing something good for the brain, in ways that might be real and might simply be tied to an anti-screen sense of virtue and moral rectitude. Personally, I have terrible handwriting and have realised recently that the very way I hold a pen is wrong, which explains why my hand always cramps, why I have terrible pen control. Handwriting feels like something that’s harder to change as an adult. It’s muscle memory, neuroplasticity is different now, etc. But I’m working on it! I can see some improvement already. It’s good to have a goal.

8. An endless Dublin summer, depicted by Trà My on Instagram

Nobody sees the city so clearly!

And six things I can’t stop thinking about

How do I cool the upstairs of my house?

This note has done numbers and it’s something I personally have thought about at great length over the last three years.

Courgettes! Best ways to cook em.

My novel has been out for two months now and I’m beginning to feel very sane about everything again! It continues to amaze me, watching how readers are receiving Frida. I love this crazy job of mine. Just a reminder that if you’re a famous actor and would like a copy DM me and I’ll post you one right now.

Is there a way to write this list every week without feeling like I am somehow pivoting to influencing?

1. The humble frittata

Getting into making bread means that I now constantly have a loaf in the kitchen. And that solves a big problem of daily life: lunch. I can reliably conjure up something, so long as I have some eggs in the house. Then it’s just a question of finding whatever leftover veg or fresh greens are in the fridge, ideally including a baby potato or some bits of roasted broccoli, add whatever cheese is available, put it all into in a little pan with butter, pour over the beaten eggs, wait a while, then stick the pan under a hot grill. Maybe there’s pesto for the toast. When it’s all on the plate I put peanut rayu on top, because it is addictive and compelling stuff.

2. Reality Instruction by James Lasdun, recently in the LRB

I really enjoyed this sprawling and grim tour through America’s courthouses and it inspired me to borrow Lasdun’s memoir of being stalked Give Me Everything You Have from the library.

3. My husband telling me enthusiastically that a reviewer or a reader has “gotten” my novel

Don’t know what he means exactly but that’s a nice feeling.

4. We live in Joyce’s Dublin!

Last week I met Tess for a drink at Bar 1661. We were sitting outside, midway through a pair of martinis, when we realised that we were sat on Little Britain St - the location of Cyclops, the episode we’re currently reading in Ulysses Club. When paying the bill, we clocked that the address of the bar itself was Ulysses House. The building itself looked far too modern to have been there in 1904 but we asked the barman anyway - is this the site of Barney Kiernan’s pub? A look of foggy recognition passed over the barman’s face and he told us he’d ask the owner. A few minutes later the owner arrived and brought us around the corner to the next building, an old redbrick terrace with many signs of long-term dereliction. It’s up for sale, the owner told us, and has been for years by the looks of it. He thought it should have a plaque because Bloomsday brings many confused Joyce readers to his bar. I said that if you put plaques outside every Dublin location mentioned in Ulysses the city would be heaving with plaques. But maybe that’s actually a good thing…

5. You can have a single oyster

I told my parents this and they were shocked. Oysters come in sixes, they said. At 1661 I had just one, one perfect oyster, with my martini. It’s an option, and sometimes it’s exactly what you need.

6. Jay McInerney discussing Russell and Corrine Calloway

I read Brightness Falls when I was 14 and then I reread it several times over the following ten years or so. I really loved it, and I still do now. It’s the story of a young married couple in Manhattan, Russell and Corrine Calloway, and their circle of friends, against the backdrop of the stock market crash in 1987. I tried to describe it the other day as a Bonfire of the Vanities that cares about its characters and their relationships. Among so many other things, Brightness Falls is a really gorgeous exploration of adult friendship, which is one of my favourite things to read in fiction.

Anyway, in the years since then, Jay McInerney has written three more novels about the Calloways and I went to see him discuss the above at ILFD this past weekend. It was a real treat, it always is, hearing from the author of a novel you have loved for so long.

And two things I can’t stop thinking about

I just saw a reel on Instagram, a series of images of Dublin with a text overlay saying that you should move to your dream city even if nobody thinks it’s any good. This was accompanied by a caption about how nobody romanticises this city the way they do other cities. I had an instinctive annoyed reaction: Oh, nobody romanticises their lives here?? Really?? Though I do know the verb ‘to romanticise’ now simply means, in this context, ‘to make algorithm-friendly Instagram content about a place or thing’. And I don’t want to single out this random poster because this stuff is everywhere, about everything, and this is just the one that popped up on my feed today. And also the pictures of Dublin were indeed nice. Still, I feel deranged by the whole thing! Also, who’s ‘nobody’? Have you ever heard about the history of Irish literature or song, perhaps. I don’t know. The problem is the internet. The bubble of it all, the way life is only deemed ‘good’ if it’s packaged nicely for the internet’s consumption, the single-minded focus on the whole world as seen only through your phone camera - it just seems so flat, like such a waste of so much life. I need to go back to deleting Instagram from my phone and perhaps my entire life.

I’m pages away from finishing the excellent and so fun Go Gentle by Maria Semple, with whom I’ll be chatting tomorrow afternoon at Hay! I’m excited for this, though extremely apprehensive about the heat. If you’re there, please come along and wilt with us.

Until next week!

1. Barry’s Tea, Master Blend

We’ve recently changed our household tea preference. It’s now the one in the black box for us. For me, this is the Platonic ideal of how tea should taste. Malty, biscuity, toasty, all the good comforting stuff. The stuff of nostalgia. For reference it’s more like Yorkshire Gold than Barry’s Gold Blend is. And it has to be loose leaf. One of my new year’s resolutions this year was more loose leaf, less teabag tea. Teabag tea is microplastic bisque.

2. A great big walk

Who cares if it’s raining? Put your shoes on, zip up your raincoat and start walking. This was such a big part of my life for so long and now I almost never do it. You sleep much better after a good 18km or so!

3. International Literary Festival Dublin, or ILFD.

I did an event here this past weekend with Sarvat Hasin, discussing our novels with Liadán Hynes. (I really enjoyed Strange Girls and there was so much thematic overlap for us both to get into.) ILFD is such a nice festival, a great size, a lovely feeling of intimacy and calm. That’s especially good for me since I do not like to sit on a stage with everyone watching me. But alas, I do love to yap. Do I contradict myself? Very well then.

4. Relatedly, I love to yap about art

I didn’t really realise, while writing a novel about a pair of fictional artists, that this would mean I might eventually be asked interesting and sometimes difficult questions about the nature of art. About art-making, the economics of it, the gender of it all, about ethics, legacies, the notion of genius, about what the point of it all is. This is a fun thing to work through in my head, something I (obviously) thought plenty about while writing Frida Slattery As Herself. But the ideas in my novel are just that: ideas in a work of fiction. The book is not an essay or an interview about those ideas. But the nature of promoting my novel involves talking about those ideas, and that feels like a gift and a privilege. Even if I do really hate to sit on a stage with everyone watching me.

5. Being sent pics of my book in far-flung bookshops, in places I’ll never go!

Auckland, NZ! Valparaiso, Indiana! The various airports of the UK and Ireland! She’s well travelled.

6. The Seafood Cafe in Temple Bar

Genuinely, is this place the best thing in Temple Bar? And is there a better lunch for two than oysters, prawns, crab salad, chips and a pair of martinis? Definitely if you’re visiting Dublin and interested in Irish seafood, this is the place to go. (I also rate Fish Shop but I think Seafood Cafe is potentially more comprehensive, but really you’re in for a treat with either.)

Also if you’re in Ireland and longing for oysters I think Flaggy Shores are the best.

7. This house in Inchicore

And look at its garden! I’ve got a deep desire for a tiny tiny writing shed at the moment, a little box with just a desk and a window at the end of a long and winding garden… Surely this would help me write my next novel… I’m very envious of houses with gardens that might allow this dream to come true.

8. New John Carroll Kirby

I can’t stop listening to this lovely track!

9. The cinnamon morning bun at Scéal Bakery

It is foolish of me to post a pic of this entirely sugar-dusted treat and claim that ‘it’s actually not that sweet’. But here we are, you’ll have to try it for yourself.

And four things I can’t stop thinking about

Am I too reliant on baked goods for daily joy at the moment?

I loved Soft God by Emma Martin at the Abbey last week, as part of Dublin Dance Festival. It was just pure fun, start to finish, really riotous. I’d love to see it again - I can definitely imagine it at Sadler’s Wells - and I hope it comes back in some form soon.

The Guardian 100 best novels of all time list. Specifically, why is it so conservative? So little from the last 30 years of literature? I’m left with the vague impression that some of the people polled might have a strong idea of the kind of novels they’re supposed to rate in a context like this, and that this might have superseded their ability to properly define their own views of ‘best novels’. No offence. Anyway, I love this stuff generally. I probably would have included Underworld by Don DeLillo, The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt, The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Maybe Possession by AS Byatt. Maybe 10:04 by Ben Lerner.

How to get over my hatred of sitting on a stage? Tips welcome please.

I’ll also say that the next day, my editor and agent planted a rogue free copy of the book in the arms of the barman statue outside Kehoe’s on South Anne Street, where the story opens. I found out later that day that it was nabbed by someone I was at college with! This in itself feels very Frida Slattery. If you’re sad you didn’t grab the Kehoe’s copy, you can simply buy your own: UK / Ireland / US.

Anyway, onto this week’s things.

1. A Real Person by Lena Moses-Schmitt

This is a wonderful and thought-provoking illustrated essay about cars, driving and ageing. I felt like I could keep reading all day.

I actually saw pieces of this story my first night at MacDowell last autumn where I, stunned and jet-lagged after dinner, walked through the woods in the dark to Lena’s studio to see her recent work. I hadn’t had any idea what kind of work the other fellows would be making, so it was a pleasant surprise to walk into her studio and find huge boards covered in very intriguing illustrated index-cards, some of which were the basis for the story above. It was such a groovy way to immerse yourself in someone’s work - to stand in a small room in the woods (the one where Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town) and just start peering at all these pictures and words until you get a sense of the story. But if you can’t do that, you can also just click the link above and see Lena’s essay that way. (Also: Lena’s Substack)

2. Children’s picture books as coping manuals for adults by Lisa Owens

The illustrations of the adults, though, were what captivated me: bleary-eyed, multitasking, pregnant, on the phone, clambered upon with glasses askew, cooking, affectionate, exhausted. Here was a vision of parenting in the round — the good, the bad and the will you please just go to bed. It brought me great comfort and relief. “The Baby’s Catalogue,” I realized, wasn’t only helping my children process their lived experiences. It was also helping me process mine.

I loved this kind, intelligent essay about the harried adults in children’s picture books, and about how art gives structure to the daily chaos of ordinary life. If you like this, you’ll also love Lisa’s forthcoming novel Natural Disaster.

3. Personalised correspondence cards

This is easily the most decadent thing I’ve ever done with my money. When my first book Look Here was coming out in 2022, I ordered a set of 50 notecards and envelopes with my name printed from Mount Street Printers. The idea was I’d use them for sending copies out to people featured in the book or who helped me with it, etc. They came in a beautiful box and I still have a decent amount left. Every time I have a chance to use them I’m just astonished at the paper quality, the weight, the depth of colour… It may have been very expensive but honestly, I think worth it for such a good quality physical object, especially in this (checks notes) ‘digital age’. Nice stationery also turns the act of sending post or giving a card to someone into a much more precise, thoughtful process, I think, a way-station amid the endless and often mindless correspondence that my days are somehow defined by.

(Good God, I’ve just checked the Mount Street Printers website and the price has almost doubled in four years. I will be rationing my cards from here on out.)

4. The faces of concentration my cats make when hunting a fly

The boy cat in particular. Look at his frown, his cheeks.

5. Carrying a matcha latte in my bike basket

I used to do a lot of trail running and it’s the same thing, really, the same kind of mindful care given to every ounce of movement to make sure it doesn’t spill, you’re never truly switching off, it’s meditative in that way.

6. A particular cookie

I’ve been let down by bad chocolate chip cookies this week. So sad, what a world. But there’s one cookie that’ll never let me down. It’s a small round chocolate and walnut cookie from 3fe that is very well suited to coffee - not too sweet, nicely nutty, lovely rich chocolate. I don’t have a picture of this because I ate it too quickly. I love you cookie.

6. The dress I wore to my book launch

Cotton poplin really is a goated fabric. This dress is from Cecilie Bahnsen (as was my wedding dress!) and when I bought it from the Outnet months ago, I had visions of a warm and sunny May evening in the bookshop. Alas it was in fact freezing last week. So I wore it with a little tee underneath, and I look forward to wearing it again on sunny days later this year. It’s very long, it’s strappy, it has a bow at the back and a smocked bust. It’s so funny that after so many years writing about clothes for a living I now have no idea how to do it anymore.

7. Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen by Alix Kates Shulman

I bought this on impulse from the bookseller’s choice section at the LRB bookshop when in London last week. I really love a bookseller’s choice section. I was surprised by this novel from the first page - racy and candid, somewhat bohemian, gloriously self-centred and so clearly a direct predecessor for many of the sex-and-inner-life novels I’ve read by modern-day women writers in the last ten years. Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen is sort of a less pained The Bell Jar, or a more self-absorbed The Group. I will say it slightly fell off for me towards the end - both the story and the telling become more conventional as the book advances - but overall I thought it was a lot of fun and definitely worth a read.

See you next week!

With every second that passes, the boat gets further and further from you. It becomes smaller and smaller out there on the waves. You begin to realise that you are not on the boat. You are on the dock. You knew this to begin with; you built the boat for other passengers and not for yourself to sail. But at some point, nailing the boards together, you may have forgotten this. Long, lonely hours in the boatshed: maybe the boat will take me with it.

But it won’t, of course! You built the boat for those who choose to sail it. So you push it out to sea. You stand on the shore and watch it become a speck in the distance. And doesn’t it look nice out there on the water?

FRIDA SLATTERY AS HERSELF is out now. I hope you enjoy reading it.

Waterstone’s

Books Upstairs

Harper Collins (US)

1. This pint of Guinness

I don’t drink much Guinness any more so when I do it feels like a bit of a novelty and a treat. And when it’s good, it’s really so good. I drank this at our friends’ gorgeous wedding in beautiful, chilly spring sunshine.

2. The 1926 census

I could spend all day in here, looking for women with unusual jobs, babies listed erroneously as ‘single’ and people taking the piss in the religion column. Any random street address contains so much potential lore. We learned that our street was home to war widows and groups of unmarried brothers, and that both my grandfathers claimed they were fluent Irish speakers (news to their present-day children).

And the 1920s are the period of Irish history I find most interesting. What a time of great change. And great madness, too! In the aftermath of two cataclysmic wars at home, many Irish people were out here ‘reinventing’ themselves, making up entirely new stories about themselves. If you comb through the census for long enough, you’re sure to find some of these creative reinventions.

3. Blossom in the seams

   The way the pink gathers!

4. The machines that made my book

I was lucky to go and visit CPI, the printers who produce the UK edition of my book, this week. I was there to sign several hundred copies of FRIDA, but I also got to have a little tour of the facility, seeing every step of the printing and binding process. This was a true delight and I learned so much about the production process. I came away feeling a great deal of fondness for both the people and the machines who took my little 100k-word doc and turned it into a physical object, a thing made of paper and ink and glue, that you can hold in your hands for yourself, and that is going to start having a life of its own in just two weeks’ time. (Pre-order FRIDA SLATTERY please, UK / Ireland / US).

5. The outfit I wore to a dinner my publisher very generously arranged for my book

I got this top from a recent Jennifer Slattery sample sale… queueing for this sale was stressful and reminded me why I stopped going to sample sales in my mid-20s… but that’s all in the past now. I love the smooth and pearly-coloured linen of this top and loved wearing it to dinner earlier this week. Oysters! Negronis! A big plate of roast chicken and chips! A wiser author than me told me recently that if there’s any single part of the publishing process that feels good, make sure you’re really enjoying it, because greater misery awaits. And I can say now that this part I enjoyed so, so much! Roll on misery :)

6. Reading the novel that everyone is talking about

I don’t know, it just makes me feel present and alive to be halfway through the big new book that has a lot of buzz… I can take part in the conversations, read the reviews, I can ‘weigh in’, even if only in my own brain! This week it’s Yesteryear. (I’m not finished yet so no spoilers please.)

7. The joys of second-level education

Last week I got an email informing me that my first book, LOOK HERE, has been added to the set text list for A Level English Language and Literature. This was a big surprise and a big delight! I loved studying English in school, and the texts I read back then left such a big mark on me. So it feels really like an honour to think some teenagers might spend some time in their formative reading years with my book!

It’s also just evidence of a real belief I have about writing and publishing books: it sometimes leads to completely unexpected places, it’s a cosmic roll of the dice, the work can open surprising doors for you even years later. And it can live differently in the minds of any and every reader, which feels amazing to me and is something I am so appreciative of.

If you’re curious about LOOK HERE you can buy it here.

One thing I can’t stop thinking about

We should nationalise Nigella Lawson

I am hesitant to weigh on this, especially using the ‘we’ there, because I am no longer a UK taxpayer. But enough is enough. There are far too many banner ads and autoplay videos on Nigella.com, it’s at times barely usable. I respect her right and in fact her need to generate income through her recipes online, but I also think there has to be a better way for everyone. That way is… nationalising Nigella’s back catalogue of recipes.

Taken as a whole, Nigella’s oeuvre is nothing short of a national treasure for the UK. Almost a qualifier for UNESCO’s intangible cultural heritage list. I’m not joking. We really should be taking this more seriously.

So a proposal: the UK should buy the rights to host the recipes ad-free. No paywall. For everyone. The price would be whatever she is currently making from the ads on the website. Host the recipes online for the British public (and beyond). I think this should be done through the BBC, who could then house Nigella.com on a special BBC Food website. It’s a simple proposition. The overheads are low, and on the whole it would be an easy win for the BBC. It should be noted that the BBC is long overdue for an easy win. (It would also be even more goodwill for Nigella, not that she needs it, but just in case she’d like it.)

(However, I am also aware that with Nigella now linked with the Channel 4 iteration of GBBO - maybe this is in fact one for Channel 4 which, lest we forget, is also public television although afaik receives no public funding.)

Thanks for reading and see you next week!

1. Transcription by Ben Lerner

I wasn’t surprised to find that I loved this novel, considering I have really enjoyed all of Ben Lerner’s other novels. But it was surprising to me that it fits neatly into a category of contemporary novels I always enjoy, where the novel itself is a neat trick that folds back in on itself and almost demands a second reading the moment you finish it. Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, Intimacies by Katie Kitamura, The Rehearsal and The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton… I’m sure there are more I’m forgetting, if you know of any, please share them!

Transcription is also a rare novel that is able to deal with those too-large-to-see aspects of ‘our modern lives’ in a way that feels… important? Successful? Just simply good, maybe. The transformative strangeness of the Covid pandemic, the constant looming presence of phones and our undignified dependence on them. It is all in here but look, I need to read it again to understand it better.

2. The cover of Transcription by Ben Lerner

‘It looks like a book from the past,’ Karl said admiringly, picking it up and tilting the glossy black cover back and forth to catch the light. It does, but also it took me 31 pages to realise that it looks like the Voice Memos app.

3. The first 30 pages of Commonwealth by Ann Patchett

I borrowed this from Eleanore and reread it this week. I think it’s the best opening of a novel of its kind. You can feel the heat at the christening party, the stickiness of the California oranges being squeezed for cocktails, the drunk priest, all the children running around. And then, of course, the infidelity that sets the scene for the rest of the story. The shifting interiority throughout, the way the ‘camera’ moves so effortlessly from one character to the next. It’s a masterclass, I picked it up again to just remember how it can be done.

4. This eyeshadow.. Stick? Pen?

I bought this in London last month from Jones Road in Liberty. My whole goal with cosmetics is to spend as little time as possible engaging with my face and then hopefully end up looking sort of French, and I feel like running this over my eyelids does like 40% of the work in getting me there.

5. Jack Rollo’s Early Bird show on NTS

Has soundtracked many a Friday morning in my house. Just really good ambient, some weird stuff, a very gentle start to the day.

A few other NTS shows I am emotionally reliant on: The Slip, United in Flames and anything touched by the hand of Chuquimamani-Condori. And Lung Dart, of course.

6. When my girl cat sticks her head out of the velvet curtain like a conniving member of the royal court

I sent this pic to Rosie who said that she looks like the shy muse of a Dutch master.

7. The Wreck by Lizzy Stewart

I haven’t read heaps of graphic novels but I absolutely loved Lizzy’s earlier novel, Alison when I read it in 2022. Like I really loved it. I can’t imagine how you wouldn’t. I’ve given copies as gifts to at least three people. Lizzy has a genius for creating characters, and then revealing the tiniest facets of those characters in both prose and illustration. It’s an incredible combination that, personally, I can’t get enough of. The Wreck is about two couples, old friends, who decide to live communally, moving into a large old manor house together. Sadly, life-ruining interpersonal mayhem ensues. I don’t want to say anymore because I think you should simply read it. It also covers some of the same ground as my novel Frida Slattery As Herself - long-durational friendship, what is right or wrong between people, making art about the above - and for that reason (among many others) I am simply so excited to be doing an event with Lizzy later this summer!

8. Dumpling lunch

A morning in town with friends, then to Little Dumpling on Stephen Street, where we inhaled this delicious spread and felt revived after.

9. Making these lists!

Having now done these lists for several weeks in a row, I can say I am a convert. It requires keeping a little note going in my phone and actually thinking about what’s been good each day…. it’s giving gratitude journal… It’s making me pursue tiny pleasures in the gaps in the week… What could be better than that? PS Next week’s might be a day late, in case you’re counting.

And several things I can’t stop thinking about:

The actor playing JFK Jr in Love Story… would we say his hair real?

My step count is frankly too high thanks to the Dublin fuel blockades.

This subhead from the Irish Times… Yes, leave her alone!

Salon Rógaire, the excellent bilingual readings series run by Róisín Nic Ghearailt, now has a substack.

Been worrying a lot about what to wear to exercise. Microplastics, etc. But also, sometimes you’re the only person in the gym doing bicep curls in a Shirley Jackson t-shirt - and that’s OK too.

I’ve been looking for nice bedside tables for two whole years now - what is the solution?

I loved this film! It was fun and compelling and reminded me of Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, which points to a generational vibe that is finally being adequately pinned down. It didn’t have the same self-seriousness that I’ve found in other films that try to rework or twist the rom-com genre for an audience of millennial grown-ups. They’re both great actors, the script was really good and the whole thing looked both convincing and dreamily precise. And also it’s a piece of art about men’s mental health, which we are told is vanishingly rare these days. Overall you will have a good time at this movie I think.

2. Going to the earliest showing of a film on a given day

Like an 11am job. You’re getting a coffee and maybe a little treat on the way and when you come out from the darkness the IFI atrium is crowded but you’ve already seen an entire movie! It’s only lunchtime and you’ve got the whole day ahead of you.

3. A sausage roll from Elliot’s on Arran Street.

Speaking of little treat. It was just so good, the best I’ve had outside of England, and worth the surprisingly long queue.

4. This mille-feuille from Library Street

God, more little treats. Everything at Library Street is very, very delicious but please, a moment for this huge and elaborate construction. Rhubarb and tonka bean inside, truly very nice. And ideal for sharing!

5. Permanence by Sophie Mackintosh

I loved this novel and think it’ll end up on a great many important lists this year. I’ve read all four of Sophie’s novels and this is my favourite. It felt very real, very original and I was immersed in it the way you are with a brilliant film. Reminded me of Synecdoche, New York, of OTCOV, of when you go on a city break and start imagining your new life there, of Habitat by Catriona Shine and of all those dreams where you spot a huge crack in the side of your home and everything terrible follows from there.

6. My sourdough starter!

It has yet to produce a Good Loaf but it has produced a couple of perfectly edible ones, and also I just like the little daily routine of weighing it, discarding it, feeding it, stirring it.

7. The very long Easter lunch

We now do this every year and each time, afterwards, I’m like OK, maybe that one was actually too long? But then maybe the length is actually the point, like a Marina Abramovic piece… You have to let the candles burn down. Sometimes it just makes sense to sit at a table with a whole lot of food and guffaw loudly with your friends for a good seven or eight hours. Healing.

8. Getting dressed for spring sunshine.

Like I’m also still very cold but it’s definitely nice to be in blues and reds and blacks on a bright day.

9. Not having Instagram on my phone

I now download the app onto my phone once a week and post a bunch of little stories and then other than that, it’s gone. Look, I still look at Instagram on my computer browser during the week. But I’m spending much less time on it now overall, and I’m spending more time reading instead! (Also, you see far fewer auto-playing video ads in the browser for some reason, for me that’s a good enough justification for doing this.)

A few things I can’t stop thinking about

Will I finish, or indeed start, the book club book in time this month?

Everything is in leaf suddenly!

When DTC clothes brands have ‘Designed in [Ireland / England / trendy European city] as their tagline. OK great, but made where, please? Made WHERE?

Similarly, what’s the natural fibres leggings alternative for exercise clothing? I am really reliant on polyester leggings currently. Are there any baggy 100% cotton shorts that are gym-appropriate and also, dare I ask, chic?

I read Flesh by David Szalay this week and my main takeaway was that it’s Normal People for blokes (complimentary!)

Should I do yellow in the kitchen? Our last rental in London had a yellow kitchen and everyone hated it but I thought it was pleasant. There is already quite a lot of yellow in our house.

Is the fox who lives in our back garden pregnant? We’ll find out very soon! Either way, that’s a springtime indicator.

1. Blossom trees are doing their thing!

   

   

2. And thus the season of reading outside has kicked off

To be honest I’d do this any time of year as long as it’s not wet out and it’s not gale-force windy. But now it feels like it has begun in earnest. Doing this in the morning as often as possible - even if only for fifteen minutes - seems to have a real tangible effect on my mood and my energy levels.

3. The new Gwendoline Riley

This is the third of her novels I’ve read and I think she is a remarkable writer, a true master of restraint and realism in fiction. Also this feels set in a London I know and can recognise, which makes for both enjoyable and unnerving reading.

4. Showing visitors around my beloved city

Two years ago I wrote the texts for a very pretty book about Dublin’s literary history and culture (it’s called Literary Landscapes: Dublin) and as a result I now have a huge amount of random information lodged deep in my brain. This means that when friends from overseas comes to visit the city I am well equipped to show them around and shower them with facts about WB Yeats, the Easter Rising, bog bodies, the Civil War, where various poets drank, what Sylvia Plath got up to in Ireland, etc. I got to do this for the first time in ages this week for my friend Kimberly and her parents, and it was a lot of fun!

5. Goat yoghurt

Tastes like I am eating St Tola in a fancy restaurant but I am in fact eating breakfast in my kitchen.

6. Having two cats

It’s been almost eighteen months since I started sharing my home with two bonded siblings. It is in fact much better than having one cat. However some of the downsides (litter, hair) do actually increase exponentially with more than one cat. Having three litter boxes in our small house is quite annoying. But life, generally, is good. They are funny to look at. They keep each other company. They somehow make it so you don’t have to brush them as often. And crucially, they clown for each other’s amusement - one running back and forth, hunting a toy or climbing around, while the other lounges from a safe distance and watches.

7. Unrelatedly, the giant lint rollers from Muji

The war on cat hair is real, especially in shedding season. I buy these in bulk from the webshop now that the shop in Chatham Street is gone. I use them on everything: furniture, curtains, the carpet, cushions.

8. Strength training

I realised this week I’ve been lifting things and putting them back down again with reasonable consistency (and some gaps) for eight years now! I do think it is an incredible panacea for many of the problems of having a body. And it truly just slots into my life with ease. At the moment I do it a mere two times a week, often for no more than about 30 minutes a session and half of that is literal rest, reading my book, looking at this app, etc. Unlike running, I can do it with a minor headcold, a hangover, period cramps, (though the latter of those don’t really bother me when I’m lifting regularly). It’s the single best thing women can do to avoid getting osteoporosis and it gives me better posture, too. It’s nice to feel I’m doing something that will help me ‘age well’. I also do other forms of exercise but to me this is a core thing that I will hopefully be doing for the rest of my life.

9. When friends ask me what’s the best way to order my novel

I’m not even including this as an opportunity to shoehorn in more pre-order links for Frida (but I will do that anyway). It’s just genuinely nice to be asked, it feels good. and it’s a better thing for your soon-to-be-publishing friend to hear than the usual ‘how are you feeling / are you spiralling into a pit of despair’ (not good / sort of yes). (Pre-order here: US / UK / Ireland)

10. Glycolic acid for your entire skin

Summer is coming and it’s time to encourage turnover of your cells.

11. This pic of Holly Lodge Gardens from six years ago today

I was lucky to live in this very idyllic place during the first lockdown. Our flat was prohibitively small, laughably small, but I spent much of the spring and summer days out in the communal gardens, so Karl could work in the living room in peace. It was a difficult time and I am very wary of viewing it with too much nostalgia, but this picture reminds me of how we often find ways of making things comfortable for ourselves, even in times of real discomfort.

I also remember drinking beers in these gardens with a friend one Friday night later in the spring when we heard calls from a nearby rooftop. Three people had gone up to look at the sunset and the fire door had slammed shut behind them. They threw their keys down and I scampered up five flights to free them. Once out on the roof, I had to stop for a moment and take it in for myself: the sunset, the city.

What I can’t stop thinking about

Is long-form journalism so back? Two articles that went around the group chat this week: The Girls of Camp Mystic (heartbreaking, excellent reporting) and Transference in the Afternoon (confusing, scandalous).

Ulysses Club! We’re a quarter of the way through! We’ve acquired some companion books! We’re starting to figure out what metempsychosis is! There’s no turning back from here.

Why is all UX writing from Irish institutions so bad? Why are TFI sending me an urgent push notification about Leap cards? Why does every email from my bank have a subject line that makes it sound like I’ve just been the victim of fraud?

How do people take those walking outfit selfies, are my arms simply too long for this?

What should I read next? Enjoying short novels at the moment.

Am I going to want to make sourdough and banana bread in late March every year forever because of 2020? Is a yearning for baked goods the other ‘long Covid’?

My book comes out in five weeks and I’m not thinking about it!

To write this novel, I had to create many fictional works of art to nest within it. At the outset, this was sort of intimidating. As a reader, I had found that sometimes made-up works of art in novels can appear corny or don’t seem quite real. But I soon found that making them up was actually extremely good fun. It was simply a case of thinking: who are these people, and what kind of art might they make? For that, I had to step back and ask: what kind of art do they love?

Doing so meant asking that same question of myself. While there is, by design, absolutely nothing in this novel that comes directly from my life, obviously it all comes from and through my own experience and outlook in indirect ways. As far as I know, that’s how fiction works. With that in mind, here are five works of art/bodies of work that were circling in my mind while I wrote this novel.

The cinema of David Lynch

There’s a lot I love about David Lynch. Twin Peaks: The Return remains one of my favourite films of all time. But during my long, often tortuously professionally bored 20s, I particularly loved listening to the great director speak about ideas. “We don’t create an idea - we catch them, like fish.” He often talks about them as a tiny germ of a thing that nonetheless contains everything you ultimately need to realise it. Like an atom bomb, I suppose. It made a real impact on me and made me determined to be always open to the spark, not to shut off the often-called ‘childlike’ part of the brain that loves play and pretend and making things up, because who knows what will come to you if you leave that door open?

(It is probably anathema to a certain kind of never-was-concerned-with-an-income writer, but David Lynch also made me better at my old day job in advertising 🙂 I needed my income from that job to write this novel.)

Some of the first parts of Frida that I wrote were John Reddan sitting around trying to come up with ideas for plays. I found these parts easy to write, and very fun. He jumps around, he is sometimes tortured by his lack of certainty in things, he is desperate for ‘the spark’, the seed, for Lynch’s fish. This doesn’t just happen at the beginning of his career. It is a myth, I think, to associate this sort of thing with the rookie.

Also: There are a great many male filmmakers who have been enamoured with blonde female actors. When I started thinking about this, I was thinking obviously about Hitchcock, and also about Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann (and the others). But the most interesting of these for me has been David Lynch and Laura Dern.

Frida is blonde and John is a spiky-haired man enamoured with an actress, and in this sense it is a small homage to this very relationship. RIP to the big guy.

Not I, Samuel Beckett and Billie Whitelaw, 1973

I realised early on that ‘someone like John Reddan’ would definitely like Samuel Beckett. If you read the novel you’ll find out why, but for now I’ll explain why I like Beckett.

People often say things like Beckett is a misanthrope but I don’t know if I agree. I think he knows about the bleakness of the world - I think his work is often about the end of things, the limits, the darkness beyond. But that isn’t the same thing as misanthropy. Beckett, like Lynch, has been a big influence on my writing because I think his work often shines a light, and then zones in in an uncomfortable way, on parts of the human experience that we would rather not confront. In college I took an excellent course in postmodern fiction and when my lecturer showed us Not I, I was aghast not only at the unusual delivery and format (the mouth, floating in darkness), but also the content within: the traumatic biography of a miserable old woman; the pain that at times, can only be expressed in a scream.

That said, I am not any of the characters in the book and I think that John Reddan, who likes and admires the work of Beckett from a young age, would have liked it in part on the simple basis of a sense of shared misanthropy.

The existence of Cate Blanchett (1969 - present)

I remember walking home from seeing Tár in the Rathmines Omniplex, a chilly January night not long after I’d moved back to Dublin and thinking that I was lucky to live in a time when Cate Blanchett was acting. I remember also thinking that I was glad I wasn’t an actress, because I thought it would be impossible not to be jealous of her talent, her roles, her career, and the respect she garners as a result of all of the above. So much of an acting career is luck, and so much else is contingent on the decisions of others, particularly for women. In this way, I think it would be particularly easy to feel envy for your objectively more successful peers, moreso than for other professions (like, for instance, fiction writing).

In the following days I read a lot of interviews with Blanchett from over the years and was struck by how she spoke about the Australian theatre director Benedict Andrews, with whom she worked on Richard II in 2009 in Sydney. Over the years the two have collaborated several times and I loved this idea - that an actor like Blanchett, who has had such success in Hollywood, would choose to return again and again to work with this one particular person. It must give her so much, I thought.

That idea bloomed in the dark of my mind - a Lynchian seed - and I started writing Frida in earnest quite soon after that. Once I had that spark, I left my research into Blanchett and Andrews there. Similarly to Lynch and Dern, I wasn’t interested in these people’s biographies or their work together, or in whatever imprecise representation of their inner lives that I might try to put together through reading interviews, etc. I was going to make things up. It was enough to know that they existed, they worked together, that they had the kind of creative connection that could be a rich seam for fiction.

I am not lucky enough to have seen Blanchett on stage directed by Andrews, though I’m hoping that might change later this year at the National Theatre.

The Muppet Show (1976-81)

The Muppet Show is a formative influence on John Reddan’s creative work, but perhaps not in a way he’d like to admit. He’s an artist, after all, and his lack of exposure to the world of the creative arts in childhood has left him feeling slightly on the back foot as an adult.

But for me, The Muppet Show generated some of my earliest encounters with the idea of the theatre. My earliest memories of the theatre are a) a school trip to see The BFG in Wimbledon (?) when I was about five or six, and b) watching reruns of The Muppet Show on Friday evenings before dinner.

The theatre of The Muppet Show is a grand and exciting place, and I loved that the programme wasn’t confined to the onstage action - it continued backstage, into Miss Piggy’s dressing room, Kermit’s desk, the staff canteen and of course, into the audience, to the box where the two old cranks Statler and Waldorf got to sit on high and criticise everything. All of theatre was here: Not just the glamour of the show, but all the labour that goes into making the on-stage proceedings come together. (Particularly from Kermit, who really bears the burden.) Guests running late. Technical problems. Big egos and little foibles. Numerous instances of slapstick-level miscommunication. Even acknowledging that actors must eat if they are to go on stage and do their jobs. And then, amidst it all, the thrill of live performance! Where the stakes are high and anything can go wrong! It’s a powerful narrative force in The Muppet Show, it keeps things going, and it makes for compelling viewing.

The House (1996)

Relatedly, long before I wrote this novel, I became obsessed with The House, a fly-on-the-wall docuseries set in the Royal Opera House. Made in 1996, it paved the way for a whole genre of similar documentaries, but it’s also an incredibly intimate view of this strange place, which was at the time run by and for the very posh, and was essentially failing as a result.

When I started going to the ROH around 2016, I found a very different institution - one that endeavoured to be open and accessible and far less elitist. That was how I managed, over about eight years, to see a fair chunk of the Royal Ballet’s repertoire for the cost of a cinema ticket each time. (Bring binoculars if you’re going to do this.) I’m still entranced by The House, though, not only its management poshos but its mistreated diva opera stars, its hungry ballerinas, and its assorted weirdos in the audience. Much like The Muppet Show, it all feeds into a top-to-bottom, materialist view of how the art we consume gets made, and by who, and these were questions that were circling in my mind from when I first started writing this novel until I filed the last edit not long ago.

This is only a tiny glimpse into the long list of things that influenced this novel, of course. For one thing, there were countless plays that informed my ideas of Frida and John’s oeuvre. In many ways, it feels like every film, every TV show, every play I’ve ever seen went into the writing of Frida Slattery As Herself, and if I sat down to write this post in a month’s time I might mention five completely different titles, instead. But these five are the ones that are on my mind today.

—

Frida Slattery As Herself is out on 7th May and it’s deeply important that you pre-order it. Here in the UK, or here in the US, or here in good old Ireland, where the book was written and where I type these words today. Thanks for reading and see you next week!

1. My new striped tote bag from the LRB Bookshop

The last one of these I bought ripped at the seams after a week of use but because I am a relentless optimist, I have high hopes for this one. It’s very roomy and as you see, the stripes.

2. Drinking in the Harlequin before going to Sadler’s Wells

On Thursday evening the sun was out in London and every pub we passed on the walk from Smithfield north to Angel was heaving with revellers - pavements clogged, voices loud, a sea of tote bags lumped in between ankles. Onwards, we said, to the Harlequin. The Harlequin is a tiny backstreet pub that has long been the designated theatre pub of the theatre next door. Inside it’s arty in the way of 1990s coffee shops - walls cluttered with mismatched prints, candles dripping wax, tiny chalkboards, things hanging from the ceiling, etc. There’s a lot of ephemera related to Grimaldi, the famous 19th-century clown, including a printed copy of his farewell speech. (The very words ‘farewell speech of a famous clown’ should be bringing tears to your eyes, really.) (Sorry, the ‘Last years’ section of his Wikipedia contains this, which has truly done me in: The years of extreme physical exertion his clowning had involved had taken a toll on his joints.)

Anyway, go here, have a wine or a beer, they also do cheeseboards and I think they used to ring a bell to summon you to your seats for the performance next door, but am not sure if this still happens so don’t count on it.

3. People-watching at Sadler’s Wells

I was sort of flummoxed by the people-watching in London this weekend. It’s undoubtable that many people are suddenly wearing much better clothing than before. But it’s also true that there’s less style? Like I’ve seen too much nice post-CBK tailoring on girls and double-pleated pants on men and buttery leather on everyone and stupid baseball caps everywhere, and it’s all too straight-forward and by-numbers and I am exhausted by it. Sadler’s Wells is different and much more inspiring - the crowd’s style is less trendy, more eccentric, more intensely personal, and the bonus is that there are enough off-duty dancers around to make you subconsciously improve your own posture.

4. One more dance-related thing, sorry

For the last few years I’ve been buying my non-running exercise gear from Bloch, the famed dancewear specialist. It’s well suited to the tallish narrow-framed woman, especially if mainstream sports bras are overkill for you. Covent Garden store is beautiful too and there are always adult women getting fitted for their first pointe shoes, which is a vibe.

5. Welsh rarebit at St John

It’s just good to have a reliable and consistent favourite dish in the back pocket. It’s like a Big Mac in that way. No further questions.

6. My leopard-print tights

I bought them from Dunnes Stores for I think €3.

6. First Love by Gwendoline Riley

I haven’t finished it yet but it’s very comforting to be reading the work of a genius.

7. John Proctor Is The Villain at the Royal Court

Speaking of the work of a genius... Start to finish I loved this play, but I especially loved how it gets really into the impossibility of language, it turns this impossibility into a narrative force… and especially how this feels for a teenager who is confronting parts of life for the very first time! It was a thrill to see this rendered so movingly on stage. E.g. How do I say this? What is this person saying to me? Why don’t the others in this room actually say what they mean? In that case, is the only option left to scream one’s head off, or dance it out?

It’s a perfectly written script written by the great genius Kimberly Belflower and if you can get a ticket to the sold-out run I really think you have to go. I’ve had ‘Green Light’ stuck in my head since Friday night.

8. The collective feeling present at Tracey Emin at Tate Modern

The work on show is so intensely personal, so intimate, so harrowing, so close to the bone that it hurts to look at. However else one might feel about Emin’s work, that part is inescapable here. In that sense it was incredible and also slightly horrific to see so much of it in one place. You do get the sense that Emin created the blueprint for so much that happened in contemporary art and literature by women in the past thirty years, and also the sense that in doing so, she herself has been irreparably hurt or changed by the process of it all. But also, perhaps that’s life? When I pushed open the door of the exit I felt a kind of full-bodied release, like a large wave had just passed over me. The next thing I saw was the guestbook: full of messages that comment on the relentless of her work, the energy within it.

SHE STILL ALIVE <3

What I can’t stop thinking about

Why is everything at Cafe Deco so delicious? How do they do it? Why does it feel like it was made in a lab to appeal to me specifically?

The cut-off disembodied legs of the trapeze artist in the top left-hand corner of Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. Relentlessly intriguing! Curiously modern! Every time I go to the Courtauld I have to puzzle it out a little more.

What should I do with my hair? Shorter or not? And where do I get it cut?

At lunch on my birthday, a man walked in and greeted his waiting friend by calling out ‘There’s my sweet boy!’ and then singing ‘Oh, how I love you…’ in a low tone while embracing him. A) this is exactly how I greet my boy cat Raggy and B) this is the spirit of friendly affection with which I should surely try to live my life.

The note in my phone where I’m collating everything people have told me helped their gut health. Digestive enzymes? Alflorex? 5 Htp? Don’t worry it’s all going in the Notes app.

My weird new Chinese trainers which I am simply so excited to wear all summer long. Their low profile reminds me of Repetto jazz shoes, which I used to hunt down on eBay in my early 20s and wore while dashing all over London like Mick Jagger, like a ballerina running late, like the whole city underfoot was the sprung hardwood floor of a dance studio.

But I assume that someday it’ll all come together for me. One thing I like about getting older is how for years something will seem boring or strange or impenetrable, and then one day you’ll turn on the radio, hear a snippet of opera and think, oh, hell yes, that sounds great. It comes to you like a mystic vision. And then suddenly you’re all in on opera, and there’s so much of it, so you’re elbow deep in the history and breadth of a genre or format that is entirely new to you. Bliss!

Is The Testament of Ann Lee an opera? I asked myself this on the way home from the cinema the other night. Not quite, but almost. As we left the cinema, Annelise said ‘I’d read it described as a musical, but that was no musical.’

It was perhaps more like a ballet than anything else. Ballet - another thing I didn’t understand until one day I suddenly did. The movement in Ann Lee, the music, are inseparable from the story, the director’s vision of a film about this woman, Ann Lee, who led the Shaker movement and was persecuted for both her beliefs and the fact that she, a woman, was preaching them. And the movement is terrifying at times. It’s violent. It looks like a collective seizure, a madness, an exorcism. A dancing plague. And dance is so hard to get right, especially on screen. I’ve seen dance performances that try to do what the choreography in Ann Lee does, but I don’t think they manage to do it well. Dance does often fail.

I think Ann Lee does not fail in the slightest. To be honest, I thought it was a total masterpiece.

Anyway, back to psychoanalysis for a minute. I was thinking about it again this week because I read Mary Costello’s moving and accomplished new novel A Beautiful Loan, which follows an Irish woman over several decades as she searches for meaning. Early on she finds that meaning in Jungian analysis, which she is introduced to in Buswell’s Hotel, although she loses hold of it through two unhappy relationships and a dalliance with religion.

A few pages in, there is a reference to the mirror stage, which is one of the only bits of psychoanalytic theory I remember from college, and this sets the tone for the novel and for the narrator’s journey. This is the territory we are going to be treading, the novel says. Similarly, early on Ann Lee, the child Ann observes sex between a man and a woman as violent and troubling and that notion sticks with her for the rest of her life, intensifying as time goes by. The tone is set: here is a woman who is going to be important, and who is going to carry with her a core belief that you, the viewer, may struggle to understand.

But one thing I really liked about Mona Fastvold’s film is that it is never didactic about Ann herself. It does not take the easy route of saying that Ann’s insane and prohibitive views on physical congress led to the inevitable downfall of the Shaker movement. The viewer can deduce that for herself. (It is actually sort of revolutionary to make a whole film out of such a woman, I think, a person so sexless in a medium that trades off, from top to bottom, the idea of showing you a really sexy woman on a really big screen.)

Instead, Fastvold shows us much of what Ann and the Shakers did instead of sex - they shook. They used dance and movement together as a way to exorcise whatever else they were repressing. It is intoxicating to watch on screen and at times it is terrifying, especially because usually when we dance, we do so out of joy, don’t we? And here it’s not really about joy, although joy is sometimes involved. Here’s Amanda Seyfried, face tilted to the heavens, beating out a rhythm on her chest, a kind of breathing that is close to chanting, doing so because for her it is worship, it brings her closer to God in a way that most modern audiences are probably so, so distant from. I really loved it. It was the dance and the movement that I loved most about Ann Lee.

There were other things I loved about this film, too. I loved how it was lit, often by candlelight. It made me think of Caravaggio, the calm amid the violence of The Taking of Christ, and also the French scene in Apocalypse Now. That then made me think of Eleanor Coppola’s diary of that film’s production - how desperately she longed to be seen as an artist, how some of the best ideas in that film were hers (including the very ending). And how she made sure to write that down in her diary, and then publish her diary as a book. Reading that book it’s hard not to see Coppola as a bit of a big bastard, as art husbands go.

Fastvold’s partner is an art husband. He won the Golden Globe for Best Director last year for a little film called The Brutalist. But on the face of it, their art marriage is clearly different from the Coppolas of 50 years ago. Fastvold and Brady Corbet write together - this film as well as The Brutalist. The two films sit nicely side-by-side, I think. Both are coming-to-America-as-refugee films, both involve furniture and patronage and the building of a church, both involve planting your name on the land, a troubled kind of conquest. Also both star A-List American actors and are elevated by the experimental and strange scores of Daniel Blumberg, and both have impeccable production design. Both were made, astoundingly, for under $10 million. For reference, One Battle After Another, a great film that I loved this year, cost more than ten times that.

The Brutalist, though, was broadly lauded and has a long list of awards and nominations, compared to the scant handful Ann Lee has earned. Sexism, a failure of marketing, or both together? Probably. (I think for whatever reason, Ann Lee has been marketed incorrectly. It was seemingly released at the wrong time in the cycle and not enough money was put into promoting it among viewers and critics, and probably also it’s sexism.)

But I dunno, man. I know that the history of cinema is simply the history of films that someone managed to actually make, to get together a whole 10 million dollars for. It’s the history of people who convinced other people, people with money, to trust them. The same way the Olympics is simply ‘the best athletes who didn’t get injured this year’. In that sense, The Testament of Ann Lee feels even more like an audacious triumph - even more than The Brutalist, in fact. It’s an epic about a strange but compelling asexual woman religious leader in Manchester in the 18th century, a person whose every success led ultimately to failure, whose mark on the world today has been mostly in terms of some beautiful, expensive wooden furniture. It’s told in large part through weird and ecstatic dance. It’s a miracle that this film exists at all.

I’ll accept that not everyone will love an audacious film like Ann Lee. Not everyone likes ballet, or interpretative dance, or opera or a great many things that I myself once also did not like, at another point in my life. (Two older ladies walked out of the screening I was in, about halfway through, though they were still in the cinema when the screening ended and asked a fellow cinemagoer what happened at the end.

‘Oh,’ the woman said. ‘She died.’)

But you know what? All of my favourite films are made out of this kind of audacity. They are simply commitment to the bit, writ large. Not pausing for a second to ask ‘will people want to watch my 18-hour epic about how the nuclear bomb brought evil into the heart of small-town America’ or ‘is the public really going to be interested in a woman like Ann Lee, who believed all sex was against God?’ Just making the damn film. Making it from top to bottom, making sure every single thrust of an arm in time with the music or flicker of candlelight or tree bending its branches in the breeze is all in service of the story and the vision. If you are going to do it at all, to bother finding 10 million dollars and persuading hundreds of people to work with you, might as well do it all the way. No half measures. No empty labour. In Ann Lee’s words: a place for everything and everything in its place.

I have come to the conclusion that phone does not feel good. This is not a surprise to me. I believe it is the fault of infinite scrolling video. I believe, quite firmly, that infinite scrolling video is the worst thing in the world at the moment.

In fairness, I am somewhat not suited naturally to the short-form moving image. I remember being a teenager and going to a friend’s house on a Saturday night and the boys present would say, shall we watch some funny videos on this new website YouTube? And I was bored senseless. I thought everyone would be bored and I was surprised when they were in fact enchanted by the screen. I preferred when the humour was generated by the physical people in the room - was that too much to ask?

I also can’t really learn things from video tutorials, the way most people can. Sometimes when I explain this to people they say: ‘me too! Except for DIY stuff, obviously.’ But for me, the ideal way to learn DIY stuff is through an IKEA instruction-manual-like pictogram, featuring one or two friendly genderless characters working together, and no words whatsoever. To me that’s truly universal and interpretable, like a long-term nuclear waste warning message.

(About seven years ago I was working for a trendy app and got a random DM on Linkedin asking me if I’d like to do some freelance creative work for another app, a new one called TikTok. A couple of people I knew got similar messages. Wtf is Tiktok? One asked. I think it’s like Chinese Vine, someone said.

But Vine was good. Vine was funny. Vine was six seconds long. But they hadn’t figured out how to make Vine absurdly profitable, growth-driven at all costs, and so it disappeared and was replaced by the worst thing in the world.)

Because to me, the phone is not a place of honour. There are a few things I enjoy doing on my phone: taking photos and posting them on my Instagram story, staying in touch with my friends and family, and doing my little puzzles. Everything else I do on my phone is either necessary (two-factor verification, bearing a boarding pass at check-in), useful (Google Maps, the time of the next bus) or profoundly stupid and annoying (I am bored on that said bus and suddenly I am willingly watching an ad for a pilates studio three counties away).

The videos are the very worst part of phone. They’re the closest to ads, of course, and often they are ads. But they’re also boring. This is more to do with their form than their content. Their form is determined by the need to keep you watching at all costs. On this point, it is not interesting for someone to start a conversation with ‘I saw this video the other day…’ ‘What the algorithm thinks I’m interested in’ is no more relevant or juicy than ‘I had this dream last night’ (i.e., I’ll listen and care only if I really like you to begin with.)

I think watching all these videos, videos we don’t actively seek out and are simply served by a clever and nefarious machine, is making us all stupid and boring. And also more racist, and more sexist, and I get very worried about the things I overhear people watching on the bus sometimes and it’s been less than six years of this stuff and already the world is quite drastically more tolerant of casual sexism and racism than it was before. What happens after ten years? Do you want to find out?

I don’t want to find out! I don’t even watch Reels or TikTok and regardless, I end up watching moving images on my phone too much every day, in a way that I don’t enjoy.

And enjoyment is what is at the heart of this. Increasingly, as I get older, I think about the last line of Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Against Interpretation’ in more and more aspects of my life. If you’ve not read it, she spends ten pages explaining why attempting to interpret art is bad, and you’re probably on her side by the time the essay is drawing to a close. And then you think, hey, wait, Susan, if we’re not interpreting art, what are we supposed to do with it instead? And then in a single line, floating at the very end of the essay, with no need for elaboration she says: In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Since reading this in college I have always taken this to mean - art should make us feel good. Not as in, art should contain things that are happy and fun and pleasant. But engaging with art, whatever it contains, should be a form of pleasure. It should make us want, and the wanting should bring us together, create a communality of feeling. That’s the point of art. It is maybe the point of life. I think about this when I go to a gallery. I think about this when I watch a very long, slow, boring film. Does it feel good on some level? Does it make me want something in my soul?

And this is the lie with which we were converted to social media on our phones: It’s fun, it feels good, it brings us closer to our loved ones.

But like, does it actually? If phone makes me want anything, it is only making me want to spend money. I just think, increasingly, that that old idea, that phone is good and connection via social media is good, is getting so lost among the infinite scrolling video that is, after all, designed to make us buy things.

My screen time is still high. I mightn’t click on the Reels tab but I do blankly ingest a lot of words on Reddit when I’m bored on the bus. It has been a long and grey winter. I sometimes stare at irishtimes.com on my phone thinking please deliver some dopamine, somehow. I try to use Instagram on my laptop instead of my phone, and I still send cat videos to my husband and I do this because I still believe, on some level, that it’s fun, it feels good, it brings me closer to my loved ones. But beyond that, does scrolling video do anything positive for us? Do you think it makes you actually feel good, to spend an evening swiping, scrolling, swiping, scrolling? If you really deeply think it does, you may have forgotten what feeling good feels like.

It’s about an actor (Frida Slattery) and a writer-director (John Reddan) who meet in Dublin in 2005 and go on to have an outsize influence in one another’s lives. More on that further down.

First of all, the facts: It’ll be published and on bookshelves on 7 May 2026, both here in Ireland, in the UK (Scribner) and the US (Ecco).

Here’s the cover for the UK, Ireland and various Commonwealth countries. A jaunty blue!

Here’s the cover you’ll see in US bookshops. The illustration is by Rosie McGuinness and I think she looks so cute and pensive.

Anyway, back to the novel itself. Frida Slattery As Herself is a story about a woman and a man - Frida Slattery, an actor, and John Reddan, a writer-director working in the theatre in Dublin. When they meet, they’re in their early 20s and they’re both trying to get their careers off the ground. Things are weird. It’s a midweek afternoon in 2005. They’re in the back room of Kehoe’s on South Anne Street. It’s not exactly love at first sight - it’s a little more complicated than that. But from the get-go, Frida and John are drawn to each other for one reason or another. Personally, professionally, romantically. It’s all piled on top of each other. In essence, each of them represents potential for the other, and that’s a messy place to begin a relationship.

The novel then follows them through 17 years, in Dublin, London, New York and Los Angeles, and it’s told through the projects they work on together, and the time they spend apart. It’s about love, artistic collaboration, and two people coming of age, together and apart. It is quite long (just under 500 pages) and the word that’s been thrown around a lot is ‘expansive’.

All in all, writing it consumed me for close to two years, and even though it’s been many months since I last opened the Word document, Frida Slattery and John Reddan are still living rent-free in my head.

Would you like them to live rent-free in yours? If so, pre-order Frida Slattery As Herself today! They’re calling it ‘sublime’ (Jessica Stanley), ‘utterly delightful’ (Elif Batuman) and ‘both epic and intimate, funny and wise’ (Roisín O’Donnell). (And I’m ‘totally grateful’ to each of these amazing authors for reading my novel and sharing their thoughts on it.)

How to pre-order

In the UK

Waterstones

Bookshop.org

In Ireland

Kenny’s

Books Upstairs

In the US

HarperCollins US

Of course, you can also do my favourite thing - pop into your local independent bookshop and have them pre-order a copy for you.

I loved writing this novel and I’m going to post a little more about the writing of it in the coming months. Before then, here’s more of what other people saying about Frida Slattery As Herself:

‘Gorgeous, immersive… both epic and intimate, funny and wise’ Roisín O’Donnell, author of NESTING

‘Moving, thought-provoking, and utterly delightful’ Elif Batuman, author of THE IDIOT and EITHER/OR

‘I inhaled this consuming and addictive novel about love, artistic agency, and the charged complexities of creation, collaboration and power. Frida Slattery and John Reddan will stay with you long after you close the pages of this utterly absorbing debut’ ─ Francesca Reece, author of GLASS HOUSES

‘An expansive, deeply felt love letter to artistic expression, as compelling and ambitious as it is beautifully written. Ana Kinsella handles big themes – power, desire, success – with great subtlety and skill. I loved it’ ─ LISA OWENS, author of NOT WORKING and NATURAL DISASTER

‘Sublime’ ─ JESSICA STANLEY, author of CONSIDER YOURSELF KISSED

‘Took me back to the way I felt when reading Normal People’ Chrissy Ryan, Stylist

Anyway, order it now and you’ll have a fun surprise arriving in the post in (checks watch) three months’ time.

Until then, I’m going to think about Frida as little as possible. It’s grey and wet outside, just like when I started writing this novel three Januaries ago. And I just got my library card renewed. If you need me, I’ll be working on the next thing.

Let’s get this out of the way. I bought this in a Japanese pharmacy believing in my heart of hearts that I was looking at an amazing new invention called “mascara remover”. I hate taking off mascara. This product is of course clear mascara. In fairness to me, it says ‘easy remove’ up at the top! What was I to think??

Best personal turnaround

On the topic of false beliefs. Having spent several years believing myself to be allergic to molluscs, I saw an allergy doctor who confirmed I am not allergic and am free to eat as many oysters and scallops and clams as I want. It was a good idea to do this immediately before going to Japan and landing myself in many ‘I’ll have whatever the chef feels like cooking’ situations.

Worst personal turnaround

Sadly I’ve gone from being a bone conduction headphones girly to being a noise-cancelling headphones girly, having cast aside my political objection to the latter because it turns out it’s just so nice to be in a sound bubble.

Best concert

Gillian Welch and David Rawlings at Vicar Street!

Biggest disappointment

Lana Del Rey live at the Aviva :(

Biggest and best surprise

My childhood best friend getting in touch by email after 30 years! And then, having reconnected, getting to meet Milli and her partner when they were in Dublin this summer!

Thing I thought was scary that turned out to be just fine

The MRI machine! They’ve got a really bad rep, don’t they? I think they’re probably quicker and less intrusive than they were when they first inspired fear and terror in the world’s claustrophobes, but I was surprised at how speedy and ultimately fine it was.

Best lunch

The picnic baskets of MacDowell, a luxury I’m still stunned by.

Followed by all three times I ate at Assassination Custard!

Best dinner

Sakaba Ikura Mokuzai in Kyoto, see note above on ‘let the chef bring you what he wants’, and in this case he follows up with ‘even blowfish??’ to which I said no, actually, I’ll skip the blowfish thanks, sorry. Everything was delicious, go, get there early, it fills up quickly, let the chef pick.

Best martini

There were a few. Karl and I got briefly into a Horseshoe Bar phase this year and it became so expensive that it started to feel like like the Didion-Dunnes flying to Paris by Concorde in order to figure out why their household expenses are out of control. There was one I had solo at the Grand Central Oyster Bar, with a fried fish sandwich, before going to the theatre. But probably Grandfather’s in Tokyo for sheer vibes.

Worst dinner

Horrible sushi in JFK terminal 7 before an overnight flight.

Best desk

I wrote 30,000 words here!

Worst new habit

I had to stop buying fresh flowers because it turns out that the cats love to knock them over. They have now smashed several vases.

Best new habit

Reading outside with a coffee as much as possible, in all weathers, even just for 15 minutes.

I also started using my film cameras again and it’s been humbling but pleasurable.

Best place to drink natural wine with your gal pals

Marseille, hands down! Had a lovely time doing just that for a few days in Limmat, Bonnies, Ripaille and generally the Cours Julien area.

Best new (to me) garment

I got this vintage jacket, sort of a lightweight denim, from a store in Kichijōji and wore it sooo much, over dresses and shorts in hot weather and layered under my wool coat in New Hampshire and back home in Dublin winter.

Best maker of wool coats

Speaking of wool coats. I remain obsessed with the ridiculously high quality of everything The Landskein does. Just excellently made, perfect Irish tweed, so warm and cosy and makes every outfit look chic.

Worst new garment

Every time I bought something in a state of panic in a fast-fashion shop. Always a purchase to solve a problem, often under a sense of urgency. Inevitably wrong. Shoes that don’t fit, a dress made of a horrible viscose, something that looks great the first time until you wash it. I do less and less of this kind of buying, but it still happens and I always end up regretting it.

Best suit I didn’t buy

Toss-up between this number from Beams in Tokyo above (looked amazing, good cut, but cheap fabric and not great construction) and this impeccable Irish linen suit from Kindred in Belfast below (genuinely perfect Irish heritage fabric, gorgeously made, trousers I’m still thinking about, but jacket was way too big in the shoulders). In 2026, I hope to find the suit that fits me.

Biggest omission

This list would look really different if I watched more TV or listened to more podcasts this year but simply I didn’t really do either much this year. The worst film I saw was Materialists, though it gave me so much pleasure to deconstruct it in the pub afterwards, so who’s to say?

Best bird

I was literally astonished my first morning at MacDowell, walking to breakfast and getting Merlin out to find… northern cardinals, blue jays, eastern bluebirds, nuthatches, kinglets and three types of woodpecker all singing in the trees on my five-minute walk to the dining hall. But it was the pileated woodpecker who took the crown for me in New Hampshire, with his outré pink Mohawk and his love of the big tree trunk outside my studio window.

Best eclair

Cafe Deco, 8th May 2025

Most beautiful pint

They are all beautiful to me!

Best $22 bagel

Say no more fam.

Biggest thrill

Holding proofs of my novel in my hands, and also having all the people I’m closest to read it and tell me what they think! It doesn’t get old! I love to hear the thoughts of people I love and respect and admire on anything, but especially, as it turns out, on this crazy almost 500-page world I made up!

Best cat

You decide.

Overall 2025 was a great year, mostly because I had the time to pursue things that felt interesting and fulfilling to me. I took two Irish courses and did about 120 reformer classes. I went to the cinema, read a great many books, visited a lot of galleries and cooked at home for my friends and family. I did not do too much writing, but I set myself up well to do more in the future. There was an amount of travel that was somewhat decadent and won’t be repeated again, I think. Not every year can be like this, but I’m glad that this one was. Most importantly, though, I “prioritised laughter” which is the best thing you can do, probably. You should try this in 2026. I believe it is really good for you. It’s healthy. It’s free. Spend as much time as possible laughing with your hilarious friends - I recommend it.

However, some did stick in my mind. Definitely! And the advantage of having your own little newsletter where nobody is forced to read your little blogs is that you can simply write 1600 words on some of the highlights from this year’s reading, and so here it is, month by month.

January

In January I read several books that were Booker winners from the distant past. I read the second of Pat Barker’s Regeneration novels (I think Billy Prior is one of the greatest and most enigmatic characters in fiction) and The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes, Amsterdam by Ian McEwan, things of that nature. I’d read Josephine Hart’s Damage in 2024 and then kept going back to the well, I read Oblivion and Sin back to back. It was funny: I’d be going to pilates each week and would just get off the bus at the Last Bookshop, go inside, find another slim, pocket-sized Hart novel, and then buy it.

And then I read The Golden Notebook, methodically, going to my coffee shop most mornings and reading it an hour at a time at a table by the window. I don’t know how to talk about it - it’s The Golden Notebook, it up-ended my brain, I loved every page.

February

In February I painted our spare room (still can’t believe I have a spare room) ‘Lulworth Blue’ and did so listening to Play World by Adam Ross on audiobook. This book is long. It follows, in immense detail, a year or so in the life of a teenage boy in New York in the 1980s. The kid is a child actor and a prep school student and a wrestler. For the first seven hours or so I was driven demented by the granularity of it. I was painting the walls thinking OMG I don’t care, this is boring to me. And then… it clicked and I became obsessed with this novel and with this kid. I wanted it never to end. I slowed down the painting of the room so I could listen to more of it. I still wish I was listening to this novel ten months later. I also read Happiness Forever by Adelaide Faith which I found sad and poignant and heart-sore and lovely.

March

I only finished two books in March which seems weird in retrospect. Probably I was deep in the editing Frida Slattery As Herself at this point?

April

In April I read The Ghost Road, the heartbreaking final book in Barker’s Regeneration novels. Billy Prior forever. I read the first On the Calculation of Volume novel and was converted to the cause. Free Tara Selter. Or maybe don’t?? I devoured The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride and loved the way it brought film to life through writing which is… tough!

May

May. I read Notes on a Scandal, having been unable to get into it when I first tried ten years ago. One of the great North London novels (along with The Lesser Bohemians/The City Changes). I also read Paradise Logic by Sophie Kemp which felt technicolour and I needed to read something neon and bright at that point. I read Solace by Belinda McKeon, a book I tragically hadn’t read before. (I’m part of an unofficial Tender fan club). Solace broke my heart.

June

I really embraced rereading this year. I guess I felt I had the time for it at last. In June I reread What I Loved - a true fave, nobody can do it like Hustvedt does in this novel. I just wish I wrote it. Also the second OTCOV novel, read out the back in Wall & Keogh on weekend mornings. Also went to Belfast to see Kathryn Scanlan talk and read Aug 9 - Fog on the train home that night. I met Seren for lunch in London and she had a copy of Among Friends by Hal Ebbott, so I bought it and read it and immediately texted several people to make them read it after so we could discuss.

July

In July I cleaned the kitchen while listening to Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin - that’s a good novel! I feel like more people (around me) should know about it. I reread The English Patient as part of my Booker-of-the-past plan. I also read LIGHT YEARS by James Salter which I thought I’d read but good God, so beautiful! What a month July was. I read Every One Still Here by Liadan Ní Chuinn which, like, is the book of the year, isn’t it? Just like a generational talent. I also read a full novel in Irish! I read Aisling Nó Iníon A by Eilís Ní Dhuibhne (and did a presentation on it in my Irish class 😎). I haven’t spoken any Irish since then, oops. Then I went to Marseille with Annelise and Tess and read The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake. My annual genre fiction foray. I also attempted to read The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin which I found so intriguing and impressive but ultimately a sci-fi bridge too far for me personally.

August

August. I took to the Booker list but only got through Flashlight and Audition. Actually I also read Universality. I painted my bedroom ‘School House White’ listening to Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser. I finally finished A Goat’s Song by Dermot Healy, which I started in March. It’s a very dark book and it blew me away. I also finished Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir and thought a lot about laughter. In fact I started watching Taskmaster because of this book. Prioritise laughter in your everyday life. I reread Giovanni’s Room and I loved Eleanor Coppola’s Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now which I read after seeing the documentary at the IFI. I read All Consuming by Ruby Tandoh - you’ve gotta get this for someone for Christmas I think - you definitely know someone who needs to read this book. I read Happiness and Love by Zoe Dubno which I still haven’t discussed with anyone else, long overdue. I thought this was a better-executed instance of the peer-group-skewering rewrite of an old novel than the other lauded instance of this phenomenon this year.

September

I read so many novels by male writers that were self-consciously about being a male writer in September, I did this completely by chance. The best was I Want Everything by Dominic Amarena which was so good, intense sum-greater-than-parts energy. I finished it on the flight to Japan. In Japan I read Eat, Pray, Love and Blood Meridian - find me a more iconic, insane duo of holiday reads! I read Daybook by Ann Truitt in Kyoto - a right and proper place to read it. And then I read Purity by Jonathan Franzen - my final of the ‘big Franzens’ that I hadn’t read. Maybe my fave? They are often talked about ‘big family sagas’ but to me they are also intensely about counterculture, about regret, about failure, about ‘the state’, about overreach, about conspiracy, essentially. He is maybe my favourite American novelist.

At home, briefly, before leaving again, I read Who Wants to Live Forever by Hanna Thomas Uose. On the plane to Boston, I wept big heaving sobs reading Heart, The Lover by Lily King.

October

I read quite a bit while on residency at MacDowell in October and November. Some were books that pertained to what I’m trying to write - titles obviously redacted. Some were books that related somewhat to the experience of being at MacDowell (Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty, Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, Kathryn Chetkovich’s essay ‘Envy’, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Our Town by Thornton Wilder), and others were works by my fellow Fellows (poems by Lena Moses-Schmitt and Trey Moody, Karin McCracken’s brilliant play Heartbreak Hotel) and some various things that were totally unrelated (CLB’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, and My Friends by Hisham Matar). Then I had to move studios and saw Annie Baker’s name on the tombstone above the bed and thought, fuck it. And so I went to the library and got out every script of hers and read them, possibly at the desk where she wrote some of them?? A weird and excellent thing about MacDowell is you can do just that. John is the best!

Oh, another weird thing about MacDowell was seeing certain novels go around the place like a headcold. When I arrived, everyone was talking about Loved and Missed (which I’d read) and Clear by Carys Davies (which I had not). Then that whole cohort left, new fellows arrived and these new fellows were also talking about Clear. I hadn’t even heard of Clear before I got there! I read it when I got home and then texted everyone who’d been talking about it to compare notes.

November

When I came home in November there was a proof of The Wreck by Lizzy Stewart waiting for me. It is perfect. I had the third OTCOV, too, which I bought at McNally Jackson, and in New York Rachel had given me a copy of Television by Lauren Rothery, and these were great things to ease my post-residency blues.

December

Remaining things for this year… I am now rereading Freedom and I am eyeing up my copy of Mating for (yet another) reread over Christmas. Also at our book club we did a book swap/white elephant where everyone ended up with the book that they wanted most (almost) and I got Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers. (I offered up The Golden Notebook and it was ‘stolen’ a record-breaking three times.) And I ordered The Slip by Prudence Peiffer after meeting her at MacDowell. I don’t think it was published in the UK but it’s a biography of a single street in New York where a whole bunch of midcentury artists had their studios at the same time, and I’m dying to read it. And I got The Magic Mountain from the library, which feels exciting.

And finally, all year I’ve been dipping into Helen Garner’s diaries, usually outside the coffee shop in the morning, twenty pages at a time, and still have a long way to go. Will I finish by the stroke of midnight on January 1st? Definitely, definitely not. But onwards!

And yes, he talked. There was one slightly awkward moment where Kaufman had to remind the room, which was verging on too reverential, that Synecdoche is a comedy. It has jokes in it. I love this film for its jokes, more than I love it for its “exploration of ageing”, which seems to be what a lot of people like most about it. To me it’s Beckett but about how frustrating it is to ideate and then have to complete a creative project. I stuck my hand up for audience questions at the end, though the mic never made it to me. I wanted to ask about pleasure - early on, Kaufman had said that shooting Synecdoche was not fun at all, hot weather, long days, Philip Seymour Hoffman in facial prosthetics that were melting off his face. I wanted to ask if there was any part of the filmmaking process was fun for Kaufman, considering how much the film is taken up with the frustration of making art. (Personally I can’t do anything if it isn’t fun on some level.)

But there were many audience questions to get through. One, towards the end, from a woman, was something along the lines of ‘why doesn’t Caden understand any of the women in his life?’

I had to smile at this. Afterward, walking to the bus stop, I told Karl that it felt like a very retro, very circa-2015 question to ask a male artist. It feels like an attempt to hold a man to account (in front of an audience of fans!), and I get it - I remember myself in college, asking the lecturer why there were no women on the American letters course I was taking, and why, in particular, there were more texts by men complaining about women than there were actually by women.

But in 2025, I just can’t bring myself to care in the same way. There are so many other reasons to love a piece of art. I read books, watch movies and go to galleries for pleasure above all else. At the moment I’m drawing to the end of what I’ve been mentally calling the Franzen project - reading and rereading Jonathan Franzen’s four big novels, as well as interviews, essays, etc. I love his big novels, God, I really love them, page by page, section by section, they’re sheer pleasure to me. And yet this seems to be vexed for many people. The other day a male friend (a writer) said to me something like ‘I like that you love Franzen, because it’s not very popular to love Franzen now.’ Or a few months back, while I was thinking about what I’d been mentally calling the David Foster Wallace project (ongoing), a male academic who has done work on DFW asked me if I, being a woman, didn’t have problems with the whole way he is about women, in his work and in his personal life.

Did I? Do I? Can I read novels and watch films by men and get pleasure from them, or do I have to pause and think about whether or not the women are real women, and get bogged down in all that, instead?1 I love that Franzen’s women are a little bit loopy and off. I love that the men are a little bit loopy and off, too. I love that in Synecdoche, all the women exist to support and antagonise Caden, and I love that Caden is a nightmare who spends all his time worrying about things that ultimately turn out to be nothing.

Squint at Franzen’s women characters and you can see real women inside them. I’m approaching the end of my second read of Freedom, and I still can’t understand how Patty Berglund, a woman with all of her traits and life experiences, doesn’t have a job for so long. So I like that they’re all a little skew-wised. That’s the great pleasure of fiction, isn’t it? The gap between imagination and reality. Do I want fiction to provide verisimilitude? Certainly, sometimes. One of my favourite novels is Norman and Elsa Rush’s Mating, which I think contains one of the greatest female characters written by a man (with the help of his wife) of all time. Is that why I love Mating so much? I don’t know that it is, really. I think it has more to do with the insane, intensely curious voice of the unnamed female narrator than it does with her accuracy as a woman. I’m only one woman, after all. I can’t make any claim to a wider insider knowledge of my gender. And maybe I don’t feel a pressing need to feel seen in art because there has been plenty of art made about women like me already. But moreover, I like to think that I can feel seen in a postmodern, surrealist, broken-down film like Synecdoche - a film about an old man who just wants to make a really great play before he dies.

Kaufman, for what it’s worth, answered the audience question about women by explaining that Caden doesn’t understand anyone, male or female, other than himself. Of course, I thought! Solipsism, I should remember, knows no gender. It makes for great art, though.

Posted by @metoperachorus on Instagram.

At the event, the panellists spoke about how reading these novels contains a shadow reading experience, where you are desperate for the protagonist to break out from the trap and to do something else, something she is not doing on the page. They asked: why doesn’t Tara commit some crimes? (Because she’d wake up the next day in jail and would be stuck there for eternity.) You’re reading thinking But Tara, don’t do that, try this instead! You want her to escape the loop, even though you know she won’t. Yes, I thought, sitting down the back of the audience, I have definitely experienced this feeling reading these books. It is in fact one of my favourite feelings as a reader of novels (and also as a lover of 1970s American movies where tension is the mode) - the deep and impossible desire for things to go differently.

And I had a little of this watching Waiting for Godot at the Hudson Theatre the next day, though much less in this production than in the first one I saw (the Gate, very traditional, around 2006). The play can lend itself to the generation of this desire, watching it can make you want to shout, ‘But why can’t the bastard just show up and put these guys out of their misery?’ (“Maybe I like the misery,” per Father Ted.)

I can date this ‘But Why’ impulse back very, very far. When I was very small, my dad had two books that he read to us as bedtime stories. One was a big book of Greek myths for children and one was a collection of creation myths from around the world. I have realised over the last year what a formative experience this was for me as both reader and writer. And it was the Greek myths in particular where I first had this impulse. Daedalus and Icarus - I found myself shrieking, saying BUT WHY did he have to fly too close to the sun? Things were going so good - why did they have to ruin everything? Orpheus rescuing Eurydice from the underworld - all he had to do was not look back, and they could be reunited forever, and yet, and yet, and yet.

Aha, my dad told me. But if that happened, then there wouldn’t be a story to tell at all.

My favourite Greek myths were the ones that gave me this feeling most intensely. And some things haven’t changed in the intervening thirty years. Basically, I want the pivot. I want to see the happy ending clearly, and then I want to see it recede into the distance before my eyes, because that’s the real thrill of a good story. The impossibility of it all!

I read the third On the Calculation of Volume novel this week, when I got home to Dublin. The moment I finished, I resumed my waiting for the next volume to be published (due November 18th, 2026), waiting for Tara Selter to break out of the cycle. OTCOV is a love story as well as a horror movie - a woman gets trapped in a time loop and her husband Thomas, who she adores more than anything, doesn’t get to be trapped with her. And as a reader, I’m left turning the pages, saying BUT WHY can’t she get out, why can’t she truly reach Thomas, even though if she did, the story would have to be over. I mean, that’s the pure Beckett of it all. Because if Godot does show up, Gogo and Didi are going to die. Only a child (i.e., me watching the Gate production in 2006) would think otherwise. In the meantime, they wait, like I do. In 2025, when you hear Didi (Alex Winter) ask ‘Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now?’, you think about Gaza and all the other atrocities of today. I also think about the Holocaust, and the war that Beckett had seen up close. When I heard Didi go on to say:

Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps.

I gasped aloud. ‘Lingeringly’ - good god. The word suggests that there is pleasure in the waiting. Waiting is all of life, per Samuel Beckett, per Solvej Balle, and in the absence of death, in the period where we wait, at least we have stories. And each other, too. Didi and Gogo are the dearest friends, after all. They try to look after each other. I had some time to kill at the theatre before the curtain came up and so I got a glass of wine ($25) and did some people-watching. What else would I do? I was alone in New York City. In front of me, standing behind the rows of seats on the balcony, two grown adults were wrapped in passionate embrace, snogging without end, arms around each other, snogging without any notice of the goings-on around them. Like they were a pair of teenagers at a disco. Like they were the only two people in the world, and do you know what? Maybe they were.