“Slop” falls out your mouth in such a satisfying sound. For me, it always makes me think of Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), a film I manically watched and rewatched as a child. For those of you un-blessed and un-initiated: the film follows a crew trying to find Atlantis. The mess cook for the exhibition—imaginatively called “Cookie”—is a scruffy Southern man, whose most famous line is: ‘I got your four basic food groups: beans, bacon, whisky and lard!’

In one scene, the characters huddle around a campfire. When it’s time for dinner, Cookie slops the a ladle full of sludge onto each of the crew member’s dinner trays. This is, and forever will be, my Platonic ideal of slop.

Of course, the most common usage of “slop” now is to refer to anything “created” by AI. It’s a brilliant term, because it neatly captures how AI cannot “make” a piece of art, or writing or paintings or photographs, it can only scrape the internet like the side of an unwashed pan, collating what it finds into off-putting sludge. What once was art, created by real people, is now a mishmash of colours and shapes re-served without form or intent. “Slop” is bad because it lacks substance—it cannot feed or sustain us, it cannot engage us, it cannot stay with us, or stick with us because it slips (or slops) right off.

“Slop” also gets everywhere. It’s a more insidious form of clutter because it leaves a residue or stains behind. When we open a post that turns out to be yet more AI sludge, we feel a resentment, a disgust, let out a resigned sigh. Yet more slop on the algorithm, yet more time wasting my life holding my phone. This is especially prescient considering some artists refer to the sickly yellow tinge that AI adds to all its “images” as ‘the piss filter’—i.e. because it looks like between you, and the image, there’s a layer of piss.

More recently, however, I see a slippage of this term. “Slop” is now liberally applied to anything considered poorly made. A proliferation of romance books with similar covers becomes “publishing slop”, toxic poorly-made fast-fashion is “clothing slop”, and poorly written films and TV shows become “media slop”. I see what this is aiming for—more and more, we are being told to switch off our critical thinking and focus on consuming, much like an image of livestock eating slurry from a pail. I don’t disagree that there is an erosion in critical thinking and a general “enshittification” of our online services, as well as a decline in the quality in media and art made by big name studios. However, I think this liberal application of “slop” to anything poorly made risks what “slop” so beautifully proclaimed in the first place—AI “creations” aren’t, and never will be, on par with anything made by humans.

Recently, Niu Lai (2026), a Chinese animation film made by a mother-son duo has gone viral online for its terrible graphics and the fact it had no budget for release—causing cinemas to create their own hand drawn posters. One comment on Instagram said: ‘reject AI slop, embrace human slop’.

I dislike this comment for so many reasons. I have not seen Niu Lai, but I believe everyone who has watched it when they say it is truly abysmal. The animation looks terrible, with characters moving with all the grace of a crashing Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. It has the same feeling as the free video game I received when my mum bought me a new pair of Hush Puppy school shoes back in 20041. That being said, this film was still made by people—two people, in fact—who between them wrote the script, animated the film, provided the voice acting and composed the soundtrack. Xin Yumeng and his mother, Sun Lifang, spent over five years making the film, using budget software and second-hand computer parts, where the motherboards were sometimes ‘burned out’. These limitations impacted the film, including Xin have to cut out some of the more ‘ambitious’ animation that his computer could not render.

Niu Lai is, by no measure, a good film (though, I am sure if I did see it I would have a brilliant time). However, it is not slop. Slop is the result of something without intent or ideas, context, effort, belief or capacity for thought. Despite all its many, many failings, Niu Lai, and any other poorly created piece of art, still had a human behind it putting in the time and work—someone who had to learn how to make each piece of animation happen or how to conduct the music. Applying the label of “slop” to this is to put it on a parity with something that has none of this same time or effort, or even the basic ability to think.

In a broader sense, “slop” is never the start of a sentence, but the end. Why does this AI piece of “art” look so bad? Why does this “writing” read so poorly? Because it’s slop. Full stop. This same logic applied to something made by humans is a sure fire way to end critical engagement. Behind everything made by a human was intent, language, understanding and this means we can critically pick it apart. We can find out about the burned out motherboards, the software used to create the film, the choices made over the course of this film’s inception and creation. With any piece of art, we can dive into questioning—what context was this made in? What culture? What are its failings? How do these connect to other pieces of art in the world today? If we call something “slop”, we don’t invite the same conversation about why it doesn’t work. You can’t dig into something that has no substance.

Niu Lai, and so many other pieces of art today, can be called bad, ugly, poorly-made or impossible to watch. But there’s still a human behind them, who cannot be divorced from whatever it is they have made. Whatever you call it, don’t call it slop.

‘The difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse.’

Every few years, I rewatch Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) because of how compelling I find its constant dread. It draws me in when I watch it, and even when I just remember certain scenes. This feeling is a perfect encapsulation of Radcliffe and Varma’s concept of “terror”. From the moment you watch Jack Torrance drive his family to The Overlook, his slightly too-wide smile as he tells his son about the Donner Party’s cannibalism, you know something awful is coming. This terror is added to through use of the unheimlich. In English, this is often translated as “the uncanny”—that which is unsettling because it is a warped version of the familiar—but a more literal translation is “unhomely”. The Shining’s terror is in this feeling of a home gone wrong. A father should care for his family, but instead Jack terrorises his wife and child with severe, unpredictable violence. A home should feel secure, but The Overlook ratchets up the slightly creepy feeling of an empty hotel to the extreme. Not only is it not a home, its both an impossible labyrinth of rooms and simultaneously a space where there is nowhere to hide. The dread of The Shining is inescapable. To watch it is to feel permanently on the precipice of something awful happening, whilst denied the ability to prepare yourself, because you don’t know what the awful thing is.

Radcliffe and Varma’s description of “horror” is perhaps something more immediate—the sudden discovery, rather than the building dread—that makes your heart race or you flinch in your seat. I associate this with jump scares, sudden reveals or sequences where a character is pursued or chased. It's that heart-in-your-mouth “oh my god they're gonna get me” feeling. It's the main propulsion behind a lot of slasher films, where you feel the fear of the protagonist as they run or attempt to hide from their pursuer. There could be a temptation to lessen this genre of horror, but sustaining this kind of feeling takes a lot of skill. I think of something like It Follows (2014), where the main character is, at all times, pursued by a murderous entity which, most of the time, looks like any other person. The only one rule to this entity: it never stops walking. You could travel to the other side of the world, and you will only buy yourself time before it finds you. This creates a feeling of dread punctuated by extreme horror when you, the viewer, realise the entity is within the shot (sometimes before characters do), and are forced to watch as it walks slowly towards the protagonist. The film’s success is in how it makes you jump just from watching a random person walking at an average, unhurried pace.

Films like this also offer opportunities to make us fall in love with the characters trying to escape their pursuers. We watch them problem-solve or use something unique from their backstory to escape. The ending of Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022) centres around characters managing to escape a giant predatory alien informed by their abilities as horse trainers.1 What is so brilliant about the writing in Nope—particularly in these final scenes—is that it shows what these exact characters would do placed in this exact situation with such specificity that you can predict their unique skills and pitfalls.2 This kind of viewing experience, underpinned by empathy creates a desperate feeling—your heart drops when the protagonist stumbles or when they're just so close to managing to open the door that will put them further from whoever is after them.

There is also another horror feeling that, whilst still living in the realm of fear, is more akin to deep discomfort or disgust. Though perhaps not quite articulated in Radcliffe's analysis, I think this feeling is present in a lot of modern horror—with popular examples including The Lobster (2015), The Substance (2024) and Get Out (2017). It's a jarring feeling as if our own boundaries are being crossed. There might not be gore, or a sudden shock, but something more akin to violation.

I think of this feeling in relation to a film like Perfect Blue (1997) by Satoshi Kon, which centres on Mimi, a young pop idol trying to make it as an actress. We watch as she is commodified into a sellable object and stalked online by fans who feel a sense of ownership over her. The split between Mimi and her image—both in her public persona and in the version of “Mimi” her fans have created—causes her grip on reality to shatter. Her image begins to appear as a separate version of her, threatening to ruin her life through mistaken identity. Perfect Blue’s horror is a lack of bodily autonomy; physically, mentally and in terms of how we are perceived within the world. This horror makes you feel sick and uneasy, like some kind of line has been crossed, like its your boundary that has been ignored.

The main problem with Backrooms (2026) is that it knows what kind of things we might find scary, but it doesn’t really know what it wants you to feel. It tries to play with an uncanny akin to The Shining; the relentless chase of a slasher; and the sickening loss of autonomy found in Perfect Blue, but it fails to capture any of the deeper feelings behind these concepts. When the film ends, there’s no lingering from the adrenaline of the chase or an insidious beneath-your-skin discomfort. It’s just over.

For those of you not in the know, the concept of the backrooms is a kind of extradimensional uncanny space. Before the 2026 film, director Kane Parsons had also explored this setting in a series of YouTube videos where found footage guided the viewer through rooms that feel uneasy and uncanny. I think it’s worth mentioning that the concept of the backrooms did not originate with Parsons but from the website 4chan in reaction to a 2002 photograph of a former furniture store.3 This means that the backrooms, as a world, is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. This is also where the film’s failure lies—it tries to be all of those things, instead of picking one story—one horror—and executing it as best as it can.

The 2026 Backrooms follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect who runs an eerily spacious furniture shop. Facing the end of his marriage, due to both his own alcoholism and violence towards his wife, Clark is seeing a therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve) who grew up with an agoraphobic hoarding mother. One night, Clark discovers a gap in one of the walls of the shop’s basement, leading him to discover the backrooms.

Backrooms as unheimlich

A sense of unnerving uncanniness dominates the first act of the film. Even before Clark reaches the backrooms, our relationship with space is that of eeriness. Due to his failing relationship with his wife, Clark is living in his furniture shop where he sleeps in a show bed in the middle of a cavernous room. With his back to this big empty space, everything feels exposed and vulnerable. Even the architechture of his therapist’s office has a discomfort to it. The space is filled with furniture, feeling cluttered and cramped; the window slightly too high on the wall, making it difficult to look outwards. Between Clark and Mary is a coffee table, orientated the opposite way to Clark, putting him at an odd angle within the space, and visually demonstrating the distance between the both of them. Mary’s chair is also higher than Clark’s—elevating her above him—and positioned between him and the door, trapping him within the space.

Once Clark enters the backrooms, the unheimlich is even clearer. Rooms connect in a way that feels counterintuitive. Clark struggles to orientate himself with a clear pathway; eventually drawing a map that does not make sense. As Ernst Jentsch stated in his 1906 essay “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”:

‘The better oriented in his environment a person is, the less readily will he get the impression of something uncanny in regard to the objects and events in it.’

There is horror is being disorientated, in the idea of becoming lost within a space you cannot understand. Akin to The Shining, where we watch Danny tricycle his way through The Overlook, suddenly turning left or right4; we lose all sense of where Clark is within the backrooms. The camera is often further away from Clark, both putting distance between him and the viewer whilst also making us more aware of the space around him. All of these elements come together to create a heightened sense of dread—we cannot scan all of the large frame around him for potential danger, and we are unable to clearly retrace his pathway back to safety. At all times, we cannot easily quantify how easily he could escape any imminent threat.

There is also no ability to predict what he will find in the next room, building terror of who, or what, he could encounter. Versions of the furniture sold in Clark’s shop, now half-formed, jut out of floors or walls. We look at a piece of furniture that is recognisably a chair, but the way it blends into the floor means it can never fulfill that function. This is clearly unheimlich—not just in that the furniture exists in an uncanny form, but also the fact its very existence cannot be explained. We can hear a looping bit of audio vaguely in the distance and have to wait as Clark gets closer and closer to it. Our inability to become, as Jentsch describes it, ‘better orientated’ gives everything a sinister edge.

By creating a seemingly endless series of rooms, the sheer amount of stuff in the backrooms feels infinite. In many rooms, objects block the exit, or clutter the space, driving this feeling of claustrophobia. This concept makes sense when we remember that Mary, Clark’s therapist, is haunted by memories of her mother’s agoraphobia and hoarding. Just as Mary’s life as a child was dictated by her mother’s possessions, now too we watch as Clark has to navigate a space filled with objects that feel threatening, as if just touching them would be dangerous. This unheimlich also has roots in Clark’s character—his desire, and failure, to become an architect demonstrates someone who wanted, and was unable, to control a space. Now, as a furniture salesman, he does not have artistic direction over spaces, but only helps to fill them up in a never ending cycle of enshittified consumerism. In other words, in both his divorce and his un-met aspirations, he cannot create a home.

It’s fascinating how much discomfort you can create with a feeling of something so visually messy. Humans don’t like mess, because it suggests disorder, even the threat of which can make us nervous. There’s also an element of terror where our brain fills in the gap with the worst thing possible. Who put all these objects here? Or what made them? We assume a malicious intent that, at any point, could become a direct threat. Yet, Backrooms doesn’t stick with this dread. Roughly 45 minutes into its run-time, the feeling of the film changes.

Backrooms as slasher

After exhausting his own explorations, Clark enlists two of his employees, Kat and her boyfriend Bobby, into investigating the backrooms with him. After they lower Bobby down into an undiscovered room with a rope, an unseen monster attacks and kills both Bobby and Kat. What has been hinted at with dread up until this point is now confirmed: there’s something malevolent in the backrooms and it will kill people. This isn’t inherently a bad choice—it makes sense to rachet up the tension from “this feels uncanny” to “this is actively threatening”. The biggest mistake Backrooms makes however, is it reveals its monster then doesn’t do anything to progress or escalate the horror.

After Kat and Bobby are killed, we immediately cut to the perspective of Mary. Earlier in the film, Clark has told her about the backrooms in one of his therapy sessions, attempting to show her the map he has drawn. This, and a sinister voicemail Clark leaves on her answering machine, convince Mary to make her way to the furniture shop, where she discovers the entrance to the backrooms. She reunites with Clark, who chokes her until she falls unconscious.

The following sequence is the weakest part of the film. The cut away from Clark means we, as viewers, go from him being curious about the backrooms to full blown manic. We haven’t seen him since Kat and Bobby died, and now he is a completely different character. Whilst the film has established his history of alcoholism and violence towards his wife, this change still feels like a leap. Earlier in the film, when we watch Clark attempt to talk to Mary about the backrooms in his therapy sessions, we can see that he is obviously rattled, but he makes sense to us, because we have seen the backrooms to—we know they exist, and we know they function as he claims. The jump in character means we go from a Clark who seems agitated, yet perceptive and methodical, to one who stabs a man in the neck, then rips out his stomach and puts the uncanny flesh on a plate in front of Mary. He reassures both Mary and us that this man can’t feel it. ‘There’s no thoughts, no pain, no fear.’ he says ‘They simply exist. Like… like furniture.’5

Clark explains that the backrooms can create distorted versions of people through “remembering” them (this includes the man whose stomach he has ripped out). Suddenly, a “remembered” version of Clark enters the room. This version is significantly taller, dressed in a pirate costume we have seen Clark wear earlier in the film when he attempted to film an advert for his shop. The pirate kills Clark then pursues Mary.

The problem with this sequence is that yeah, sure, I feel that “oh no, it’s gonna get me!” feeling, but that’s kind of it—there’s no fear beyond being chased. Pirate Clark has the exact same function as what killed Bobby and Kat: it chases with an intent to kill.6 Watching the film in the cinema, I started thinking of this one YouTube video I saw where someone had installed a mod onto Resident Evil 2 that replaced the monster chasing you with Thomas the Tank Engine. There’s no fear beyond being pursued, there’s no specificity. Pirate Clark doesn’t have any specific characteristics or flaws. It isn’t like watching Alien (1979) where you develop a sense of the xenomorph: its face-huggers, its acidic spit, its tendency to hang out on ceilings. Similarly, Mary kind of just runs. She doesn’t engage us by coming up with a clever plan or outwitting the pirate. We aren’t offered a new opportunity to engage with her thinking or watch her problem-solve in a compelling way. The pirate chases, Mary runs away.

Showing a monster in a film is a sure fire way to kill feelings of dread. It takes a lot for something to be scarier than the version you’ve created in your head. Even then, the pirate is really just not scary. It’s bulging eyes and literal pirate costume push it away from threatening into sheer goofiness. This entire section also suffers from the fact its come straight after an engaging 45 minutes of uncanny dread and the total annihilation of the film’s most interesting character. It feels a bit like a chase sequence screensaver is playing out in front of you whilst you try to digest that you’re watching a new movie, and it’s a lot worse than the one you were perhaps enjoying until now.

Backrooms as loss of autonomy

Thinking about the pirate version of Clark, I am aware I should feel something similar to Perfect Blue. Just as there is a monstrous version of Mimi that haunts her—taunting her with its ability to ruin her life—we are now presented with a monstrous Clark that should represent or extend something horrifying about Clark himself. Pirate Clark is, however, just too unlike the real Clark to really be an uncanny doppelganger. Whilst the other “remembered” people have these unnerving rippling faces, where their features repeat in uncanny patterns, Pirate Clark is just kind of googly and goofy. There’s no possibility of him replacing Clark in any meaningful way, he’s just a big guy who wants to kill people.

For a brief second, I wondered if Pirate Clark could be read as a symbol of Clark’s shame in running a furniture shop. The pirate is the mascot of his furniture shop, and near the start of the film, there's an excruciating scene we watch Clark attempt to film an advert in costume. We watch as he clumsily makes it through his cheesy lines and sits down on a chair, which immediately crumples beneath him. The message is clear—not only is Clark desperately trying to keep his failing business going, there’s something kind of pathetic about the cheap costume, the overegged pirate act, falling down in front of other people because of his own furniture breaking. Yet the Pirate Clark in the backrooms isn’t really a symbol of anything. It’s only alike to Clark’s mascot in costume. It doesn’t repeat the mascot’s lines, contain elements of his personality, or make any broader reference to his furniture shop.

There are other simulacrum beings in the backrooms, such as a woman with red hair and a rippling face (see above). Reviews have pointed out that the red-headed woman in the backrooms is likely a remembered version of Clark’s wife, and that, in one scene, she runs away as soon as she hears Pirate Clark coming towards her. This, they claim, is evidence not only of Clark’s abuse, but that his abuse has been “remembered” in the backrooms. I don’t deny this theory, but I don’t quite see how it adds to the feeling of horror.

Backrooms has established that Clark is abusive, and by this point in the film he has reached out-and-out psychopathic violence (see the aforementioned cutting out a man’s stomach). If Pirate Clark represents real Clark’s abuse, this is only shown through acts of immediate violence—Pirate Clark bites real Clark in the neck, killing him; he pursues Mary, and is (potentially) what killed Bobby and Kat. Yet the real Clark’s abuse of his wife, like most forms of domestic abuse, was not just sudden murderous acts—it was a bigger pattern of actions including controlling behaviour and verbal abuse. We see this across multiple scenes where Clark and Mary act out the arguments he had with his wife. He belittles her, he threatens her, he cajoles. When someone abuses their partner, they don’t jump straight to chasing and killing them, they slowly escalate their behaviour through different forms of manipulation, bullying and violence. If Pirate Clark is a “remembered” version of Clark’s abuse, it does not meaningfully engage with what it is to be systematically threatened and abused by someone you love—someone you live with, who may hold financial power over you. It doesn’t even vaguely nod towards it.

After Mary manages to escape Pirate Clark7, she is found by a group of scientists who explain they’re looking into the phenomenon of the backrooms and the various portals into it. This bit of the movie really drags. Personally, I don’t feel like I need to know that there are other backrooms, or even scientists working in them, but I can appreciate this bit of writing is trying to up the ante: there’s not just one backrooms, there’s backroomses.

The last shot of the film is supposed to hammer home this discomfort. A “remembered” version of Mary, with the characteristic repeated rippling face sits in the backrooms, alone and silent. We, the viewer, are supposed to intuit that the real Mary was pulled out by the scientists and that this version has been created by the backrooms “remembering” her. What’s the fear here? Remembered Mary looks disturbing, but that’s about it. Like Pirate Clark, there’s no chance she could impersonate or become the real Mary, or even any indication that she will enter the real world. She doesn’t even seem to have any intent at all. Pirate Clark pursued, Remembered Mary passively sits. Sure, I’ll say that I’m not thrilled at the idea of a weird creepy version of myself out there, somewhere, but if it’s not trying to come and get me or impersonate me, it’s not really quite enough of a threat to climactically end a film on. Mary may assume that there will be a remembered version of her in the backrooms, but she never actually sees it, so we don’t even get her horrified reaction.8

There is also an obvious loss of autonomy storyline in Clark’s descension into madness, but the jump from him being frantic-yet-methodical to out-and-out psychopathic undermines this. In films like The Shining, you watch as the protagonist loses their grip on reality bit-by-bit. With Jack Torrance, we see The Overlook and its ghosts through his eyes, we have a front row seat to his escalating mania. Similarly, in Perfect Blue you see how Mimi is ground down—you watch her be stalked by fans, find a blog that claims to be written by her, uncover intimate details of her life splashed all over the internet. You're forced to watch, in painful detail, a film scene she acts in, where its depiction of graphic sexual violence begins to feel too real. Scenes cut from Mimi acting on set to Mimi’s real life in such a destabilising way that you too are unable to tell what is real and what is performance. To be able to engage with a loss of autonomy storyline like this, we have to see it happen. The fear comes from watching the erosion of control—every single act that makes you lose your sense of what is real, have your autonomy taken away from you or cause others to isolate you.

Backrooms could have explored the horror of losing grip on reality; or even the discomfort of someone preferring the backrooms to confronting their problems, but we only ever see Clark exploring the backrooms as a form of initial investigation rather than any kind of temptation or perversion. The film could have pulled on his failures, in both his marriage and his aspiration of being an architect. Beyond his curiosity and eventual madness, what sends Clark deeper into the backrooms? What if the uncanniness and isolation of the backrooms allowed him unrestrained creativity to create spaces in a way he is unable to in his real life? What if he could control the “remembered” version of his wife when his real one left him? Mary, by contrast, would immediately see the inherent wrongness of the backrooms. Her childhood trauama is a literal fear of being unable to escape rooms cluttered with stuff. Yet these characters aren't able to fully live out these ideas, because the film doesn't let us live within these reactions—these slow losses of stability.

As a Black man, any form of poor mental health for Clark is also more dangerous. Both his therapist and wife are white, placing him at threat of a racist medical and justice system, whereby Black men are more likely to be categorised as violent, receive poorer mental health care and are five times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia. In one scene, Clark asks Mary if she has ever placed a patient under an involuntary psychiatric hold and Mary confirms that she has. Mary has power over him not only as a therapist, but as a white woman who is more likely to be listened to or presumed both innocent and an authority. The film is aware that Clark is at threat of being seen as mad, but not how this threat is exacerbated by the fact he is Black. Or perhaps more uncharitably, the filmmakers are aware of this but decides they are not going to explore it.

When I read Jon Greenway’s statement that ‘few of our contemporary myths feel as precisely calibrated to the present moment as the Backrooms’ I want to be able to agree. Not only do I love the unheimlich and the haunted house, but I think it is a narrative form that, used well, can speak truth about our lives right now. Backrooms had the potential to capture some of the ugliness of the contemporary relationship with space and the stuff that fills it. In the last six years most of us have experienced a form of feeling “trapped” within our homes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, more and more of us spend more time in the place where we live, whether due to collapse between our homes and workplaces, or the increasing closure of community third spaces.

In our culture, we now spend longer and longer in uncanny versions of people’s homes. As I’ve previously complained about, set design has become more and more like watching a series of staged homes that feel deeply unhomely. Beyond this, the very nature of watching most TikToks, shorts or reels is to be “invited” into someone’s living space. Their home is no longer somewhere they occupy, but a background, a part of the content, something open to surveillance. Just as fast fashion has promoted the idea of changing your style with every “microtrend”, the proliferation of online content filmed in, or centered around, our living spaces causes more and more people to see their home less as somewhere they live and more as something they need to “do”; another self-betterment project. In this sense, where we live is not so much a place, but an extension of our own identities; and just as we can have “online personas” or doubles, our homes can too. What does my home say about who I am? Am I somehow “failing” or somehow failing my aesthetic potential if I have several chipped mugs or inconsistent unmatching decor? How much does my home have an identity and, more importantly, how much does it overlap with mine?

In Backrooms, Clark is a man without a home. Where he lives is also his work, and the backrooms extends this by repeating the furniture he lives amongst and sells in an endless loop. He is unable to escape his shop—a space that represents both consumerism and his own personal failings. The unending rooms, cluttered with so much stuff, begins to scratch at something akin to eco-anxiety. Its reminiscent of watching a nature documentary where you see animals choking on a piece of stray plastic. You think about every piece of rubbish you have ever thrown away and are crushed by guilt. Yet, you live under capitalism, which means you constantly have to make the choice about how much money you can reasonably spend on a biodegradable toothbrush that probably won’t actually biodegrade anyway. Jon Greenway refers to this feelings as ‘an endless, fluorescent purgatory assembled from the leftover materials of capitalism’.

Yet Backrooms fails to engage with a bigger analysis of our relationship with space by diverting from a more complex unheimlich and into a something that feels both more shallow and unearned. Blending forms of horror is not inherently wrong—in fact The Shining, It Follows and Perfect Blue all do so to incredible effect. The problem with Backrooms is that it doesn’t use these different elements in harmony, but against each other, harshly taking you from one form of horror to another. Pirate Clark is too goofy to develop the film's unheimlich, the loss of autonomy narrative is unseen, and the monster chase doesn't develop beyond any initial impact.

On a grander scheme, I think the failures of this film matter because I cannot divorce Backrooms from the studio that made it: A24. For a long time, A24 was, to me and many other film-goers, a reasonably reliable mark of quality. A24 were behind films like Under the Skin (2014), Room (2016), The Lobster (2016), Moonlight (2017), the latter of which stormed the awards seasons and has been lauded as one of the best films of the 21st century. In my time I have loved American Honey (2016), The Witch (2016), The Souveniur (2019), Midsommar (2019) and Minari (2021). In horror, A24 launched the careers of Robert Eggers, Ari Aster and Danny and Michael Philippou.

Of course, A24’s filmography has never been perfect, but seeing the A24 logo in a trailer at the cinema made certain audiences sit up in their seat. Even if you didn’t love something they made, you felt you would probably get something distinctive or different, with its own point of view you might not find from other production companies. I think of The Lighthouse (2019) which throws together New England, Welsh 19th century legends, homoeroticism and Edgar Allan Poe and makes something brilliantly gothic and fresh. I think of The Lobster (2015) which, though not specifically horror, made me so desperately uncomfortable I can replay whole sequences in my head, despite having never having rewatched the film (and they still deeply unsettle me).

More recently, however, this sense of a dedication to a certain style of independent and distinctive filmmaking has started to crack. In 2024, A24 released Sing Sing, a brilliantly constructed film about a theatre group in a maximum security prison featuring stellar performances across the cast. Just three months later, they released Heretic, which would feel more at home somewhere like Blumhouse where the mid-budget treatment could have pushed through some interesting practical effects. By December, they capped off the year with The Brutalist, where AI was used to change the actor’s pronunciation of Hungarian words and, allegedly, “create” backgrounds for the film.

I think this is the point at which A24’s identity as a mark of quality felt, for me, like it was beginning to falter. On the one hand, we have one of the best films of the year led by the performance of a lifetime from powerhouse Colman Domingo (Sing Sing), and on the other, we have an unfinished scrappy horror film that feels like the script needed about three more passes (Heretic). To top it off, it goes for Oscars gold whilst utilising AI, and for unbelievably lazy reasons at that. Since then, it’s not so much that A24 has only made bad films, more so that it’s lost the interesting niche its carved out. In June this year, it was revealed that Google had invested $75 million into A24 to enable them to create AI filmmaking tools. Whilst they wouldn’t hand over actual films or data, but support with storyboarding and provide a ‘reimagination of the production process’. Yet, and I realise how insane I sound saying this, film is a visual medium, and storyboarding is one of the first places a film's visual elements are brought into reality. Even with A24's ascertion that the imagery of a film is not created by AI, what is a film if not its production process? A film is not just a series of images, but something created by a crew. Change any part of this crew and the film becomes a different thing entirely.

When faced with criticism, A24 trotted out the usual ‘seat at the table’ narrative we have seen parroted from production companies, directors and actors. For a production company originally interested in distinctive storytelling, this reasoning for adopting AI is beyond wishy-washy. Kane Parsons himself has hit back at studios using AI, calling it ‘cultural and economic rot’ and stating ‘If I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would.’

A24 has stopped being a badge of something different, and has started to function like any other production company. I don’t pretend to know the first thing about the economics of filmmaking, but I think I can still say there is a sense of loss in this. Backrooms is, and for a long time will be, the highest grossing film that A24 has made, and the deal with Google is undeniably a profitable one (at least in the short term). Yet both the final Backrooms film and this partnership decision are a direct contrast to what earned the company its cult-like following. Both portray a desperate need to be all things to all viewers, instead of trying to make something distinctive and exciting. Economically, Backrooms is the best choice they have ever made; but on a filmmaking level, it can’t help but feel like an identity crisis, both in the backrooms itself, and in the conversation at large.

I recently saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time. It’s one of those monumental watches that makes you feel like your life is now BC2001 and AD2001. Not only is it an incredible piece of filmmaking—visually and story-wise—but my lasting impression was a feeling of trust. This kind of trust is shared—the filmmaker trusts you to bring your attention, patience and analysis to this film, but you also have to trust them. In the case of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film starts with a roughly 15 minute long section entitled “The Dawn of Man”, which centres on a group of apes. As a viewer, you have to trust this means something—that we are watching apes eat, sleep and fight in a film called 2001: A Space Odyssey for a reason.

2001 is also filled with restrained performances, minimal dialogue and use of classical music instead of a dedicated score. All of these elements put faith in your ability to intuit what is going on and what it means—you don’t need an actor or piece of dialogue to state something explicitly, or the type of music which, as Robert Ebert wrote in his review of 2001, ‘gives us emotional cues’1. At several points, the only sound in the film is one of the character’s breathing. This is a deft piece of filmmaking—even when a character is not facing us, or has their face obscured by a helmet, we can still tell how they feel through their breath. As a viewer, you find yourself breathing in time with what you hear; sharing an embodied experience with the characters on screen.

To me the biggest demonstration of this trust, however, is in the film’s symbolism. Roughly 12 minutes into “The Dawn of Man” act, a tall monolith appears near where a group of apes are sleeping. The apes gather around, tentatively reaching out their hands to touch it. This image of a monolith appears a throughout the film—a group of humans discover a monolith on the moon, later we follow the spaceship Discovery One’s mission as it traces a radio signal the monolith is sending to Jupiter. On board Discovery One, astronaut David witnesses a huge monolith orbiting Jupiter before he is seemingly pulled towards it, entering a futuristic neoclassical house. At the end of the film, David, now an old man, lies in bed, clearly on the verge of death yet still reaching out towards a monolith standing in front of him.

What is the monolith? There are no flashbacks or dialogue or voiceover that finally reveals the monolith’s meaning because Kubrick has chosen to trust that we’ll decide what we thinks it means. He even said in an interview with Playboy:

‘You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film—and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level’

Similarly, 2001: A Space Odyssey refuses to make any concrete statements on the nature of humanity. The “dawn” of man, whereby an ape becomes the first human, is when he uses a bone as a tool to smash the ribcage of a skeleton in front of him. In other words, man enacts violence for violence’s sake—destroying something for no other reason than because he can. The “Dawn of Man” act ends when this newly created man throws the bone into the air. A match-cut shot turns the bone into a spaceship hurtling through space. In other words, for all our so-called advancements—societally, technologically, philosophically, culturally—we are still just animals using tools to inflict violence on the world around us.

Yet, every being who encounters this monolith—ape, lunar astronauts, bed-bound David—reaches out to touch it, gently and reverentially. There are many interpretations of the monolith. In the Arthur C. Clarke novel, on which the film is based, the monolith is explicitly depicted as a tool created by aliens to advance other beings to the next step of evolution. When the monolith appears before the apes, they become mankind, and so on.

In his in-depth analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Rob Ager extends this metaphor, claiming that the monolith is, in fact, a cinema screen. In Ager’s analysis we can see the idea of cinema as a tool of evolution. We, ape or human, reach a new stage of being when we can tell stories:

‘Clarke described the monolith as a pyramid […] Kubrick, in adapting the story for cinema, changed this to a black rectangular box. Why? Because the monolith is a representation of the actual wide frame cinema screen […] in the film’s opening and during the intermission, we are not looking at an empty black screen at all. We are looking directly at the surface of the monolith!’

To me, the monolith represents the capacity to think beyond ourselves. The moment the apes become human is when they understand themselves as one part of many. They use the bone to kill, but also to share the food they have created by killing. When humans later find the monolith on the moon, the Anthropocene—our entire way of viewing humanity as the centre of things—is disrupted. We have to understand the universe anew; look beyond ourselves and understand there are other, non-human intelligent perspectives. When David reaches out on his deathbed, he is confronting his own mortality, but also the fact that by going on Discovery One he has caused a ripple effect on the future that he cannot control. This concept is deeply exciting and completely terrifying.

The richness of the monolith, and so much of Kubrick’s imagery, is this underpinning of mutual trust. He creates an image which invites us to interpret it, rather than something which explains itself. It is this ambiguity that allows people to understand it through so many lenses—be it evolution, art, anthropology or otherwise. When cinema invites us in like this, it’s not just an enriching experience, it can lead us to question the very nature of what it means to be alive.

Since watching Emerald Fennel’s “Wuthering Heights”2, one scene has stuck in my head. It is by no means the worst scene, but it haunts me like a particularly annoying poltergeist. In Fennel’s adaptation, Cathy’s father, Mr. Earnshaw, is an alcoholic. With this change Fennel has both eradicated the crucial character of Hindley Earnshaw and created a massive plot hole for Cathy which undermines some of the key messages of Wuthering Heights. In the book, Cathy’s decision to marry Edgar Linton is because she is corrupted by the promise of material wealth. In Fennel’s film, Cathy now has to marry Edgar to keep her head above water because her father’s alcoholism and gambling threatens to plunge her into poverty. In the novel, Cathy’s corruption is not only important to her character—as a piece of writing, it demands that we, as readers, confront the role of money in our own relationships, both familial and romantic.

There are so many ways Fennel could have demonstrated Mr. Earnshaw’s alcoholism, but what she chose was these two stupid piles of green glass bottles in each corner of his room. These bottles make me want to run into the woods in the middle of the night and scream because they are so very facile and obvious and just really bad filmmaking.

Fennel wants to show to us that Earnshaw is an alcoholic whose addiction is ruining his life. Drinking is more important to him than his daughter Cathy, and adopted son Heathcliff—more important than his family name, his status and his own health. Fennel’s thinking runs likes this—drinking a lot means a lot of bottles, bottles that, as someone isolated alone, would just pile up. However, this imagery requires me, the viewer, to believe that an alcoholic man who is drinking himself to death would (a) be capable of and (b) desire to, pile all these bottles up in a cascading piles in two of the corners of the room, without any of them smashing. How is Earnshaw reaching the top of that pile, Fennel? And why?

Watching this scene for the first time, I found myself thinking (as I often do) about Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015) which has similarly unsubtle imagery, but uses it to elevate its themes and ideas. In the film’s opening, a young girl, Edith, is visited by the ghost of her mother who tells her ‘Beware of Crimson Peak.’ We watch as Edith grows up, falls in love and gets married to Thomas Sharpe, whose wealth originates from his family’s clay mining. When she arrives at her husband’s mansion home, she discovers the house is referred to as “Crimson Peak” because the house is collapsing into the family mine, and the mine’s clay frequently stains the snow a gruesome red.

The symbolism here is obvious—the stained snow looks like blood. However there’s still layers to this imagery that invite interpretation. It’s clear foreshadowing of what is to come, with the film’s climatic event taking the form of multiple deaths through violent stabbings. It can also be seen as a critique of mining—the Sharpe family, as Victorian industrialists, literally inflict violence upon the earth, causing it to crumple and bleed.

Similarly, the bloodied ground is also visual way to underline the evils of Thomas Sharpe and his sister, Lucille. Edith and Thomas’s marriage is part of a long running scheme whereby Thomas woos, marries then kills off rich women, using their money to fund the Sharpe mines whilst Lucille and Thomas can continue their secret incestuous relationship. The Sharpes have sunk themselves into debt and acts of great evil and the house too, is sinking into the ground. Their plot to dig themselves out only causes both siblings and house to sink deeper and deeper.

It also feels like a fairytale-esque piece of imagery. When Edith’s ghostly mother says ‘Beware of Crimson Peak’, she might not just mean the literal place, but also the very concept of becoming a woman and getting married. Read this way, the bloodied snow can be likened to menstruation or a bloodied wedding night bedsheet—cultural symbols of blood that are often used to signify a woman’s transition from childhood to adulthood.

Throughout the film Edith often appears in virginial white nightgowns, whilst Lucille, her competitor for Thomas’s affection, is in all red3. By the end of the film, Edith has been stained with red blood, both her own and others’. Even though she manages to flee the Sharpes and Allerdale Hall, the last scene shows her writing a novel entitled Crimson Peak—just has her nightgown is stained, she will never escape the impact the events at Allerdale Hall have had on her.

Symbolic imagery, like the red clay of Crimson Peak, does not have to be subtle, or even as ambiguous as 2001’s monolith. It does, however, have to encourage us to think about a film’s characters and the world they inhabit. The red snow not only stylistically heightens the gothic melodrama, it visually demonstrates the evil of Sharpes, both against women and the land itself. Imagine your house—your reputation, your legacy—literally sinking into the ground. What evil could you justify to yourself to dig yourself out?

What is most frustrating about the “Wuthering Heights” bottle imagery is that it is not an invitation to interpret or wonder. Fennel does not believe her audience is capable of a deeper, or more empathetic, understanding of Mr. Earnshaw’s descent into alcoholism and its impact on Cathy. Why is Earnshaw an alcoholic? What underpins his sadness and alienation from his children? Why did he adopt Heathcliff if he hates him? We are not invited to explore this. Fennel’s bottle piles are a full stop: Earnshaw is an alcoholic because he is. That’s it.

A lot of very talented writers have written excellent critiques of “Wuthering Heights” and you may think it’s easy to drag it over the coals, especially in relation to 2001: A Space Odyssey, widely regarded as one of the best films of all time. But this concept of full stop imagery is symbolic of a bigger problem that contemporary films just seem determined to keep repeating.

Weapons should have been a film that was right up my alley. I like horror and I had previously really enjoyed Zach Cregger’s Barbarian. My main issue with Weapons, however, is it is a film that pretends to be about a lot of things—some of the most difficult things that art can explore—and is, in fact, about nothing.

Weapons opens with narration from a child, sating that on one Wednesday night, seventeen children left their homes at 2:17am and have not been since. These seventeen children make up the entire class of third-grade teacher Justine Grady, save one child, Alex Lilly. In a review for RogerEbert.com, Brian Tallerico wrote:

‘One of the greatest strengths of Cregger's ambitious script is its abject refusal to connect every dot in the manner that so much “elevated horror” has done in recent years. Still, it's not overly difficult to read the inciting incident of Weapons as a school shooting allegory’

This ‘school shooting allegory’ is mainly established by one piece of imagery. Archer, the father of one of the missing children, has a dream about his son in which he sees a floating machine gun appears emblazoned with the numbers 2:17 in alarm clock font. 2:17am, as we have been told, is the time at which all seventeen children left their homes and ran into the night. It could also reference a real U.S. House of Representatives vote in 2022, whereby they passed a ban on assault weapons. The vote was won by 217 votes though, at time of writing this in 2026, the U.S. Senate has not voted on the bill.

Save this image alone, the school shooting allegory has no other concrete basis. Yes, we hear about how a whole class of children disappear, and see scenes of an emptied classroom—but by the end of the film the children are found and returned to their families. Simply put, they are missing and not dead. It’s important to emphasise because by making art about school shootings requires us to confront a lot of societal ugliness: the capacity to kill children, the monumental grief and tragedy in a child’s death, the money behind the gun lobby, the political action we are all obliged to take to campaign for stricter gun laws worldwide. The trauma of a child going missing is real, but it has its own nuances that are wholly separate to those of a child who has been murdered, especially by something preventable.

Weapons failure of this theme is also present in the character of Aunt Gladys, the film’s main villain played by Amy Madigan, for which she won the 2025 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Aunt Gladys is the one who has stolen the seventeen children and hidden them in the basement of Alex Lilly—the sole survivor of his class and, allegedly, a relative of Aunt Gladys. Aunt Gladys is some kind of supernatural being—most probably a witch with voodoo-like powers. At one point, she uses the word “consumption” to refer to tuberculosis, leading some to conclude she is perhaps as old as the Salem Witch Trials. To which I say: sure, I guess. But also why?! This little detail does nothing for her characterisation, the plot nor this film’s bigger themes. Similarly, I don’t understand why her magical powers are what they are. What does this convey about her as a character, or, in fact, the themes of the film? Weapons as a film is littered with stuff like this, tiny details that are visually interesting but don’t go anywhere. Every choice feels like it has been placed in the script to create something that someone will spend half an hour explaining to you in a YouTube video essay with constant midroll adverts4.

Aunt Gladys is the one who abducts the children and, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, she is a terrible metaphor a gun or a school shooting. Weapons establishes that she steals the seventeen children to “sustain” her energy and powers. The film repeatedly hints at the concept of a parasite—in one scene, a couple watch a documentary about cordyceps fungus, in another, Justine teaches her class about tapeworms. The symbolism is obvious, Aunt Gladys is a malignant foreign body that has invaded this town and his causing it harm from the inside-out. However, is that not the exact opposite to a gun? The problem with guns is their mundanity, not intrusion. In America, where this film is set, guns are too easy to purchase and own. Research from 2024 stated that 1/4 households in America had a gun and 32% of adults owned one. Aunt Gladys is not everyday, she is literally supernatural. She is not a resident in this town, but an interloper.

Aunt Gladys’s wig and make-up is also so obviously uncanny and off-putting that there is no possibility of a narrative about the mundanity of evil, or abuse inflicted by those who seem caring. The point of the make-up and wig is to be memorable to a film viewer; it has no point within the world of Weapons. At other points in the film, Aunt Gladys appears without her without this make-up, looking unwell but normal. So why does she put this hair and make-up when visiting Alex’s principal to demonstrate she is a worthy guardian? With this bit of styling, any story about children falling through the gaps into the hands of unfit, or even cruel, adults is made impossible.

Aunt Gladys’s performance of femininity and wellness has been read through the lens of drag. In fact, in an interview for Entertainment Weekly, Zach Cregger claimed Weapons’ costume designer, Trish Summerville, said ‘I hope that one day somebody does [Aunt Gladys] on Drag Race.’ If you think about this for more than a second makes you realise that if Aunt Gladys is a drag queen who steals children from school and bewitches them into doing her bidding, then Weapons’ villain is unintentionally reaffirming your standard queer and transphobic talking points: LGBTQ+ people will come into schools and brainwash your children, altering them beyond repair. I strongly believe that Weapons does not hint at this intentionally, because as a film, every choice has no real basis. Watching Weapons is like picking up a piece of knitting and watching it unravel in your hands. You have a thought about one idea, and a hole appears elsewhere.

Weapons wants to be about a lot of things. It flirts with huge ideas that are horrifying and can feel inescapable: police brutality, child abuse, school shootings. Yet, by committing to none of these ideas, it undermines all of them. As with Fennel’s piles of bottles, this floating gun is a full stop. We have not been invited in to consider what this gun means—or what guns, more generally, mean, especially in relation to these characters in this world. If the film was about guns, we would have to sit with a film where seventeen children die. If it was about guns, we would have to watch parents mourn their children never coming home instead of actively trying to look for them. If it was about guns, we would have to tackle the systems that prioritise gun ownership over children’s lives. The reason this floating gun appears is to directly tell us, the viewer, what this film is “actually” about instead of doing the necessary work.

The “full-stop” images in both “Wuthering Heights” and Weapons are part of a bigger problem in contemporary cinema. Filmmakers no longer trust their audiences or even really want to be in conversation with them. Fuelled by a drive towards “second screen” content and a general decline in critical literacy, films are now full of characters walking around saying exactly what is happening or how they feel (Hamnet, Disclosure Day), flashbacks that remind you of something you saw about 10 minutes ago (Sinners), and a general decision to eschew ambiguity or audience interpretation in favour of concrete endings (Bugonia). Everything is so easy to digest you feel like you’ve eaten baby food and, in turn, symbolism has lost all abstraction in favour of obviousness. If you can’t trust an audience to remember key details or even look at the screen, it makes sense that symbolism will instead function as an explanation over a provocation.

To be trusted by a piece of art is one of those experiences that makes you feel thrilled to be alive. Even in a crowded cinema, you feel like a filmmaker is reaching out to you alone and asking if you can understand them. You walk away from the film turning it over in your head like a puzzle you’re determined to solve. Its an acknowledgement of power on both sides—the filmmaker has the power to move you, to shake you to your core; but for that to happen, they need you to truly know their ideas.

The reason this is so important is because Weapons, Hamnet, Bugonia and Sinners, and films like them, are winning Oscars and BAFTAs and so many other awards. They are being lauded by critics and are actively shaping both those working in contemporary cinema now, and the minds of the next generation. Whilst they are doing all this, they are failing one of the most important points of art—the mutual relationship of a filmmaker and audience member, trusting each other to create a good story together.

Look at this absolute chaos. Behind Roy on the right-hand side we have shelves overflowing with Roy’s stuff - books, electricals and random wires strewn everywhere. The table in front of him is completely covered by his model train set, as well as more random books, abandoned coffee cups and just piles of crap. In another scene, we see that these trains are also strewn around the table and on the floor.

The scene is messy, but also noisy. Roy’s son wants help with homework, Ronnie reminds him about going to the cinema, the son pipes up saying he also wants to play goofy golf. Behind them, one of their children takes a plastic doll into a creche and smacks it off the bars until its legs break off.

These characters are imprinted on this space. We can see Roy’s huge messy hobby room, his children picking up items - like the doll - to break them because they can. Random stuff is piled everywhere. In fact, Ronnie is shown throughout the film repeatedly picking up stray toys and random objects. In this very first scene of the family, we also get a sense of who has ownership over this space:

‘Roy, what is all this stuff on my table?’ Ronnie says, ‘I thought I told you this was for my stuff.’

Ronnie is upset that Roy’s random bits and pieces from his work are on the dining table. This neat little detail shows how these two characters interact with this space. For Roy, he can put stuff down and forget about it. For Ronnie, she is thinking about where she, her husband and, most importantly, her children, will be able to eat the food she has cooked for them. Ronnie calls the communal table her table, whereas Roy’s table is only dedicated to him.

In a later scene, we get this beautiful side-by-side, with the wall dividing the two rooms. On the left we have Roy’s chaotic hobby room - the wires, the ramshackle shelves, the stray trains. On the right, the room that faces the street has a completely different style - frilly lamps, bowls of flowers, decorative plates.

This design says so much about both Roy and Ronnie. Roy is someone whose passions run riot over a space. Meanwhile, the room with more of Ronnie’s design faces outwards. This reception room allows any visitors to only see a clean and ordered version of this house. In other words, perhaps this room has Ronnie’s style and taste, but it has been created for other people to enjoy.

There’s obviously a lot of gendered expectations going on here. We can see Roy’s room as what might be called a “man cave”, i.e. the part of a house free from the style and cleanliness of the wife and mother, where a man can indulge in his hobbies, interests and own style. The “man cave” has become a fraught piece of dialogue - on the one hand, men deserve to feel at home in their own houses, even if they have bad taste and tacky design. At the same time, women are expected to run clean and perfectly styled houses, then lambasted as being shrewish and controlling when they do exactly that. Women are also not granted the same opportunity to escape into their own hobbies, they do not have a space to close the door, relax or be away from the family in the same way men are permitted to (hence Ronnie’s protection over “her” table).

This is prescient in Close Encounters of the Third Kind because as much as it is a film about aliens, it’s also a film about the mania of devoting yourself to art. After a UFO sighting, Roy becomes obsessive about trying to recreate a specific mountainous shape that he believes the UFOs have given him a vision of. His family are those most effected by his obsession. We watch as Roy piles mashed potatoes onto his plate at dinner time. A shot cuts to each family member’s face - all of them know this is a sign of something alarming. Roy’s eldest son starts to cry.

‘I can’t describe it,’ Roy says ‘what I’m feeling, what I’m thinking. This means something. This is important.’

Roy’s obsession with sculpting the mountain is all-consuming. Despite Ronnie begging him not to, he brings bricks, mud, rubbish and stolen chicken wire into the house to create a bigger model. Ronnie chases him, pleading with him to stop, unable to get through to him as he rips up the neighbour’s coop for her ducks whilst she watches. Roy shoves everything through the kitchen window, where the bricks smash the dishes and glasses in the sink.

Roy is not only destroying plates and glasses - a symbol of how Ronnie provides for the family, through cooking for them - he is destroying the core of the home. Eventually, Ronnie gives up and puts all three of their children in the car to take them to her sister’s. She is so shaken that she doesn’t even change out of her nightgown or pack a bag before driving off. This is the last time that we see them in the film. Roy’s destruction has reached its peak: he has destroyed his family.

However, as the film shows us, Roy’s obsession is founded in reality. The mountain he is compulsively trying to create is real, and, more importantly, he is correct in his belief that the aliens have sent him this vision on purpose. The climax of the film happens when Roy reaches the mountain and witnesses the arrival of alien spaceships. The aliens select him to be taken on board - to where, or for how long, is never revealed.

Other witnesses of the UFOs had similarly been draw to the same mountain, but the film establishes that all of them had drawn or painted it. Roy is able to climb and navigate the mountain much more easily because he has sculpted it - in other words, because he had lived in the “world” of the mountain in multiple dimensions, much like a director with a film set. Roy’s manic dedication to his vision pays off. Not only is he the only witness who reaches the U.F.Os, but we watch his transcendent joy as he is selected to be taken into space.

Seen in this light, the sets of this film become all the more important. Roy’s vision leads him to break apart his family. This is not just because he ignores them or acts erratically, it is through the very act of destroying the family home. Just as his trains took over one room, his obsession with U.F.Os overflows across the house - pushing everyone else out of it. To engage with this idea, we have to believe in this set as a living, breathing family home.

Imagine my surprise when, only half an hour after I finished watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I discovered that a key plotline in Disclosure Day is literally the reconstruction of a childhood home.

Disclosure Day is a messy film - plot wise and thematically. Feelings-wise, it’s like a late 2000s spy thriller, with similarly crowbarred-in jokes and flat characters. The main plot elements you need to know are this - Margaret, a meteorologist played by Emily Blunt, develops uncanny abilities linked to an unknown event in her childhood. Her character is thrust into action when, on live TV, she speaks an alien language and discovers she can intuitively understand other peoples’ thoughts and feelings.

Alongside this are a group of whistleblowers who are determined to reveal the truth about aliens to humanity. A specific group of these whistleblowers are shown walking around a warehouse in which a full-scale house is being built. Towards the climax of the film, it is revealed that this is in fact Margaret’s childhood home, and that the whistleblowers have built it because they believe it’s crucial for Margaret to relive a memory of when she was ten years old to be able to fully understand her new psychic abilities.

Margaret is, understandably, emotional when she sees this replica. She’s confused and angry and upset:

‘That’s where I grew up. That’s where I grew up. This is my life. This is my life and this matters. What I want, who I am. Not who I am as you, or him, or her but as me.’

We then see Margaret run into what is not really a house, but a staged set. Granted, the decor is a little dated, but every single item has a perfect place. Compared to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it looks uncannily fake, a space that is pretending to be a room. The bookshelf is ordered with everything exactly lined up, everything is clean and neat and perfectly symmetrical. This would make sense if the film was leaning into the idea of this replica never being the reality - the eeriness of trying to recreate a memory. However, we are supposed to see this as moving, as somehow real. Margaret bursts into tears, clutching a picture of her parents to her chest and reverentially touching the furniture.

On reaching her recreated bedroom, Margaret’s replica home has its intended effect, and she is able to relive a memory from when she was a little girl. The memory starts starts with her waking up in the middle of the night. The camera pans away from Emily Blunt and shows a little girl sitting on a fully made bed. It’s such a bizarre filmmaking choice. Who wakes up in the night, gets out from under their duvet and then remakes their bed to sit on it? Compare this with Close Encounters of the Third Kind in which the children who are woken up in the night look like this:

This one detail says a lot. The child version of Margaret only exists to give adult Margaret a backstory - she isn’t a fully-fleshed character with her own perspectives. The children in Close Encounters, however, are already people, not just potential adults.
Looking at these shots of them asleep in their rooms, we get so much of their personality. They sleep lying at odd angles or, in Sylvia’s case, with her bum in the air. They are comfortable yet chaotic - from these shots we can see these children might put themselves to bed, or fall asleep after a lot of tossing and turning. For the two boys, it was absolutely crucial they kept these random toys beside (or in) their bed. It also makes Roy’s actions all the more devastating - look at how at home these children are, look at how much they lose when he takes over all of their space and pushes them out of it.

It’s not lost on me that in this plotline about reconstructing Margaret’s bedroom, the set designers have, in fact, created a model home instead of a real one. Margaret’s bedroom is non-descript: there’s butterfly wallpaper, images of animals taped on the walls, a bowl of crayons and some games. What can I take from this? She was a little girl who liked animals, drawings and playing games. Where’s the stains or marks on the wallpaper? A specific cuddly toy beside her bed? Ripped edges of magazine images she tore out? The worn boxes of the game that she liked best? Margaret’s room in Disclosure Day does not feel like a real children’s room, but an aspirational one. The kind you would see in the background of an Instagrammer or TikTokker who is playing the part of relatability. Sure, there’s some random toys or some magazine clippings on the wall, but everything looks new and unlived in. On her wall are four framed prints of the same image of a cartoon house - obviously bought at one time and hung precisely in place.

Going beyond the sets, to watch Disclosure Day is to watch a woman nearly get hit by a train, yet arrive at the end of the film with her hair in perfect curls and an unchipped manicure. Emily Blunt’s face is unmoving whilst she cries about the most monumental thing that has ever happened to her. Her car looks like the smell of a Little Tree, her phone case is completely clean with no stickers, dirt or dents. Meanwhile, Close Encounters shows us a trashed house, a protagonist who is sunburnt with unruly hair, under slept in a fraying nightgown. There is obviously sexism at play here - male characters are allowed to become dirtied, injured or in any way “less appealing” than female characters are. Yet this aspirational sheen goes beyond watching attractive people and aesthetically pleasing lives and reaches a level of unreality that goes against the very humanity of the film.

To watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind is to try and accept some very difficult truths. To feel the full force of Roy’s unabashed joy at the end of the film, we have to accept it came at the price of his wife and children - a family he doesn’t think of again before he boards the spaceship to leave them behind. I believe, wholeheartedly, that Roy is joyful, but I can’t fully celebrate that feeling with him. In Disclosure Day, Margaret’s opening establishes that she has no real life. She and her boyfriend are disconnected, and she asks to move again. ‘Where are you supposed to be Maggie?’ he asks, and Margaret has no real answer. Again and again, she has nothing to lose, nothing pinning her to a fully-lived life. Disclosure Day is supposedly about what it means to be human, but not one of its characters have the complicated relationships that are really at the core of what it means to be alive.

My problem with sets is not exclusive to Disclosure Day. More and more, films are filled with bland show homes sets, professionally styled character outfits, newly bought expensive possessions and factory fresh cars. In a landscape shaped by Instagram, YouTube and TikTok videos that prioritise aspiration over truthful depictions, it feels like film has gone the same way. We don’t watch films about people who have normal messy homes or broken phone screens or cars covered in dust and empty wrappers, because we want our escapism to be about lives we wish we could lead, instead of portrayals of people like us. It’s the same drive that causes videos of fridge restocks and toilet cleaning to garner millions of views. It’s the same drive that is causing actors to sacrifice one of their most important tools - their ability to convey their emotions - in favour of getting Botox. It’s the same drive that clutters films and TV shows with product placement. They look like adverts because they are adverts.

More and more, we live with filmmaking that cares more about this aesthetic look than the feeling it conveys. I don’t want to watch films about beautiful people in beautiful houses. I want to watch films about being alive - including the mess, the dirt and the crumbs on the carpet.

My Brilliant Friend is a 2011 novel by Elena Ferrante and translated by Ann Goldstein which made my 100 books list after it topped the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list (though, I was also motivated to read Ferrante after watching the film adaptation of The Lost Daughter). Set in 1950s Naples, My Brilliant Friend, and the three other books in the Neopolitan novels, follows two girls, Lila and Lenù, and the diverging paths their lives take. The story is about the complexities of friendship, growing up in poverty, politics (both within the neighbourhood, and at large in Italy and across Europe) and, in the way all good books are: what is it to live a good life?

The prose of My Brilliant Friend is propulsive. Ferrante, and Goldstein as translator, have a fast-paced style, often placing you directly within narrator Lenù’s body. Remembering this book, I often linger on physical feelings: the oily sting of pimples on your face or being unable to sleep properly in summer heat. There is a lot in My Brilliant Friend about the growing pains of childhood and puberty, and how this feeling of unfamiliarity with your own body is exacerbated by the ways in which girls are constantly appraised. In both fiction and reality, we often frame children as potentials - imagining the adults they will be, instead of thinking about them as people in the present tense. Similarly, Ferrante captures how Lila and Lenù are always positioned as potentials in relation to men - which neighbourhood boy will claim them? What kind of wives will they be? How will they keep their future houses and raise their future children?

Lila and Lenù’s first proper interaction begins when Lila throws Lenù’s doll down the basement chute of Don Achille, the local loan shark, an act of sudden aggression that places us within the wider tensions of two girl's neighbourhood. From this moment, Lila and Lenù are in competition with each other. Lenù often shows us that she is both intimidated by, and intent on following and emulating Lila. Ferrante’s conflict is this: both characters want to overtake the other, but they are also dependent on each other’s approval. Lila is stubborn, intelligent and observant where Lenù is hard-working, nervous and desperate for validation from school and, more generally, the world. Whilst these young girls are capable of a deep and emotional understanding of each other, they are also selfish, manipulative and cruel. Their competition encapsulates academic success, marriage and love, economic success, being well regarded - in simple terms, being “better” than the other. Friendship is not a simple mutual affection, but something more complex which includes elements of power, desire, ambition, empathy and distrust.

Through both characters, Ferrante captures the specific nuance of growing up as a young girl, whilst still refusing to “other” young girls and women as wholly different from boys or men. Part of the real joy of reading My Brilliant Friend is how Ferrante shows how girls, and women, can be marginalised yet reject powerlessness. Lila continually uses her sharp intelligence to persuade, manipulate and sway others in order to better her situation, or to defend her principles. Lenú, too, shows a fierce determination to stay in school, despite the hesitation from her family. Lila and Lenù are thrust together, in part, by the male violence they are steeped in, yet it does not wholly define their narratives. They are capable of success, callousness, heartbreak and change just as much as their male counterparts.

My Brilliant Friend is also a masterpiece of the concept of “the personal is political”, a phrase which is easy to say, but not always well executed. Lila and Lenù’s lives are shaped by post-war poverty, the treatment of the working class, the political actions of those around them (ranging from Communism to worker’s unions to outright fascists). Lila and Lenù have power dynamics between the two of them which feel like a microcosm of the world around them. For example, Lenù overtakes Lila in many ways when she is able to earn a certain level of education that Lila’s father prevents her from achieving. Ferrante captures the queasy perspective of childhood, outright resisting any nostalgia. In fact, Lila directly tells us:

‘I feel no nostalgia for our childhood: it was full of violence. Every sort of thing happened, at home and outside, every day, but I don’t recall having ever thought that the life we had there was particularly bad. Life was like that, that’s all, we grew up with the duty to make it difficult for others before they made it difficult for us.’

It should not be transformational to read such a well-written encapsulation of childhood, especially from the perspective of young girls, but as a topic that is so often poorly handled, you can't help but admire Ferrante's skill. The children she writes are treated as equals to the adults - they are capable of the same morality and immorality. Yet Ferrante also manages to show us the obliviousness they still possess, how their view of the world is still limited to their own small circle. At times it reminded of how Annie Ernaux captures the lived experience of historical change in her memoir The Years:

‘In the humdrum routine of personal existence, History did not matter. We were simply happy or unhappy, depending on the day.’

As soon as I finished My Brilliant Friend, I reserved the second book in the series from the library - The Story of a New Name - which I possibly enjoyed even more than the first book. With this series, Ferrante has created a special type of writing: something so deeply personal that manages to speak a larger truth about who we are, how we change, how much our friends shape us, the very imprint we can leave on the world.

So, in terms of reading this as part of a larger list of classics, would I recommend it as a “classic” or, at the least, a seminal piece of work? Undoubtedly yes. Ferrante’s style is not only elegant and engaging, the story itself resists the oversimplification of two chronically misunderstood forms of living: childhood and being a girl or young woman. This 100 books project is, in part, from a sense of all the good books that I feel I have missed out on. If I got to the end of my life having not discovered My Brilliant Friend and its sequels, I would most definitely be missing something very important.

100 books
Books read: 28
Books to go: 72

Next up: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Adam Thorpe

1. No more than one book per author. I do want to read my way through (for example) Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen, but including all of their best books means giving at least five spots away. I’m aiming for breadth of perspective and style where possible.
   

2. I had to research beyond the Georgian and Victorian novels. They’re great, and I do love them, but I want some breadth across both historical eras and countries where possible.
   

3. If a book appeared on more than two of the lists or articles I read, or came up in several conversations with other people, I had to really have a good justification to not include it. I couldn’t ditch it because it didn’t look like my kind of book, I had to look at how many titles I had from a specific style or era, or centring a specific perspective.

Eventually, I had to give up my perfectionism. There are so many more books I would have liked to included. Missing are authors I wanted to read (or read more of) like Yukio Mishima, J.G. Ballard, Shirley Jackson, Audre Lorde, Angela Carter and Elizabeth Gaskell, Katherine Mansfield. As much as possible, I tried to cut down work from authors that I have already a lot of, or specific styles and traditions, I feel I’ve read a lot of. At some point, I’ll have to create another list: everyone I wanted to include on the first list2.

This finished list was fun to research, and an exciting project, but it is also a celebration of the public library. Except for those I already own, most of these titles will be borrowed from my local library. Libraries go beyond borrowing books - they are community hubs, spaces for people to gather, access the internet, get job advice or bond with their children. In the current climate, where libraries face unjust budget cuts and censorship, it’s important we fight for everything they do, including the ability to read some of the best regarded books in the world at no cost.

With that all said, here is my imperfect but final list. The books I had read before starting this project in 2026 are struck through.

1. The Illiad by Homer

2. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

3. The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1,001 Nights translated by Malcolm Lyons and Urusla Lyons

4. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

5. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

6. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

7. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

8. The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe

9. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

10. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

11. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

12. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

13. The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

14. Moby Dick by Herman Melville

15. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

16. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

17. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

18. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

19. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

20. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

21. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

22. Little Women by Lou May Alcott

23. Middlemarch by George Eliot

24. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

25. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

26. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome

27. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

28. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

29. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

30. Dracula by Bram Stoker

31. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

32. The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

33. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

34. Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

35. Ulysses by James Joyce

36. The Age of Innocence by Edith Warton

37. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

38. The Trial by Franz Kafka

39. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

40. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence

41. Orlando by Virginia Woolf

42. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

43. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

44. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie

45. I, Cladius by Robert Graves

46. Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

47. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

48. The Stranger by Albert Camus

49. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

50. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

51. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

52. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

53. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

54. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

55. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

56. Lord of the Flies by William Golding

57. The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkein

58. Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov

59. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

60. On the Road by Jack Kerouac

61. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

62. The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

63. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

64. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

65. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

66. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

67. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

68. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

69. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

70. The Master and the Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov

71. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

72. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

73. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

74. My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

75. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

76. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

77. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

78. Lanark by Alasdair Gray

79. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

80. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende

81. The Colour Purple by Alice Walker

82. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

83. Beloved by Toni Morrison

84. Watchmen by Alan Moore

85. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

86. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

87. Possession by A.S. Byatt

88. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

89. The Secret History by Donna Tart

90. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler

91. The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

92. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

93. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

94. The Corrections by Jonatan Franzen

95. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

96. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

97. No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

98. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

99. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

100. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

In Leslie Kern’s Feminist City, each chapter follows a different way women interact with city spaces - as mothers, protestors and survivors. In her chapter on women as friends she says:

‘The city doesn’t seem to be a place where mainstream filmmakers imagine teen girls interacting with one another, building friendships and claiming space.’

Most films that are aimed at young girls, as Kern points out, show friendship in private and domestic spaces: girl’s bedrooms (think Heathers, Clueless, Sixteen Candles) or school bathrooms (Easy A, Mean Girls). Both spaces offer somewhere for girls to escape from their male peers and talk, bully and/or police each other without observation. In a world that finds teenage girls, and whatever they love, deeply annoying, the closed door to their bedroom allows them to gush over a film or TV series with friends, or pin up posters of musicians on the walls. In film, a teenage girl’s bedroom is shown as an extension of her self - think of how Kat in 10 Things I Hate About You has wallpapered her room with grunge posters, whilst her sister, Bianca, surrounds herself with florals and teddy bears.

It’s natural, then, that women’s friendships are framed as existing within these intimate, homely and private spaces. Yet this is also a way of keeping what happens to women away from men and, by extension, out of public. Suburban houses, outwith the cities, were invented, in part, with this division in mind. As Dolores Hayden puts it in Redesigning the American Dream, a suburban house would: ‘help a woman change from Rosie the Riveter to a stay-at-home mom.’

By cutting women and young girls off from the public, we cut them off from friendships that are more free or adventurous, and we reinforce the idea that their lives are not interesting enough to be something that others can engage with. Ferris Bueller can take a parade down a busy city street, but in film, most girl’s biggest outing will be confined to a house party or a school gym prom.

For me, my early teen friendships are written all over the nearest city to where I grew up. We didn’t do anything particularly exciting, it was just somewhere we could go by ourselves. Cities, as a rule, are not the most hospitable places for young girls, and we spent most of our time at Greggs, the Vue cinema or shopping in Primark. If we didn’t want to spend money, we’d just walk for hours around shopping centres or nurse one drink in a coffee shop until it was time to go home. When we did have money, we thought we were incredibly sophisticated by having a sit down dinner at Frankie and Benny’s or the recently opened Wagamama. The journey there was crucial too: we had to plan which bus to take, as not all of the routes went through our different towns. The bus journey into, and home from, the city was just as important as the day itself, because it was another hour and a half of time together.

In Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a 2020 film directed by Eliza Hittman, two girls from Pennsylvania travel to New York because one of them, Autumn, is pregnant and cannot obtain an abortion in her home state. Never Rarely Sometimes Always is a film about reproductive rights - but it is also a film about two girl’s relationship with a city. New York, for them, represents freedom - not just from parental observation, but over their own bodies. Despite this, they are not free from patriarchal control. They have to sleep rough, killing time in arcades and on subway trains, where men openly stare at them, all whilst dragging a cumbersome cheap plastic suitcase. The procedure takes all of Autumn’s money and Skylar ends up kissing a boy in order to receive enough money to buy a bus ticket home. As the boy pushes her body against a pole to kiss her, Autumn wraps her arm around it so she can hold Skylar’s hands.

Cities have always posed problems for women. In Feminist City, Leslie Kern links this historical tension back to Victorian London, where the industrial revolution stirred up fears that cities would corrupt women through ‘moral miasma’ where ‘one could be infected by depravity via sheer proximity to those who carried it’. In other words, cities created opportunities for women to work in various forms of paid labour, including sex work, and people believed that this not only corrupted those women, but any woman who would get too near to it.

What would a city that works for women look like? Firstly, we might have to reconsider the importance we place upon cities more generally. Girls and women, like Autumn in Never Rarely Sometimes Always, should not be forced to travel to a city for access to basic medical care. Similarly, even if New York has unique offerings to the characters in Roaming, we should not see cities as the only places with guaranteed reliable access to arts or cultural experiences. Why is it that we accept so many services or experiences rely upon being able to travel into a city? Why is it that these are not better funded and supported in smaller towns and villages?

At the same time, girls and women should be able to access cities without expensive or difficult public transport for the reason that cities contain more people. Access to a greater pool of people invariably leads to access to information, community and the ability to gather and protest. Whilst cities should not be the only places we house certain services, we should also recognise that there biggest asset is this access to other people, which, in an age where social isolation is rife, has enormous political weight.

Secondly, we have to think about what girls and women need from cities, and where they are not currently safe or welcome. Leslie Kern points out that the majority of spaces built specifically for young people evolve around an assumption they will be used by young boys - skate parks, basketball courts or ice hockey rinks. This is not to say that girls cannot, or will not, use these places, but more so that they are not the imagined user, and, when they do use them, their safety and acceptance is not guaranteed. Yes, children and teenagers should have easy access to places they can skate or play basketball. But who keeps these spaces safe for girls? And what other offerings do girls want from city spaces?

Kern goes on to discuss the work of White Arkitekter, a Swedish architecture firm who worked directly with young girls to understand what they wanted from city architecture. The final result was:

‘…places for sitting together face to face, protected from weather and wind, to see without necessarily being seen, a sense of intimacy without being constrictive; and most of all, to be able to leave an imprint on their city.’

When I think of the “imprint” I have left on the cities I have spent time in, I think of memory and connection. I can travel through places and remember spending time there: the shopping centre I spent hours in with friends, the bookshops that have filled my shelves, the cinema where I had the first date with my husband. I can also think of the times I have left some small change on a city - bars where I ran a poetry open mic, streets where I joined a protest, or the church where I worked as a guide.

It is easy to cast ourselves as passersby who float through a place, maybe buying or watching something occasionally. It’s hard to determine how much we “change” a place just by existing within it. Yet those of us who live in, or travel to, cities, are both reliant on, and support, the systems that take us there - the public transport we buy tickets for, the cafes we buy food from, even the waste management that takes our rubbish away. If we do not see ourselves as part of the cities we visit, it is too easy to cast off our responsibilities, to accept the idea that we don’t make a difference, so what is the point in trying?

Last night, I rewatched Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s masterpiece, Amélie. Though its titular character is not a teenage girl, I could not help but notice how much Amélie shapes, and is shaped, by the city she lives in. Throughout the film, we watch her use public city spaces - phone boxes, a photocopy machine, a train station, photo booths, parks, a street-side grocer. Community is knit into these spaces, in part because of Amélie. Her narrative arc is centered around this idea of reaching out to her fellow city-dwellers, both strangers and acquaintances, to create some form of meaningful change.

It is true that Amélie’s do-gooder acts, such as reuniting an old man with his box of childhood treasures or matchmaking two colleagues will not change the world. The film itself is not interested in structural change - in fact, Amélie’s depiction of Paris removes its multiculturalism, and there is a somewhat overly whimsical moment where Amélie offers money to an unhoused man who refuses, quipping he ‘never works on Sundays’. However, what I think Amélie does show is that cities do not necessarily isolate us and that we, including women, can be take action to start to foster communities. In 2001, it would have been easy to make a film about the failed promises of the millennium and the defeatist feeling of modernity (many other filmmakers and writers did create such stories), but Amélie does try to make us rethink what the city could mean, especially to a lonely 20-something woman.

Feminist geography has already delved into the concept of a city for, by and with women in much more depth than me, positing wider, and more exciting, solutions to make cities safer and more accessible to all. I myself have so many desires for the cities I have lived in - better access to green spaces, and protection of the environment, free and improved public transport, the preservation of third spaces where people can gather without spending money, better accessibility for those with disabilities. Yet in all my imaginings, I cannot help but return to Roaming, Never Rarely Sometimes Always (and perhaps Amélie) - I think that young girls and women won’t always see the importance of what they bring to cities, unless they have stories like these that show them the change they are capable of.

‘If half a loaf of bread is better not only than no bread at all, it is also better than overmuch bread. Readers become surfeited with topics not of everyday interest; books such as Bird Life on Island and Shore should be swallowed at a single gulp.’

Despite this, Bird Life on Island and Shore is, to me, a crucial text in terms of New Zealand’s birds, and the progress that has been made.

Out of the fourteen or so birds that Guthrie Smith dedicates a chapter to, I saw seven whilst travelling through New Zealand (the tarāpuka, the tara, the poaka, the hihi, the toutouwai, the pōpokotea and the tieke) though it’s worth noting that many other birds appear in Guthrie Smith’s accounts. He makes occasional references to korimako and tūī which I saw frequently - especially the latter, which I saw every day of my visit (much to my delight, as they were one of my favourite birds due to their general cheekiness, beautiful little ruffs and excellent bird call).

It’s important to note that New Zealand only has two native land mammals, both of which are bats. The main predator for birds would have been a huge eagle with a wingspan of up to 3 metres - as such, birds in New Zealand would have been safer on the ground rather than flying, and many of them have evolved to be ground nesters and/or flightless, as well as freezing (to blend in) rather than flying away when faced with danger. This has made them easy targets for the rats, possums, stoats, weasels and dogs that humans brought to New Zealand, who can eat eggs straight from their nests on the ground, or even attack them (especially in the case of flightless kiwi birds).

For Guthrie Smith to see the wide range of birds that he did, he often took boats out to these smaller islands - which were less likely to have, or have as many, rats and other pests. He spent long amounts of time watching and waiting behind screens that he built out of plants. He would put the screen in place, wait a while, then move it forward until it was close enough to the bird to take a photograph. In the first chapter, he recounts being attacked by a tarāpuka who did not fall for his screen at all:

‘In order to gain sight of him, it was necessary to peep round the screen. This - after a proper interval of prayer and supplication - I attempted, moving as gently and gradually as a lizard can move its head. Alas! it was ordained that one eye of his should meet with one of mine […] Then in one long roar his feelings were vented. He had foreseen his triumph, and, waiting for the psychological moment, had been storing up suitable imprecations for the persons who haunt lonely beaches and spy on the privacies of incubation.’

I have been birdwatching now for a few years. It’s something I started during COVID-19 lockdown when I had a lot more time to spend in the area I lived in, and often went to the parks near my flat. I read an article by Stuart Kenny about the importance of local nature which mentioned bird call apps, and I decided to download one on a whim.

Birdwatching naturally appeals to some part of my brain that likes to collect things. I love keeping a list of the birds I have seen - each new spot feels like something akin to discovering a cleverly hidden unlockable item in a video game, or spotting a detail in a painting. For a long time, I have thought of seeing birds in the language of “luck”. If you saw lots of new birds, you had been lucky. If you saw a bird you really wanted to see, you had had good luck. More recently, I have realised this framing is flawed.

In 2006, there were 89 tūī birds in the central suburbs of Wellington, New Zealand’s capital. Today, there are so many it would be difficult to count them all. This is not “luck”, this is due to the hard work of conservationists. Wellington is home to Zealandia Te Māra a Tāne, a 225 hectare sanctuary surrounded by a high fence that has been designed to keep out predator animals. The focus is to try and make this patch of land as close to what New Zealand was like before human inhabitants as possible. This will not happen overnight, in fact, they make reference to having a plan that will take over five hundred years.

At the sanctuary, you can see some of the birds that Guthrie Smith saw on his travels - in my case, the hihi, the toutouwai, the pōpokotea and the tieke, but also many more. I saw a pīpīwharauroa, a cuckoo which migrates from Papua New Guinea, being fed by a tiny riroriro, a warbler with a distinctive lilting call. I saw a colony of different kinds of kawau, which were not introduced to the sanctuary, but elected to live there due to the population of ducks and native fish they can eat. I got incredibly close to a kākā, one of New Zealand’s three types of parrot. When the sanctuary reintroduced them to Wellington in the early 2000s, there was around 30. Now the numbers are as high as over 1,000.

Another sanctuary I visited was Tiritiri Matangi, an island roughly an hour away from Auckland by boat. In the 1800s, Tiriti was farmland, but its lease was withdrawn in 1971 in order to let the land restore. Two scientists from the University of Auckland, John Craig (a zoologist) and Neil Mitchell (a botanist) argued that instead of letting the land regenerate by itself over a long time, there should be a more active approach. This lead to the “spade brigade”: boatloads of volunteers, many of whom were school children, who replanted over 280,000 native trees. Since then, nearly thirty types of bird have been identified as living on or visiting the island and Tiritiri Matangi is recognised as one of the most successful community conservation projects in the world.

Walking through dense canopies of trees that, at times, shut out most of the sunlight, I saw (for only a few seconds) a North Island kōkako - an incredibly rare bird and listened to its slightly haunting organ-like calls. A tiny tītitipounamu hopped close enough for us to take its picture, and on several occasions a korimako flew right up to us. After walking up the hill towards Tiritiri’s lighthouse, we had our picnic lunch (no food is sold on the island) listening to birdsong that Joseph Smith, a naturalist who travelled to Tiritiri with Captain Cook, described as: ‘the most melodious wild music I have ever heard’. On coming down a shortcut to get back to the harbour, several tūī lay on the path, sunning themselves whilst kererū flew suddenly up into the sky before letting their bodies drop in a mating display. The volunteer guides, who had finished their guided tours or shifts in the shop, rushed to the sea to get a swim in before the boat took us back to Auckland.

In so many regards, I am lucky. Lucky that I can visit New Zealand in the first place. Lucky that I can see so many birds, knowing how much work and dedication it took someone like William Herbert Guthrie Smith to see just a few of the ones I encountered so often on my trip.

But seeing a bird, any bird, is not quite “luck”. “Luck” suggests there is something outwith our power that creates the right conditions for a bird to be in front of us. In reality, this is something that we can change. We can dedicate huge chunks of land to sanctuaries, where we consciously work to undo the harm we have caused. We can replant native trees that create a safe place for these birds to live. On a bigger scale, we can fight back against climate change - both through reducing our own consumption, and demanding that large organisations, or our own governments, make huge changes.

In the opening to Bird Life on Island and Shore, Guthrie Smith states that: ‘nature watched close is nature cared for’. Our personal relationship with the land we live on, whether birdwatching, photography, gardening, replanting, rewilding, walking, or noticing, can have crucial importance. Or, as Guthrie Smith says:

‘all labour such as gardening, bee-keeping, fruit-growing, agriculture - work dealing at first-hand with the soil, - it calls forth the faculty of observation’

I keep a track of the birds I see every day, and take part in bird counts, such as the Big Garden Birdwatch, in part because I think it is important to create a record of what, and how many, birds I see. I hope this information can be used to support the birds whose numbers are dropping. I also think that doing so makes me care about these birds, and the plants and land they rely upon, and leads me to further ecological action.

To me, it is not enough to birdwatch for my own relaxation or enjoyment. Whilst I do love birdwatching for how it makes me feel, to end there - with no further advocating for the natural spaces around me - would be to only take from what I see, and not working to ensure it can continue to exist. As Guthrie Smith says:

‘Why should we paint life drab for the unfortunates yet to come? […] I don’t say we have shall quite come to that, but certain it is that with every species eliminated, by so much is the world robbed of light and colour […] Heaven help us poor mortals if an abominable utilitarianism is to chill the world like an eclipse, if what we call civilisation is to mean only the survival of man’

Near where I live is a very small patch of woods, planted by volunteers like those who replanted Tiritiri Matangi. I visit it often - in part to enjoy the experience of being surrounded by trees, in part to note down what birds are there during different months of the year. Since coming back from New Zealand, I like to think of it in the same way the workers at Zealandia Te Māra a Tāne think of the land they work on: as a several hundred year commitment. I hope the people who come long after me enjoy my local woods. I hope to that the birds I so enjoy still live there amongst their trees and plants. “Hope”, however, is not a passive verb. It is something that I, that everyone who takes a walk through those woods, can keep fighting to ensure it does come true.

You probably know Shirley Jackson for her short story “The Lottery” or her novels The Haunting of Hill House or We Have Always Lived in the Castle (as a side note, her novel The Sundial is truly superb and I’m sad more people haven’t read it - or, at least, people I can talk to about it!)

Shirley Jackson is known as a pioneer of horror, the gothic, the short story form and for exposing the dark layers of the seemingly everyday. “The Lottery”, Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle have rightfully earned their place as seminal works. However, “Men With Their Big Shoes” is one that I think about a lot. When I first read it, it needled at me for days, and, coming back to it for this piece, I found it even harder to pin down than I originally thought.

Our protagonist is Mrs. Hart - newly married, pregnant and also new to a richer class and a nicer house, one where she can: ‘look down the quiet street with the trees and gardens and kind people who smiled at her as they passed’. Her introduction is coded with class: her houses’ ‘chintz curtains’, ‘matching slip-covers and maple furniture’ and a ‘real stove in the kitchen’. The most important marker of Mrs. Hart’s new class, however, is that she now has a maid: Mrs. Anderson.

The narrator tells us that Mrs. Hart is ‘unreasonably afraid of Mrs. Anderson’ due to Mrs. Anderson having a sense of ‘belligerent authority’. Mrs. Anderson acts as if she knows more about cooking, cleaning and babies, despite the fact she ‘never got anything quite clean’ and admits she has never had any children herself. Despite the fact it’s an act, Mrs. Hart still follows what Mrs. Anderson tells her to do, even though this story marks the turning point where ‘Mrs. Hart recognized with sickening conviction that the faint small uneasiness was justified’.

On this day, Mrs. Hart is positive - she waves her husband off to work, thinks about how soon she will be able to play with her baby in the garden, and reminisces about her wedding presents. Mrs. Anderson, however, responds with a persistently negative perspective: ‘You’ll be having trouble with your stomach right along now’, ‘some of us never get much good coming along’, ‘You’ll never have another chance to take it easy like this’.

Mrs. Anderson’s true transgression is when she starts criticising Mrs. Hart’s husband for having friends over: ‘He shouldn’t bring his friends home with you like that.’ Throughout Mrs. Anderson’s critique, the narrator makes references to the domestic items, telling us that Mrs. Hart ‘looked into the teapot’, ‘put the freshly washed cup back on the table’, ‘touched the yellow curtain’. To ground herself against Mrs. Anderson’s authority, she reaches for the signifiers that she is of a higher class than her, namely, the items that she owns.

Mrs. Anderson continues to degrade Mr. Hart - suggesting that Mrs. Hart’s inexperience means she does not see that Mr. Hart could be a drinker, or that he is, or inevitably will, be unfaithful. Mrs. Anderson heightens this by making Mrs. Hart feel like she is at the centre of town gossip: ‘I said I was sure Mr. Hart never did any running around’s far as I knew.’ Though she is seemingly defending Mr. Hart, the very fact she depicts herself as having to defend Mr. Hart encourages paranoia in Mrs. Hart: ‘a quick fear touching her; her kind neighbors watching her beneath their friendliness, looking out quietly from behind curtains, watching Jim, perhaps?’

We can see now, the power balance has been thrown off. Mrs. Hart is reliant upon Mrs. Anderson’s defence against the nameless other people of this community who are seemingly watching and judging the Harts. At this point, Mrs. Anderson suggests that she should move into the Harts’ spare room. Mrs. Hart deflects this, again, reaching for items, physical things: ‘I wish I could get into a decent dress again.’

For every rebuttal she offers, Mrs. Anderson has a response. Mrs. Hart says the spare room will become the nursery, Mrs. Anderson says the baby can sleep with her. Mrs. Hart says her husband won’t allow it, Mrs. Anderson implies that it’s because she’s the ‘scrub woman’, causing Mrs. Hart to come to her defence.

The end paragraph zooms out from this conversation, following instead the train of Mrs. Hart’s thoughts. She imagines what everyone else will say - the worker at the local shop, the neighbours, her friends that she still writes to and all of them seem to cement that saying yes to Mrs. Anderson is, undoubtedly, the right thing to do - in fact, she must do it. We end with the chilling ‘[l]ooking up at Mrs. Anderson’s knowing smile across the table, Mrs. Hart realized with a sudden unalterable conviction that she was lost.’

The first time I read this, I saw it as a chilling story of home invasion made all the more excruciating because it is entirely because Mrs. Hart does not, or cannot, say no to Mrs. Anderson’s pressure. She deflects, she rebuts, but she never says no. It’s not just because of politeness, it’s because of a sense of what she should do, and because of the power that Mrs. Anderson tries to hold over her.

However, I don’t think this story is that simple. It’s not possible for us to only sympathise or align ourselves with Mrs. Hart. Think about what Mrs. Anderson is trying to escape - how she describes her husband:

‘“Cursing and yelling,” she went on, “I thought I was going crazy. ‘Why don’t you go on and get out?’ he says to me. Went over and opened the door wide as it would go and yelled so’s all the neighbors could hear him. ‘Why don’t you get out?’ he says.”’

If we are to believe her, then Mrs. Hart is in an unstable position. At time of publication, women in America could still not own a bank account. If Mrs. Hart gets kicked out by her husband, where will she go?

As well as writing novels and short stories, Shirley Jackson also wrote three memoirs: Life Among the Savages (1953), Raising Demons (1957) and Special Delivery: A Useful Book for Brand-New Mothers (1960). Each one of these chronicled the experience of raising children and the inequalities faced by women who were both writers and mothers. In a 2016 article in The Guardian, her son Laurence Jackson Hyman tells this story:

‘When she went into the hospital to have my sister, and was asked what her occupation was, she said “writer”, and the man who was checking her in replied: ‘Well, I’ll just put down housewife.’”

In other words, perhaps Mrs. Hart is as naive as Mrs. Anderson says she is. Perhaps we should take Mrs. Anderson’s statements about how ‘all men treat their wives the same’ seriously. Mrs. Hart’s perception of her life is saccharine and overly trusting: ‘Mrs. Hart spent hours every day, while she was resting as the doctor told her to, in peacefully congratulating herself’. The images of the chintz curtains, the quiet street of happy neighbours, the daily milkman ooze with false sweetness. Meanwhile, Mrs. Anderson sees the reality, that men can tear these quiet lives down: ‘[i]t’s the men who make dirt on the floor’.

This moment brings us back to the title. Men are only referenced in this story, and never speak for themselves, yet still they have more power than both Mrs. Hart and Mrs. Anderson. Both characters are always “Mrs.”, always defined by their marriage, but even Mr. Hart gets a first name in passing. Near the start of the story Mrs. Hart admits ‘I didn’t think Jim and I were ever going to get married […] and now look at me’ - in other words, everything she has is because Jim gave it to her, and Mrs. Anderson, and her relationship with her husband, demonstrate how easily everything can be taken away again.

Ultimately, that is the takeaway of this story - neither of these women have any real control over their lives. In the society they live in Mrs. Hart is to be a housewife and mother, and Mrs. Anderson a maid with unstable living. They cannot take power from their husbands, so the only way to get it is from each other.

I can see Ferrier’s reptile house in my head: the humming heat lights, the dim tanks, the odd, slightly sour, smell of wet reptiles. It is dank and disgusting, but also I can’t look away - something powerful and prehistoric draws me, and the narrator, in, forcing both of us to question the line between animal and human.

The opening of this story immediately places the narrator and the animals on the same level - under the red light lights they are all ‘rins[ed]’ with the same red colour. It would be easy to cast this human narrator as an interloper amongst the reptiles, but instead she seems to belong there - ‘[a] corn snake heaves it curls against the palm I offer’. In fact, she has been there as long as the crocodile that lives there, ‘[w]e arrived at the zoo two months ago, simultaneously, as though fate had tied our paths.’ In other words, they both have the same claim to this space.

Oh how I love crocodiles. I think of them as frightening oxymoron. We often see images of them swimming, so slowly, so languid - in fact, crocodiles eat rocks, potentially to help them sink to the bottom of the rivers they live in so they can seek out prey. However, a crocodile is also terrifyingly fast. On land, some crocodiles can reach up to an 11mph “gallop”. The saltwater crocodile has the strongest recorded bite of any animal - recorded at 16,460 newtons of force in a 2012 study. By comparison, humans have about 890 newtons in their bite.

In this story, that oxymoronic tension between two is at the heart. Ferrier’s imagery for this crocodile is unreasonably good - gives-me-writer-envy-good - named Gabriel, the name of the Angel who is the messenger of God in The Bible, we are told that the crocodile has a ‘marble-milk eye’, and is a ‘half-blind beast’, a ‘strong man’ with ‘charisma lying as duck fat on his tongue’. He is both humanised and beastly; oddly vulnerable and yet has ‘terrori[sed] the inhabitants’ of the river he lived in. He is charming; he is deadly.

This opening page also tells us exactly who the scientist is: someone who is drawn to that danger and power. I love this paragraph so much, I have to include it all:

‘All scientists love the dangers under their cultivation. A virologist admires the virus raging his cells to ruin, while a volcanologist sees beauty in the venting magma-ash that binds her lungs to stone. It is closeness to power. A good poison to open a vein, to become poisonous yourself. For this same reason, I adore Gabriel and through adoration I am as dangerous as he is.’

It is not just an interest in the strength of a crocodile, the magnetic quality something that prehistoric holds, it’s the sense that she becomes stronger by knowing more about him. She cannot have physical power over him (‘He could swallow me whole. Quite neatly, in fact’) but by learning about him, she gains some sense of control over him.

Power is the core of this story - it twists and turns and slips out of our grip. Who has power over whom? Scientist or crocodile? The scientist is the active agent, she comes to visit the crocodile, she is the one who looks at him through the ‘glass divide’. He is a prisoner under her watch. Yet, at the same time, the narrator is reliant upon him. She tells us ‘he takes a starring role in my research’. In other words, she is economically and academically dependent upon him, likening her to a traditional wife. This relationship, despite being human and animal is also gendered - ‘As a woman, I need a male subject if I wish to garner praise.’ An male, even though it is a male crocodile, has more respect than her simply because of his sex.

This continues into the first ‘FIELD NOTES’ of the story - the narrator not only tells us she feeds Gabriel, but she also eats alongside him, like a married couple at a dining table. The field notes mention, ‘I SUPPLEMENT GABRIEL’S RATIONS WITH SUPERMARKET MEAT (TESCO’S FINEST)’ offering us a domestic image of a woman shopping for her husband in a normal supermarket. She even asks herself ‘[h]ave I domesticated a crocodile?’ before telling us she has decided to bring a mattress into the reptile house so she can sleep beside him, completely closing the gap between reptile house and home.

Similarly, the gaps between field notes also shorten, bringing a faster pace to the story. Snapshots show us the scientist becoming closer to the crocodile (‘I can sleep and work and never leave him’) She sleeps beside him, undresses in front of him and time passes more quickly, jumping from September to January.

In February, we are offered a new twist of power. The scientist thinks Gabriel is sick and smuggles sedative pills into his food in order to take his temperature. Sitting on his back, she reinforces that she is still the one in control: ‘This is power, isn’t it? Straddling a century-old beast who lies within the mercy I grant him’ - in this moment, she is physically stronger than him, could kill him if she wanted to. However, the next day the field notes tell us ‘I FOUND TRANQUILISERS, THE PILLS I THOUGHT I’D FED TO GABRIEL, UNEATEN IN HIS ENCLOSURE THIS MORNING.’ The scientist never had the power, Gabriel only let her feel as if she did.

The relationship begins to turn even more unsettling, Gabriel ‘warms his throat against my legs’ and the narrator, no longer buying food for him instead ‘take[s] two moorhens from the local pond’. The breakdown of barriers makes Gabriel feel more like a human man and the scientist more like an animal.

My favourite moment of this story is when the field notes break through the story, becoming part of the narrative instead of a report that punctuates it. The line ‘YOU CAN READ THIS, CAN’T YOU, GABRIEL?’ is so shocking, so creepy in its connotations. You can read this as the narrator losing a grip on reality, believing that Gabriel is beyond crocodile, or you can choose to accept her reports: perhaps he can read this, perhaps, through her own doing, she now is powerless to escape him. This feeling of inescapability continues until they become almost one organism, an ‘Ouroboros’.

This is where we end the story, power has fully been subverted and the lines of where Gabriel end and the narrator begins are blurred. The ending of the story echoes the opening - referring to the red lights, the scientist’s blouse, ‘the security key into my—no, his—Burberry jacket’. Have they swapped bodies? Has Gabriel overpowered her into such submissiveness that he can assume her life? Does she relate to Gabriel so strongly that she sees herself in his body, and her in his? We are offered no firm answers, you must choose yourself.

Again and again, I am drawn to stories about nature where the barrier between human and animal, or human and wildness, disintegrates. It is, in fact, the main focus of the short story collection I have been working on. In part, I am fascinated by how, as humans, we so often see ourselves as divided from the natural world, instead of just another type of animal that lives in it. This line of thinking makes it easier to see us as the rightful “owners” of this planet, as having more right to do what we would with a patch of land than the animals, birds or insects that already live on it. It also allows us to divorce ourselves from the harm we commit: there are human matters and then there is the natural world.

In “The Dictator’s Bride”, Ferrier weaponizes removing that separation to take us into a gothic, uncomfortable place. It is a perfect example of the unsettling as compelling. What if animals had a power over us? What unnatural things might we do with them? Or to ourselves? What if they treated us as we did them? And, perhaps most importantly, what is power over nature? What does seeking that control do to us?

Whenever I think of this story, I think of a bus winding around a road on the edge of a cliff. At any time, something could happen and the entire bus and all its passengers could tip off and into the sea. Each time I’ve read this story, I’ve marvelled at its relentless pace, its unsettling and off-kilter world and how much the author gives away at each point in the story - enough to both surprise you and keep you hooked.

We begin the story with: ‘It comes for me in the middle of the day when I am preparing lunch, quartering a tomato then slicing each segment in two’ - what a glorious opening. It makes us ask what has come for the narrator? What kind of force or thing - benevolent or evil? Why are the details about the chopping of the tomato so specific?

Instantly, this story feels unsettling. The domestic act of making lunch is interrupted by something that feels violent in its intrusion. I love how this opening sentence places the ‘it’ first - ‘it comes for me’ is before the lunch, the tomato - it is clear that whatever ‘it’ is, it will be the main thrust or focus of the story.

This uncanny feeling seeps throughout this story - and it’s used perfectly to keep us hooked. When something is slightly off, slightly not right, our instinct is to keep going, keep reading so we can find out why. In her comparisons, a tomato becomes ‘the meat of my own hand’, a stranger is called ‘the driver’ and nothing more. The driver tells the narrator ‘It’s time’ - continuing the intrigue. Time for what? Now, as we look at the second section we can see the numbers are counting down - from 14 to 13.

The next point that makes us focus is the introduction of the character Jennifer, a nervous teenager, who says her mother is likely following the bus and has ‘caught me up before’. This seems like a threat to the driver, but then she says ‘Can you hurry up? […] Please, just a bit faster.’ Our expectations are subverted: despite the earlier threat of something ‘coming’ for the narrator, and presumably Jennifer too, Jennifer wants to be there - she is scared of getting off of the bus.

Despite Jennifer’s desperation to stay on the bus, the narrator shows us that she, personally, feels conflicted. She ‘want[s] my ribs to split with love and I want it to kill me instantly’ and has ‘thrown up onto the tarmac after smoking an entire packet of cigarettes in one go’. The use of present tense gives us momentum - there is no narrator looking back on what has happened, there is only the here and now, this bus and its passengers speeding towards somewhere. It feels relentless, inescapable. Images clash: a family laugh and play games, Jennifer sleeps - why does the protagonist fanaticise about death or smoke so many cigarettes that she’s physically sick?

The next crucial admission is after Jennifer has been taken by her mother, when the narrator meets another passenger, James. James asks ‘When did you put your request in?’ which changes our understanding of the story - whatever the characters are headed towards, it was their choice to be here. Whatever has ‘come’ for the narrator, came at her ‘request’. Why then, has Jennifer’s mother stopped the bus both now and on her previous journeys? The narrator herself has admitted she has ‘consider[ed] not getting back on the vehicle, because I have choices. A military van or a tourist would take me home.’

Ann Radcliffe, one of the early and most renowned gothic writers, has a definition of horror versus terror that I often return to. In her essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry”, she defined horror as the feeling of encountering something physical or substantial - think of the jump scare when a film reveals a scary man wielding a knife, or shows us the face of the attacker - right there! We feel a rush of panic, and then relief.

Terror is a more drawn out feeling that denies us that same relief. It combines anxiety and dread, it is ‘uncertainty and obscurity’. We feel uneasy, less heart-in-mouth than horror, but overwhelmed by a feeling that is much harder to overcome.

‘Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; the other contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.’

In other words, horror confirms what we are scared of, whereas terror refuses to. Everything in this story is orchestrated to build this sense of terror. The use of present tense, the counting down numbers, the ‘uncertainty and obscurity’ of what is happening and whether or not the protagonist will stay on this bus force us to fill in the gaps, with no guarantee of relief. Mackintosh refuses to confirm what the ‘it’ is because if she did, all momentum, all force of the story would be, as Radcliffe said, ‘annihilate[d]’.

Eventually, we reach the ‘3.’ of our counting down, and the driver tells everyone on the bus that they have ‘passed the point of no return’. We know that soon we will be at ‘1.’ and there no chance of escaping the stories conclusion, presumably facing whatever the characters have volunteered for.

I am also fascinated about the recurring idea of choice throughout this story. At the start of the story, the narrator tells herself ‘You have choices’, that with every purchase in the supermarket, ‘[e]very choice was a joy’. Once on the bus, it is revealed that the passengers have made the decision to be here - Jennifer had even chosen to be on the bus again despite being taken off by her mother before.

This repetition of choice stands out so starkly against the standard image of a bus passenger sitting and waiting to arrive. I think about how, sometimes, when I’m on a bus, reading my book or messaging a friend, I will become struck by the realisation that someone is actually driving this machine and I am passive to their every decision. Mackintosh is repeatedly pulling us out of that of that passivity - though the driver drives the bus, every time they stop it is a direct choice to get back on. At one point the narrator says, ‘There are more and more stops for the loved ones after this’ - in other words, more and more opportunities to choose to leave the bus behind.

Even right at the end, to the last sentence, Mackintosh is clear - the protagonist is making a choice. The characters hear people shouting at them, ‘the words are the only ones they could call, the words are Don’t jump’. Her last sentence uses repetition to hammer this home this last choice: ‘we look at the water below, and we do jump, we do.’

To me, the real gut punch of the story is that choice. The idea of being forced to jump, potentially to my death, is scary, but the idea of choosing it again and again is much more unnerving. Who would choose this? What kind of world would support it with this system of buses and drivers and check points? I especially love how the story ends with this final choice. We are offered no relief over what happens - do the characters die? How far away is this water? We are forced, instead, to linger on that last choice: to jump.

Years ago, I saw a photograph of a supermarket shelf - where a jar of pasta sauce had been, there was now an abandoned bundle of basil, a ripe tomato and a bulb of garlic. The caption of this photograph was ‘I love environmental storytelling’.

This same method of storytelling is at the heart of Unpacking, a little indie game released by Witch Beam in 2021. The gameplay is fairly simple: unpack a collection moving boxes, finding the perfect place for every item you unpack. What is genius about this game is how it manages to tell you a whole narrative, without containing any real dialogue or characters.

You begin the game in a childhood bedroom: unpacking a Polaroid camera, stuffed animals, a Tamagotchi, a yo-yo. Next, you move onto a student bedroom. You bring some of the same stuffed animals (though not all of them), a couple of pairs of jeans, some t-shirts. As each level unfolds, your room gets larger, and your protagonist older. You follow their possessions through different flats and home-shares until, eventually, you unpack in a house with a nursery and a crib.

There are so many layers to the story you are being told. You see how time moves on - a Tamagotchi becomes a Nintendo DS, a clunky white PC becomes a laptop. The mug the protagonist keeps their toothbrush in earns a chip, and a worn patch grows in the centre of their mouse mat. Equally, you see the protagonist’s interests change. At one point, you have to find a shelf for all their bouldering kit. By the next move, it’s all gone.

The most devastating level takes you to a flat, clearly already occupied by the protagonist’s boyfriend or partner. His stuff fills the space, making the level reach near-tedium as you try and move every single thing he owns to try and fit your basic items. You pick up each pair of his pants to earn a tiny amount of space in his drawers, you move his coffee stuff into one cupboard so you can keep your cooking knife. It’s clear that he doesn’t have any space for you, he won’t make any. The level ends with a devastating realisation: you can’t move any of his art or wall hangings, so you have to store your university degree under the bed. This small detail tells you everything you need to know about this relationship.

However, there’s still a touch of joy here. Every level after that, you unpack a fancy bag of coffee, a machine to grind the beans and a cafetiere. The boyfriend you lived with owned lots of coffee making equipment, but before living with him, the protagonist didn’t own any. In short, a shitty boyfriend can still open your eyes to the wonder of good coffee. We are changed by everyone we let into our lives, and sometimes those changes are not as easy to categorise as “good” or “bad”, just different. When we unpack, we don’t just bring our items, we bring all the history of where they came from and why we brought them with us.

These days I feel exhausted by just how much stuff there is in the world. Buying a new water bottle feels like an exercise in research. Everything comes with a comparison guide and seven different personalisation options for showing your personality. You could have a water bottle, or you could have a water bottle with insulation and a carry lid and that also demonstrates to the world that you love a specific series of books or cats or birdwatching. What I love about Unpacking is that it cuts through that noise. The items feel real, not planned. There’s always something somewhat random: a red sieve that doesn’t match the protagonist’s set of pans, board games that are different sizes and don’t beautifully stack, one pair of shoes too many. It’s impossible to unpack perfectly in this game - you just have to find the best home you can, and accept that some things will always be somewhat out of place.

More and more, houses or homes are offered as a source of entertainment to others. Think of TikToks showing people cleaning their toilets, “fridgescaping” or “tidy with me” videos or celebrities giving house tours on the Architectural Digest YouTube channel. Before the internet, where we lived was something we only really showed to people we physically invited into it. Now, the invitation is much broader. I could take a picture of the desk I am writing at right now and even if I wasn’t in the picture, would I not be inviting you into my life in some kind of way? Even if we’d never met, you’d be invited to see what I do, to pick apart who I am by which books or photographs I keep next to me as I work.

With this broader invitation comes a desire to curate our lives, our living spaces. A random assortment of things you’ve collected, that work perfectly fine, are no longer enough. If our houses are entertainment, they have to be unique, engaging or fit to a rigid aesthetic. You buy a specific toothbrush holder that matches your bathroom tiles instead of using an old mug, you put everything in your fridge inside another plastic container. There’s nothing wrong with the concept of interior design, cleaning or organising, but sometimes I wonder - how do we live in these spaces? The pandemic has fundamentally changed our homes. For many, they also became where they worked. A home is not somewhere to be, it’s somewhere to be productive or signal who you are as a person. How does someone rest on a sofa chosen for aesthetic over comfort? How do you sleep when your bedroom is also your office?

Perhaps that is why Unpacking offered me such a breath of fresh air. Here I was not thinking about my house being too messy or not perfectly decorated. Here, I was thinking about how to best display a life - how each object held a story. How each level let me closer and closer to the main character in a way that felt real, that had heart. I wasn’t building a pretty picture, I was making someone feel at home. As the credit song’s lyrics go:

‘We pull your favourite mug
out of the packing foam,
stick magnets on the fridge,
and we make this house a home.’

From there, each book has a reliable formula: the children move into their new home and adjust to life with their new guardian, the evil Count Olaf shows up in disguise to try and kidnap them, the children expose Olaf and he disappears before the police can show up. Each story ends as the children are taken away from their current home.

This pattern breaks towards the end of the fifth book. The Baudelaires discover their parents were members of a secret organisation known as “V.F.D.” - the membership of which seems to be the reason they were killed in the fire. Lemony Snicket treats us to numerous secrets and red herrings - other versions of V.F.D. pop up in Baudelaires search, including “very fancy doilies”, “village of fowl devotees”, “volunteer feline detectives” and “verbal fridge dialogue”. Lemony also continually references a sugar bowl that he and “Beatrice” - an unidentified woman to whom each book is dedicated1 - stole many years ago. So who killed the Baudelaire’s parents? Why? What is the sugar bowl? Why did they steal it? Why was so important? What was inside it?

Snicket never tells us. Some mysteries are resolved, but many are abandoned with no answer other than the one the reader creates. I believe that’s the exact reason that 29-year-old me, a full 20 years since the last book was published, is still absorbed by these books. I will forever admire how Snicket had the opportunity to create a perfect mystery series where every single clue fit perfectly in place and instead decided to end it with readers asking more questions than they went in with.

This decision, however, perfectly fits the grander narrative of the books. The series touches on themes such as the mistreatment of workers under capitalism2 , the danger of literal interpretation of the law3, the role of charity4 and, more generally, what is ethical in the face of evil5. In other words: the orphans encounter societal structures they, and the reader, assume will protect them and, time and time again, they don’t.

Throughout the books, adults are cruel, lazy, selfish and don’t listen to children. The central villain is not the obviously cruel Count Olaf, but the systems that fail the children. The banker who is put in charge of finding them a home never ensures they are safe and happy. Guardians ignore or fail to notice when Count Olaf has shown up and is threatening the children’s lives. Even V.F.D, the organisation their parents upheld, is riddled with people who do evil things in the name of “honour”.6

The Baudelaires are shocked, out of nowhere, by their parents death and, across the thirteen books, they never recover from this. In fact, the articulation of this loss is one of the best descriptions of grief I have ever read:

‘It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things.’

There are a scattering of references to classic detectives in the series - The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupine, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. Yet, this series is completely unlike the mystery genres it alludes to. Every Poirot mystery ends with Poirot assembling every key figure into a room, pointing at them one by one to explain their role in the mystery and what the real and true answer is. Every clue is explained, every loose end is tied up. This works perfectly for the world that Poirot lives in.

In the second last book The Penultimate Peril, Lemony Snicket even plays with the idea of what this kind of ending would look like in his series. The Baudelaires, Count Olaf, and all the previous guardians and characters the Baudelaires have met assemble at the Hotel Denouement where the guardians decide the best thing to do is put Count Olaf on trial. The book seems set to reveal every secret, to lock Count Olaf up forever, to find the perfect home for the Baudelaires. But of course, it doesn’t. The judges panel has been rigged and the adults refuse to listen to Baudelaires when they point this out. There’s a whole other book to go, where readers are whiplashed from a busy hotel to a remote island, and very few questions are answered.

A classic Poirot or detective denouement doesn’t work for these books, because the Baudelaires, live in a different world - the world where Edwardian and 50s noir aesthetics match, and there are secret organisations that use jars of pickles and poems as clues, where a baby can have her own language where “Busheney” means an evil man7. More importantly, the Baudelaires live in the world where their parents have died. Their grief is always unresolved and, in life in general, many things are never sewn up neatly.

If books help us make sense of the world, A Series of Unfortunate Events helps us make sense of the fact that life isn’t fair, that the people you thought of as perfect were flawed and capable of great immorality, that bad things happen to good people and that the world isn’t as safe as you were brought up to hope it would be. Perhaps, most of all, it prepares us for something uglier - the fact that closure is never guaranteed. No matter what we want, we may never get it. No matter what we lose, we might never find it again. No matter who dies, that wound may never heal. Or, as Lemony says: ‘The sad truth is the truth is sad.’

I went into Little Women with the perhaps obvious assumption that Jo would be my favourite of the March sisters. Jo is a writer, a rebel. She makes mistakes, learns from her scrapes and refuses to fit into the mould of conventional womanhood. Honestly, it’s like she was written for my bookish yet frustrated personality! On (finally) reading the book, however, I found all of my affection went elsewhere: the youngest sister, Amy. If Jo’s brutal honest and tomboy nature (and potential queerness) is obviously rebellious in a culture that values women to be beautiful, polite and obedient, Amy’s is more slippery.

Amy is, in my opinion, the character that changes the most over the course of the book. At the beginning, she is a coddled, somewhat spoiled, twelve-year-old. An example of her rather bratty attitude is featured in one of my favourite scenes, where, after staying with her aunt to avoid contracting Beth’s illness, she tries to persuade her mother that keeping an expensive ring that’s been gifted to her will actually help her remind herself to be less selfish (this is absolutely the kind of thing I would have pulled as a kid and it is therefore hilarious to me).

Amy’s selfishness and temper is ugly, and its an ugliness I like because of how real it feels. When Jo scorns her and she commits the cruelest act she could, and burns Jo’s notebook (her most precious object). This depiction of being so nasty is refreshingly honest to me, because it manages to avoid both being either sentimental and pandering. In fiction, when girls and women are unkind to each other, it is often to elicit the response of mocking the one that has been wronged (making us think she is shallow, vain or stupid to care about what’s hurt her - think of all the “I broke a nail” girls of the 90s) or its to promote the aggressor as being a female character we could call “feisty” or “badass”. Both don’t have real emotional depth - they’re just posturing. Amy’s cruelty is neither of these. The loss of Jo’s novel is devastating, and Amy isn’t cool or alternative for destroying it, she’s just doing the nastiest thing she can think of to hurt Jo - something sisters and friends do all the time.

Amy can be cruel and stubborn, yet she is also desperate to be liked by the other girls, especially the richer girls in her art class. She is proficient in society, more so than her sisters who avoid it because of their self-consciousness or shyness or, in Jo’s case, because it is boring and requires a certain level of pretence. In society, and her own life, Amy is also fiercely ambitious. She works on her painting, we are told, not just because she enjoys it, but because she believes she should be good at it:

‘If ‘genius is eternal patience’, as Michelangelo affirms, Amy had some claim to the divine attribute, for she persevered in spite of all obstacles, failures, and discouragements, firmly believing that in time she should do something worthy to be called ‘high art’.’

Her ambition to be a great painter is both her greatest asset and the rod she uses to beat herself with. After seeing master painters in Rome, she decides to give up, stating: ‘[T]alent isn’t genius, and no amount of energy can make it so. I want to be great, or nothing. I won’t be a common-place dauber, so I don’t intend to try any more.’

This could be read as childish, impatient - but we know Amy is not impatient, as we have seen, she’s worked tirelessly at her art. What Alcott seems to scratch at here is a sense of burnout, of overwhelming internal pressure of a greater dissatisfaction with life. Painting was Amy’s way to be more than just a high-society lady, but she knows if she is not extraordinary, she will only be dismissed as a woman with a nice little hobby. Amy’s realisation is also her reckoning with a much grander idea - the crushing weight of mediocrity. To be both ambitious and “only” good at something is to contend with the devastating feeling of looking at those better than you and feeling a deep sense of inferiority and jealousy. Amy, then, has to find a way out of this pressure she puts upon herself and change her relationship with painting. As Naoise Dolan says in an article for Mashable:

‘I saw Amy as more of a role model than Jo. I’ve never felt gifted at anything, it’s always moderate talent plus slog, and I loved that Amy thought it was still worth creating art on her own terms. That’s the attitude I aim for.’

Later in the novel, Amy also decides she should marry rich in a way that is completely counteractive to her earlier characterisation. If Amy as a child was selfish or self-indulgent, as an adult, she is willing to make a sacrifice for her family by marrying a man she doesn’t love:

‘One of us must marry well. Meg didn’t, Jo won’t, Beth can’t yet, so I shall, and make everything okay all round. I wouldn’t marry a man I hated or despised. You may be sure of that, and though Fred is not my model hero, he does very well, and in time I should get fond enough of him if he was very fond of me, and let me do just as I liked.’

Obviously this is, in part, motivated by her desire to escape the poverty that Meg has married into, but it also feels like a recognition that this is how she is able to support her family. None of her other sisters can bring in money, but Amy has struck the balance of being well-mannered and pushy enough to be able to, and so she will. It reminds me of Charlotte Lucas in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice who, narratively, serves to show how precarious life is as a young woman. Whilst Elizabeth is able to reject a marriage proposal, Charlotte isn’t. Charlotte doesn’t marry Mr. Collins because she is being rash: she marries him because she is being smart:

‘I ask only a comfortable home; and, considering Mr. Collins’s character, connections, and situation in life, I am convinced that my chance of happiness with him is as fair as most people can boast on entering the marriage state.’

Then there is Laurence, or Laurie. Laurie is difficult to me. Perhaps, if I was younger I would find him more charming or romantic. Perhaps, if I didn’t see so much of myself in his outright desperation to be loved. Perhaps if he wasn’t slightly so puppy dog in his determination to propose to Jo, and be wounded when she says no1. Amy is honest with Laurie, painfully honest, in a way I find refreshing, criticising him when she believes he is wasting his life and his potential: ‘“What would Jo say if she saw you now?” asked Amy impatiently, hoping to stir him up by the mention of her still more energetic sister’s name.’

If Jo shrugs off traditional femineity, Amy wears it like an uncomfortable coat that doesn’t fit her right. Her reasoning for this feels layered - a sense of duty, of making up for the losses her sisters have accrued through failing to become the women they were supposed to, perhaps, also, some sense of guilt at being such a difficult sister to all of them. This is her way of repaying that debt. Yet, at the same time, she doesn’t lose that same directness that made her burn Jo’s book. Amy, despite everything, still has bite.

Why is Amy the most maligned sister? Perhaps because it it hard to move past how she is introduce: petty, spoiled, selfish. Even once she has changed, the image of a annoying younger sibling is a sticky one that’s hard to forget.

In an article for the New York Times, Jessica Bennett states that ‘each iteration [of Little Women] is a kind of Rorschach test for how the world feels about women at the time’. Perhaps no character embodies this idea of a “put-upon” character than Amy: onto her go your feelings about younger siblings or vain women or unsatisfying marriages.

The Roscharch of Little Women is especially obvious in Gerwig’s adaptation from 2019, where she plays with Lou-as-Jo - Jo’s manuscript is rebuffed by a publisher who insists the women be married at the end (just as Lou May Alcott’s publisher insisted Jo be married in Little Women), but, she ultimately succeeds in publishing it and receiving the copyright and loyalties. Amy, too, receives a similar change. At one point Jo asks her ‘When did you get so wise?’, Amy responds in turn: ‘I always have been, you were just too busy noticing my faults.’ This moment could be filmed with Amy looking directly to the camera - she’s not just talking about Jo’s characterisation of her, but the readers too.

I’ve already said that what I love about Little Women is how real the women feel - and that includes their faults as well as their assets. Amy, to me, is perhaps the realest of all.

‘I reread Beth's dying a lot because there was this sense of helplessness. And I really understood that in a way that a lot of people don't. Because I knew when something's inevitable, and it's going to happen, they keep saying the tide's going out in the book.’

In her essay “Intimacy Without Cannon: Loneliness, Adulthood and Little Women”, Anahit Behrooz also touches on this sense of grief and helplessness in Little Women. Behrooz shows that Little Women manages to articulate something fairly nuanced - the loneliness, isolation and deep sadness that the end of childhood can bring. The four sisters go from one community to four separate individuals without any clear paths of how they should be. As Behrooz says:

‘There is something that shifts between the two halves of Little Women, the childhood half and the adulthood half; a change of mood that articulates exactly the sense of unshakeable, melancholy grief, the constant agitation…’

Shamlya’s story is objectively sad - she was a young girl who was abused, cut off from her family, from her own childhood - unable to freely play, write, read or be creative. Yet there’s also so much hope in this story. Shamlya is able to identify any quote from Little Women within seconds and she still reads Little Women every year:

‘…every year on my birthday, I find the corresponding age that I am for the chapter I am, and I read that […] To be like, so what is this year going to be about in my life? What's it telling me?’

Little Women is described as the love of her life, her ‘magic eight ball’, her Bible. I listened to this story several times, but, until recently, I had never read Little Women. I’d seen the Greta Gerwig film twice and cried both times, but until a couple of months ago, I had never read it.

If you’re not familiar, Little Women follows four sisters - Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy - from their early teens until they are young women in their twenties. Each sister has her own characteristics: Meg is the eldest; kind but a little shallow and often waylaid by her desire for nice things. Her storyline is the most conventional of the four - her journey into womanhood focuses on learning to run a household and satisfied with less, and generally being a good wife and mother.

Beth, the second youngest, is also somewhat conventional, but perhaps harder to place than Meg. Shy, honest, kind, Beth wants nothing more than to stay at home with her family and play music. She claims to have no great ambitions, but the impact she has on other characters (including her family, but also Mr. Laurence and The Hummels) is clear. Some, however, read Beth’s death as a rejection of the domesticity. In a grander sense, they claim, Beth’s death allows her to leave the conventional path.

Jo is the second-eldest; brash, strong-willed, adventurous and repeatedly characterised as a tomboy or masculine. Fiercely committed to her writing, Jo is sometimes believed to be a stand-in for Alcott’s own personality, as well as their own queerness and potential transness.

In case you were unaware: “Louisa” May Alcott preferred to be called Lou and said things such as: ‘I am more than half-persuaded that I am, by some freak of nature, a man’s soul put into a woman’s body.’

Jo, similarly, feels this tension, complaining: ‘I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy.’

I am well aware that some will take any evidence of transness, past or present, in bad faith and that there are also others who will argue that Alcott’s language here does not betray being queer or trans, but instead a dissatisfaction with the limitations placed upon women in the time they were alive. There is so much I could say to that in terms of Occam’s Razor, but I also enjoy the following quote from the New York Times Article on Lou May Alcott:

‘Although some would object to a word like “trans” being applied to the 19th century, the objection is spurious. We do it all the time with words like “feudalism” — a term used in the 18th century, which no 10th-century serfs would have used to describe their life. […] No one would dispute that Joan of Arc was a resident of feudal France. Call her transgender, though, and charges of misogyny arise.’

During the summer I attended an event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival where a question was asked: Is queer writing hopeful just because it exists? In other words, does the content of the poem or story have to have a hopeful focus, or is any articulation of queerness that is open and public automatically revolutionary purely because it exists in a society that has tried, and often continues to try, to snuff it out. Is Jo hopeful because she is able to exist outwith gender norms?

I ask a similar question when I read a lot of women’s classic fiction. Is any book that reveals women have rich lives or thoughts or feelings automatically revolutionary purely because it came out of a society that repeatedly subjugated women? I think a lot about how the Brontës work comes with knowing that they used pen names (Currer, Ellis and Acton) to increase their work being published. Lou May Alcott was, somewhat similarly, constrained in what they wanted to write - Thomas Niles, who edited Little Women, insisted that Jo must be married before the end of the book.

Despite this, I don’t think any book by and about women is necessarily revolutionary. Women, even if well-written and examined, can still be huge proponents of unjust systems. Elements of Little Women grate upon me as, naturally, I think they should - it’s not fair for me to want my intersectional feminism in a book from the 1860s.

Perhaps Little Women’s defiance is not because it is about the rich lives of women, but because it is about the rich lives of girls and teenagers. Teenagers, especially teenage girls, are one of the most mis-characterised figures in fiction: either turned into mindless screaming children who are annoying and best ignored, or they are romanticised as objects of forbidden affection. As Behrooz points out, Little Women manages to convey something much deeper - a sense of depression of longing, both missing younger childhood whilst feeling trapped by its lingering effects.

There is obviously a richness to any book that can survive over 150 years of scrutiny, but especially one that can sustain a twelve-year-old stuck in abusive restriction with nothing else to read to the point where she still loves it. It is clear too that throughout the book there are ideas that were, and still are, pushing back against society: queerness and transness, the value of girls, familial obligations and how we see marriage and class, ambition and the dissatisfaction of life not being what you thought it would. What I love most about this book is that these girls, these women, don’t feel like fictional creations, they feel like fully realised human beings. That is where this book’s power lies: in the girls and the women who live as richly as any real person.

P.S. I turns out that I had a lot more to say about Little Women, so my next post will be all about my favourite March sister. Stay tuned!

‘I don't believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it's about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.’

Travelling by yourself is an art, one that I’ve only recently got good at. It most definitely requires the idea of ‘befriend[ing] yourself’ as well as recognising that a lot of systems and services are not set up for single people (single women, especially) to enjoy (though that doesn’t have to stop you).

In Germany, travelling alone now, I read The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki, a thick book that, at its heart, is about a family who fall apart after the father’s death. Benny, the son, starts hearing the voices of all the objects in the house that his hoarding mother gathers. His mother’s hoarding becomes more and more unwieldy, her version of filling the void left by her husband, until social services threaten to put Benny in care, and their landlord threatens to evict them. I took this book with me on long walks through Lübeck, the small city in Germany I was staying in. As beautifully examined already by , being in other countries right now makes you realise how much your own is falling apart. Lübeck had street musicians, big parks and green spaces, thriving independent shops and cafes, efficient public transport - all small things to want from a society (arts funding, support for the environment, infrastructure), but it’s wild how much this feels no longer the norm.

No systems are there to help Benny and his mother, they only exist in the novel as antagonists. The scene from The Book of Form and Emptiness that stays with me is one where an entire community show up to try to help Benny’s mother dismantle the mess of her life. There is so much to say about the need for community, for helping others around you not because they are family, but because they are humans and now, more than ever, we need to care for each other rather than be divided. Back home in Scotland, I re-read Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum, one of my favourite books of all time (and the topic of my sixth year English dissertation at secondary school). Through it’s protagonist, Ruby Lennox, and the unfolding stories about her ancestors it is one of the best take downs I have ever read of the “nuclear family” and how it structure harms women.

Come August, I chaired three events and hosted another, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands and Juno Loves Legs by Karl Geary were paired to discuss coming of age, but we also hit on life-defining relationships, misfits and outcasts, and our reluctance to use “love” outwith romance.

With Kirsty Gunn and Jan Carson I discussed their short story collections - Pretty Ugly and Quickly, While They Still Have Horses respectively, but also, the beautiful ability of a short story to linger on one mood consistently, keeping you uncomfortable or thrilled or horrified for an entire sitting. I’d also found that in the short stories I took with me on my last trips down for masterclasses at The London Library: Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, Revenge by Yoko Ogawa, Madame Zero by Sarah Hall and Salt Slow by Julia Armfield.

I finished my chairing by chatting about Weak Teeth by Lynsey May and Glasgow Boys by Margaret McDonald - an event that allowed me to say “let’s talk about teeth!” and go on a tangent about Studio Ghibli and Glasgow. Both novels look at the foundations of care in our society - foster care, the NHS, dentistry, families - both found and blood.

The day after I finished chairing, I took a bus to a bookshop and bought three books before ducking into a bakery to buy raspberry danishes. On the hot bus home, the raspberries burst on the pages and stained them pink, which felt like an incredibly summery thing to happen. In the sun, I read The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell in a couple of days, complaining to people that when I wasn’t reading it, all I wanted to do was read it, then slowed down with the other two - Bel Canto by Ann Patchett and The Overstory by Richard Powers.

All three contained real-life inspiration: Maggie O’Farrel’s taken from the Robert Browning poem “His Last Duchess” (in turn, based upon the death of Lucrezia di Cosimo de' Medici), Ann Patchett’s plot came from a real party in Peru, to which she added an opera singer, and The Overstory contains the seeds of real ecologists and activists who campaigned to protect Californian redwoods.

Bel Canto follows a birthday party which is interrupted by terrorists who take all the attendees hostage. From there, they keep all the men (including a priest who they tell to leave but refuses) and only one woman: an opera singer. In this lavish house they build their own community. The owner of the house cleans up after his guests, the opera singer teaches one of the terrorists to sing, and a translator falls in love. The term Stockholm Syndrome is too simplistic, and widely misunderstood (as covered by You’re Wrong About on their podcast). What happens in Bel Canto is much more along the lines of empathy, of understanding that the person who holds you hostage, or who you keep for bargaining, is much a human as you are.

The Overstory unfolds the stories of a community of humans held together by their love of trees. Strangers become each other’s family as they campaign, protest, fight and even break the law for what is right. In it’s 625 pages, all characters who enter are connected by trees - from a Norwegian immigrant who plants a chestnut tree in 19th century Iowa, to a couple who let their back garden go wild against their city council’s wishes. Throughout these stories there is care, and the care for the planet sits hand-in-hand with care for each other. One character, a deaf ecologist, marries a man who is busy with his own work. But at lunchtime each day they meet. He brings her food he has cooked (and often foraged or caught), they eat, then he takes the Tupperware home to wash. Without his care for her, she cannot care for the tress.

Two of the other characters live in a tree for nearly a year - at first, they volunteer to stay for a couple nights, but are stranded when no one comes to take over. The last inhabitants have left them food, a water bucket and a library of books suspended in a hammock. Without the past inhabitants care, they cannot care for each other, nor the tree they live in.

At one point, when one of the narrators is completely isolated in the woods, when a stranger knocks on his door:

‘The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God. Ovid tells the story of two immortals who came to Earth in disguise to cleanse the sickened world. No one would let them in but one old couple, Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined. What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer…’

Even in mythical terms, caring for each other is linked to caring for where we live and everything else that lives alongside us.

What do we want our lives to look like? If books like Pretty Ugly, Quickly While They Still Have Horses, The Marriage Portrait and Behind the Scenes at the Museum show an ugly, disappointing an cruel side to human nature, then The Overstory, Bel Canto, Glasgow Boys, Only Here, Only Now, Juno Loves Legs and The Book of Form of Emptiness all contain scenes of hope. Activists advocate for the trees (refusing to be as cuddly or calming as the Lorax), rich and poor rebuild a doomed society, two care experience boys care for others, teenagers growing up in poverty find life-defining love, and a community comes together to clean out a widow’s broken house. Hope is not joy or happiness, it’s a scrappy emotion that requires a level of fighting, of anger and despair but demanding better. As Rebecca Solnit says in Hope in the Dark:

‘Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.’

At another event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival - this time in the audience - chair, Tice Cin, asked K. Patrick about the idea of hope in their work. K. Patrick responded that whilst their work wasn’t hopeful to them, they wondered - is queer writing hopeful because of its very existence? Does a queer writer openly writing about their queerness have inherent hope, just because it exists in a world that so easily could have, and has, quashed it before? Hope, again, is not a closed loop - it’s something we have to keep both fighting for, and with.

In Margaret McDonald’s Glasgow Boys, one of her protagonists, Banjo, is addicted to painkillers. The other, Finlay, spends time as Banjo’s roommate - helping him with his addiction in a move that leads him to apply to university to train as a nurse. That scene gives me hope - two boys, isolated, taking their grief and turning it into love for others. You’ll have to read it for yourself, but I can promise you it swings like an axe.

All of the books mentioned in this post - support your local library or independent bookshop if you can!

1. All the Lovers in the Night by Mieko Kawakami

2. Eileen by Ottessa Mosfegh

3. The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

4. The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

5. Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

6. Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands

7. Juno Loves Legs by Karl Geary

8. Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn

9. Quickly, While They Still Have Horses by Jan Carson

10. Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung

11. Revenge by Yoko Ogawa

12. Madame Zero by Sarah Hall

13. Salt Slow by Julia Armfield

14. Weak Teeth by Lynsey May

15. Glasgow Boys by Margaret McDonald

16. The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

17. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett

18. The Overstory by Richard Powers

19. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit

Marge Simpson, you overlooked wonder. Lone suffering matriarch with repressed artistic dreams. More empathetic and daydreaming than you’re allowed to be. Overjoyed by something as simple as a potato.

Marge Simpson has been one of the most famous mothers since 1989, but she’s also been an artist, a policewoman, a waitress, a real estate agent, a pretzel saleswoman, a carpenter, a babysitter, a teacher and a body builder. In all her changes, she’s still not a self-insert character. Throughout her runs a bedrock of faithfulness, hard work, creativity, care and (sadly) generally being “put upon”. Despite this long-suffering status, Marge is not just a doormat. She’s also been prone to fits of rage, jealousy and pride. (Side note: “Scenes from a Class Struggle in Springfield” may be one of, if not the, best episodes of The Simpsons).

I love Marge. She’s undeniably fun to look at and impersonate. She’s also the homely centre of a cartoon that, for me, is always lodged in my brain with being a kid after school, watching TV alone before my parents took charge of the remote. Even now, when I see a clock at 6pm I think I should be doing something, and the something is eating dinner and watching The Simpsons. If The Simpsons had reliably taken up a spot in my brain, Marge is the core of that reliability.

Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, called Marge Simpson the hardest character to write, a statement which makes complete sense with only a little reflection on her character. She walks a tightrope of comedy and tragedy: think too much about crushed dreams and sacrifice and you’ll want to weep and phone your own mother to profusely apologise. Without that sadness, however, Marge would just be a crudely drawn stereotype of a woman made blissfully happy by doing all the unpaid work like a weird Stepford Wife. At the same time, The Simpsons, is a comedy and it cannot get too bogged down in the tragedy of its protagonists.

The internet has had its fun with Marge. Her dancing, odd hair and gravelly voice have been played with, remixed and reworked to both horrifying and hilarious results. More recently, the account MargieTheHun popped up on TikTok, amassing thousands of fans. Seemingly divorced from the world of The Simpsons (no other characters show up, but some of the other characters are trademark yellow), “Margie” is now a young English woman who loves her nan, trips to Costa coffee, watching Love Island and working as a nail technician. She’s so popular, she’s even been interviewed by Vice and has her own Patreon. (Another aside: MargieTheHun’s Hun Club costs £6 a month, which I don’t think I can justify, but I am desperate to know what the picks are for Margie’s Book Club).

I’ve spoken before about my issues with AI, but I can’t help but wonder if anyone involved in its creation could have predicted that it would be used to reimagine Marge Simpson raking through the bins at a charity shop or worrying about her mother’s pyramid scheme?

You could ask: why is this character Marge? Why not invent your own character? But Marge, despite her nuances, is ample playing material. In her video essay “The Absurd Horror of Marge Simpson”, YouTuber Lola Sebastian examines Marge in amongst the history of housewives in sitcoms, the rise of the modern tradwives1 and, of all things, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Marge is both capable of shopping at B&M with a vanilla latte and 21st century feminist examinations. Perhaps because she is so grounded as a character, you can throw whatever you want - surrealism, tragedy, horror and existential angst - at Marge and all of it will stick in some way.

As Lola Sebastien points out, whilst The Simpsons subverts the ideas and tropes of American family sitcoms, each episode resets the characters to a neutral starting point. Over and over again, we watch Marge be betrayed by her husband and overworked by her role as a mother. In one episode, “Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(Annoyed Grunt)cious”, a spoof version of Mary Poppins comes to look after the Simpsons children after Marge becomes so stressed that her hair falls out in huge fluffy blue clumps. By the end of the episode, Homer promises he will change, but the viewer knows that he will never change. The very format of the show they exist in prevents it. So we tune in next week to see Marge fall apart all over again, or try to reinvent herself with a new job or hobby, only to be yanked back into her housewife life at 742 Evergreen Terrace.

Without going on too much of a tangent, it reminds me of time travel rom-coms like About Time or The Time Traveller’s Wife which promise a charming look at love overcoming all, but fill me with nothing but dread and anxiety at the idea of a man literally warping time itself to make sure he ends with the woman he wants2. In a more meta sense, Marge’s put-upon-ness is inescapable because of her constraints as a character. In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Jessica Rabbit says she’s not bad, she’s just ‘drawn that way’. Marge is drawn to endure.

It is in our re-creations that Marge can escape her narrow confines. In Marge Simpson Anime, artist Soolagna Majumda reimagines Marge through watercolours, remixing the art of The Simpsons into something queer, surreal and slippery. As she said in an interview with Vice:

‘[My work] explores the idea of what would it look like if the Marge in our own lives, in ourselves, was truly free.’

Marge gives me comfort, as well as a fun-to-pick-at absurdist horror. At her core, she is creative, wants to see the best in others, and has an unending amount of love. This is what shines through when we reimagine or deconstruct her character. The “put upon mother” is such a tired trope that it has become the expected, the almost invisible for those not trying to look for it. If Marge’s tragedy is the lack of life outwith her family and home, the beauty of these re-imaginings is when fans give her one. In my head, Marge never left behind her art, or she stayed on the run with her neighbour Ruth in the Thelma-and-Louise-esque episode “Marge on the Lam”. In Majumba’s world, she destroys the town of Springfield entirely to build a new life with her children.

Wherever we put her Marge is capable of anything. In our dreams, Marge can be free.

With gratitude to the following publications:

• “An Interview with ‘Margie the Hun’, the AI Marge Simpson Taking Off Online” by Helen Meriel Thomas for VICE

• “Marge Simpson Anime” by Soolagna Majumda

• “Soft Watercolours Imagine Marge Simpson’s Feminist Awakening” by Patrick Malborough for VICE

• “The Absurd Horror of Marge Simpson” by Lola Sebastian

• “The Bizarre Modern Reality of The Simpsons” by Super Eyepatch Wolf

• “The Fall of The Simpsons: How it Happened” by Super Eyepatch Wolf

‘How many times have you heard someone say they’ve “done” Berlin, or some other location, as though it is a video game to be completed and then stuck back in the cupboard or sold on second hand? A country cannot be “done”. It is not a cake. It was there, in all its beauty and complexities long before you visited it and with any luck it will be there for a long time afterwards too.’

Since I first read this article, I’ve become much more aware of all the experiences I have reduced to checkboxes in my head and my tendency to seek something new instead of revisiting something good. I often try not to order the same food at a restaurant, opt for a new book instead of a reread, try and visit a different country instead of going back somewhere I’ve already been.

I think this tendency comes from not wanting to become set in my ways or shut myself off from a new experience. What I’ve realised, however, is that doing something again is always a new experience because, in a very ship of Theseus way, we, and the places we go to, never stay still.

I recently travelled to Lübeck, where I was commissioned by the Günter Grass-Haus to write and perform a poem at a screening of the Scotland vs. Germany Euros match. Whilst there, I spoke with other Germans who were visiting the city. I said how much it reminded me of a couple of places in Denmark I went to in 2019 (Esbjerg and Ribe, towns in the very west of Denmark). This makes sense because Lübeck is only a couple of hours drive from Esbjerg, but one person listened to me and nodded: ‘All day, since I got here,’ she said, ‘all I’ve been saying is how much the light looks like Denmark.’

Obviously, the border between the two countries is an entirely human creation. But if I was using the scratch off map version of travelling, I could go home from my four days in Berlin in 2017, or these four days in Lübeck and decide I’d already completed Germany, even though they couldn’t have felt more different.

Earlier this summer, I spent two weeks in Japan - my third time in the country, and in the capital city of Tokyo, my second time in Kyoto and Osaka, and my first time in Nara and Nagoya. Japan is one of the worst places to convert to a checkbox itinerary. Cities like Tokyo and Kyoto are so big and busy that if you only search out what people say are the “must dos”, you’ll spend half your time there running from place to place, and the other half realising that, in some way, you’ll always be missing out because it’s impossible to do every recommended thing in Tokyo in a week. You’ll be bombarded by TikToks and websites suggesting you should get up at 5am to try and fit in as much as possible, but you should consider this: no.

The first time I visited Japan was a few months after the Fukushima earthquake, and my mother and I were two of a handful of tourists. I spent nearly ten days in Tokyo only seeing other tourists when I was on a pre-booked tour. The second time I visited was as a student, where a friend and I slept in hostels which varied from private rooms to a busy room of bunk beds in Osaka, full of Chinese and Korean tourists who came home late into the night, waking up when all the lights turned on at 8am ready to start again.

This year, I was with my husband, who has never been to Japan before. Even at the places I’d been to before, I was struck by everything I’d overlooked or forgotten: the feeling of walking through the huge canopy of trees up to Meiji Jingu, the busy food stalls at Sensō-ji, the dark light in the Tokyo National Museum, how, despite the videos, crossing Shibuya Scramble takes less than a minute.

So much has changed. As Kenny says, a countries ‘beauty and complexities’ exist after you leave them. Places shut down, open, new fashion trends line the streets, food is reimagined. When you visit a country again, however, you also bring a different self to it. This time, I could speak more Japanese - asking for menus, maps or tickets, doing some basic ordering or asking where things were. I could read the locations in Hiragana on the subway.

In Lübeck, I was struck by how I’m now much more well-versed with travelling alone. I’m much better at eating in restaurants alone and not over-filling my days (once, when alone in Washington I walked the loop of the National Mall then spent nearly 6 hours in the National Art Gallery. I was broken the next day because of course I was!) Taking a place at your own pace, with your own decisions about what to see and eat, completely changes it for you.

Places themselves are also never how you remember them, and most of the time memory is incredibly spotty. At one point, in Kyoto, my husband and I took a train through Arashiyama, a bamboo forest in Kyoto, and I realised I’d forgotten all about the tiny train I’d taken last time.

I recently found myself in a reading slump and reread Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum, one of my favourite books when I was a teenager. Simply put - though it’s a book that’s very hard to put simply - it has two types of chapters: standard chapters which follow Ruby Lennox and her family that live above a pet shop in York and “footnotes” which follow different members of her family: dipping around in time from the 1880s to the World Wars.

As a teenager, I felt desperately sad for Ruby, a young girl who feels totally out of place in her family - often wondering if she’s adopted. As an adult I was stuck on the chapters about her mother and aunts - women trapped in bad marriages, who struggled with motherhood and lived through war and grief. Nearly fifteen years have passed since I first read that book and they’ve brought with them growing up, moving out, going to university, working various jobs and getting married.

This month, I’ve decided to read Ariel by Sylvia Plath once a week. I’ve been wanting to do this with a collection of poems for some time - spent an extended amount of time going back to the same poems again and again. I’m only two reads in, and I’m already struck by how much I remembered “Lady Lazarus”, “Daddy”, “Ariel”, “Morning Song”, but how the collection also contains several conflicting poems about the moon and trees, bees and hives. Each time I sit down, my notes begin to layer on each other, building and building until the poem becomes fresh again. I keep think - how on earth did I miss this line last time?

During lockdown, I was commissioned by StAnza Poetry Festival to run an digital poetry project. I asked people who were shielding to send me a word to describe what brought them joy. Someone submitted “repetition”. I am struck by how deep that one word is. The things we do, again and again, the places we revisit, our regular haunts and little rituals - they are what make our lives. After six weeks of travelling, the thing that gave me a sudden jolt of joy was just standing in my kitchen, making a cup of coffee and watching the sun filter through the window. I do it every morning, it’s a path I can only hope to take a thousand more times.

Over the Christmas period, I read painfully slowly - mainly due to recovering from dental surgery. By the time the new year hit, I was desperate to get my (now healed) teeth into as many books as possible. I flit through poetry collections I’d bought myself as a pre-Christmas treat: Roshni Gallagher’s Bird Cherry, Ellen Renton’s An Eye For An Eye For An Eye and Tapping at Glass by Tim Tim Cheng. I’d just started Jo Bell’s 52 - a book of 52 poetry prompts designed to get you writing a poem every week, and I was keen to read as many poems a week as I could too.

Bird Cherry felt like a gentle invitation into a year of writing - with poems that gently lead me from cooking to trees, I felt like I’d spend time with a really kind friend who’d given me kind advice over a cup of tea, or sat on a park bench. An Eye For An Eye For An Eye was more demanding my attention - it made me rethink my own childhood (and girlhood), what I did, and did not, see. Tapping at Glass expanded even further - poems that had travelled the world, from baths to love hotels, frogs and farming.

Ellen Renton’s poems set me up perfectly for my first favourite novel of the year, Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle. I had the pleasure of chairing Claudia at the Edinburgh International Book Festival last year, discussing her book A Little Luck (which, incidentally, was so good, I didn’t notice a fight had broken out in front of me when I was reading it on the bus).

Just as Renton’s poetry pulled the reader’s eye to the ableism built into everyday spaces, in reading Elena Knows, we must follow Elena over the course of one day including watching her navigate the world with Parkinson’s. The novel is a triumph in brevity - in only 143 pages it manages to build Elena as a character: brash, unlikable but forced into isolation due to her disability. It makes you question the concept of “care” and the amount of unpaid labour that falls beneath the cracks. If everyone who provided unpaid care for a relative or loved one went on strike, the economy would fall apart in seconds.

I flit into young adult books, reading The Evolving Truth of Ever-Stronger Will by Maya MacGregor, in part, for an article I was researching on young adult romance. Like their previous novel The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester, I utterly adored this novel. MacGregor’s strength is in trusting their audience to be able to understand, grow from and protest societal truths.

Evolving Truth is written in second-person, putting you straight into the head of Will, a teenager whose abusive mother has just passed away. It’s a novel about found family, but also about trauma - about the young people who are thrust into adulthood much too young, about how your friends can let you down, and how to build your own life bit by bit. It’s rich with emotional nuance and I’m beyond glad it exists for young people who have been failed by their adults, who are queer or trans or neurodivergent, or who just need a good story filled with fully-fleshed characters they can empathise with.

Back in poetry, Gillian Clarke’s Zoology and ’s Another Way to Split Water gave me two totally different sides to nature poems. In Zoology, the reader becomes a leveret, a ewe in labour, even the rocks on the hillsides of Wales. In Another Way, the reader stays human, but starts to blend their own being with the world around them. Water becomes, at once, a site of beauty, a source of life and a boundary to separate us from each other. Again and again, Pirmohamed returns to braiding - the idea of bringing disparate things together, as if we can braid our own lives into the natural rhythms of the world around us, instead of feeling like interlopers in natural spaces.

I took on Cixin Liu’s epic Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy across February and April. The first book, The Three-Body Problem, slowly builds the tension of a world on the precipice of a discovery - what if aliens found out where Earth was? The series, as a whole, is huge in scope and page numbers - spanning billions of years and nearly two thousand pages across three books. At times it was incredibly challenging - I spent hours online researching theories in maths and physics, brushing up on Chinese history and philosophy, looking into specific figures in Buddhism. Yet it was endlessly rewarding.

In interviews, Cixin Liu identified Dostoevsky as inspiration for trying to capture the scope of human history. Many readers are turned off by sci-fi - whether it’s because of how often it is parodied, or a fear of over technical language, but Cixin Liu’s best skill is cementing the scientific into a world of politics, ethics, philosophy and the day-to-day of everyday lives. Aliens coming to Earth is as much a question about how unethical we can be in the act of deterrence as it is what spaceship we build. In a note from the author at the end of the first book, he says:

‘I’ve always felt that the greatest and most beautiful stories in the history of humanity were not sung by wandering bards or written by playwrights or novelists, but told by science. The stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional, compared to the stories told by literature. Only, these wonderful stories are locked into cold equations that most do not know how to read.’

In March, I picked up a book I’d long been anticipating: Butter by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton. Following Rika Machida, an overworked journalist who starts to befriend a suspected serial killer and gourmet cook, Manako Kajii, it’s more than a cat-and-mouse or Silence of the Lambs game. It’s a book about food beyond what sits on a plate or in a bowl. It’s about who has time to cook and who is fed, what it means to cook for yourself, or someone else, and the emotional and social impact of never eating home-cooked food. It defied any expectation I had about it, and it also made me so hungry that, on spending a night in London for a session at The London Library, I sought out the first bowl of ramen I could get my hands on. I spend an hour at a ramen restaurant, eating and reading before walking through St. James’s Park, to try and visit the pelicans, feeling utterly full and utterly content in the evening sun.

April brought an insatiability for poetry. I borrowed collections from the library - Peach Pig by Ceceila Knapp, which threw me headfirst into an ugly, messy journey through grief, Mothersong by Amy Acre, which confronted motherhood and how it changes both your own body, and the very lens through which you view the world.

I picked up Three Births by K. Patrick and Felicity by Mary Oliver whilst trawling through a bookshop in Glasgow. K. Patrick’s Mrs. S was one of my favourite reads last year - and Three Births was a very worthy successor - filled with bodies and life, I loved how the poems also took their time with pub garden tables, bullfinches and George Michael’s jeans. Felicity, as Mary Oliver’s collections always do, felt like being held. Her poems burst with a simple wisdom about the world and our place in it. As the title poem reads:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

‘"Wild roses," I said to them one morning. 
"Do you have the answers? And if you do,
would you tell me?"

The roses laughed softly. "Forgive us,"
they said. "But as you can see, we are
just now entirely busy being roses."’

Also in April, I finally read Yanita Georgieva’s pamphlet, Small Undetectable Thefts. Poetry is at its best when it manages to sum up the inexplicable in as few words as possible. Georgieva’s poems sit in the uncomfortable in-between of spaces. Every line was fresh, impossible to know where it was going. Every perspective felt like I’d never thought it before, and yet knew it completely. For example:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

 ‘Time unbuckled me, without warning.
The past is a beautiful friend
with whom I feel daft and unlikeable.'

Now, I’m entering summer. Jo Bell’s 52 is still my companion - the first poem I wrote of the year actually won the Janet Coats Memorial Prize at Paisley Book Festival this year, which is possibly the best endorsement I can give it.

I’m currently savouring Salt Slow by Julia Armfield - perfectly written eerie gothic short stories, and I’m excited for her next novel Private Rites. If I was better prepared, I’d give you an insight into what’s on my to-read list next, but I don’t even know - I’m lead by my mood on finishing something. So far, I think it’s served me well.

All of the books mentioned in this post - support your local library or independent bookshop if you can!

• Bird Cherry by Roshni Gallagher

• An Eye For An Eye For An Eye by Ellen Renton

• Tapping at Glass by Tim Tim Cheng

• 52: Write a Poem a Week by Jo Bell

• Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle

• A Little Luck by Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle

• The Evolving Truth of Ever-Stronger Will by Maya MacGregor

• The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester by Maya MacGregor

• Zoology by Gillian Clarke

• Another Way to Split Water by Alycia Pirmohamed

• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu

• The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu, translated by Joel Martinsen

• Death’s End by Cixin Liu, translated by Ken Liu

• Butter by Asako Yuzuki, translated by Polly Barton

• Peach Pig by Ceceila Knapp

• Mothersong by Amy Acre

• Three Births by K. Patrick

• Felicity by Mary Oliver

• Small Undetectable Thefts by Yanita Georgieva

• Salt Slow by Julia Armfield

• Private Rites by Julia Armfield (forthcoming)

‘Everybody’s experience of The Sims is different, but it seems to matter a huge deal to people, but also [it] feels sort of private. In that, almost every conversation I’ve had with a girl who plays The Sims is… it feels like it belongs just to them.’

The game, for those of you don’t know, is about creating Sims, whose lives you design and control. You design how they look, what they wear and the details of their personality. You build their homes, pick their jobs, their partners and their families. It sounds rather “white picket fence with 2.5 kids”, but there’s also something delightfully queer about The Sims. Any Sim can date any other Sim if they both want to, making them bisexual by default which, in 2004, felt ahead of its time. Now, in The Sims 4, whilst the word “trans” or “non-binary” do not appear in the game, you can play around with gender - both in the clothing or hair you select (all options are open to all characters) and in settings of your character, for example, allowing a male character to get pregnant.

On a deeper level, not every Sim is destined to have children or a job or get married - its up to you. There’s no internal pressure (so long as you’re not adverse to using cheats to get household funds), meaning your Sims live their lives however you want them to without the usual markers of adulthood.

The Sims’ biggest asset is also what, on the surface level, would sound like a fatal flaw: it’s a simple concept. It makes me think of a bit on The Simpsons where Marge is desperate for Bart and Lisa to help her clean the garden, but they refuse. As soon as they’re given the option to play a video game version of it (“Virtual Yard Work”), they’re desperate to have a go. Similarly, when you play The Sims you escape your life by making up another one.

The Sims came about after the developer, Will Wright, lost his home in a fire. When having to consider what he’d lost, what he’d have to replace, and ordering new items - thinking about all the objects that surrounded him.

‘When something like this happens, you get a big picture. Where do I want to live? What sort of things do I need to buy? You see your life almost as a project in process. When you’re embedded in your day-to-day life you don’t get that perspective.’

Will Wright, quoted in Berkleyside

It’s ironic, then, how many players use his games to stage life-ending catastrophes - whether creating their own house fires, staging divorces, making widows or widowers, dramatic deaths or, famously, deleting the pool ladder to trap their Sims in the swimming pool.

I have never really played The Sims like this. The hours I’ve whittled away in game have been dedicated to creating my own characters, down to the most elaborate details of their personalities, outfits and the feeling of the homes they live in. I’ve always hated having bad things happen to my Sims (definitely a case of overly attaching or anthropomorphising). As a teen I adored playing The Sims 2 in a way that, I recognise now, was flexing the same muscle that led me to becoming a writer. I liked observing people or characters, trying to get to the heart of who they were, then capturing what their life would look like as it could play out in front of me. What shirt would this gothic cat-owning lady buy? How would these two completely different teenagers style their shared room? The joy was pining down an exact character in all their style, flaws, eccentricates and skills.

I had friends who also played, and we’d swap the expansion pack discs so we could install them on our own computers at home. Sometimes we played together, but it was always an odd experience - by the time we’d created our family, we’d usually be yelled at to go outside and play, meaning we got had families scattered across the map - doomed to be neglected and never played.

As an adult, the snatches of conversations I’ve had with other fans tap into Griffin’s idea of every player having a very different experience. One of my friends spends all her time in the game building elaborate houses, never really touching gameplay of the day-to-day lives of her creations. Another loves the chaos of watching lives fall apart, and others set themselves challenges like creating a huge family tree with a sprawling legacy, or a Black Widow character who moves her way up the chain by marrying and… “dispatching” husbands.

I love the term “sandbox” to describe a game, as it perfectly captures the idea of being a child, sitting surrounded by sand. You’re given the sand, perhaps a bucket, space or shells, but it’s totally up to you what you’re going to build. You can create a huge castle then smash it with your foot, you can draw shapes or letters, or you can just enjoy feeling the sand trickle through your hands. All are forms of play, and all start with you and your instincts and inclinations.

So why does playing The Sims feel too private to talk about? Probably because The Sims is a trickier video game to talk about because it doesn’t have linear gameplay or a standard story. Also unlike other sandbox games like Animal Crossing, there’s very few concrete things in every game. Every Animal Crossing player meets Tom Nook, the Able Sisters and Blathers or, at least, can compare the villagers in their town. Not every Sims player chooses to unravel the mystery of Bella Goth’s disappearance or the life story of the grouchy Agnes Crumplebottom.

Perhaps, it is also because adults don’t have a language for talking about play. Talking with unreserved excitement or interest about something that isn’t “important” or in the “real world” is immediately embarrassing or childish.

Despite this, The Sims is definitely in a renaissance. The Sims 4 was released in 2014, with Sims 5 supposedly underway. The Sims 4 has spawned a huge number of expansions and spin-offs - many more than The Sims 2 or 3. Streamers, Tik Tokkers and YouTubers have created seemingly endless content showing them building houses, creating storylines or ranking their favourite downloadable mods or CC (modifications or custom content crated by fans which can add to the gameplay).

I’m glad this community of creativity exists, but it leaves me somewhat cold. The Sims 4 expansion packs feel limiting - there’s not quite enough content in each one and there’s more than ever was for The Sims 2. The Sims 2 had 8 expansion packs (which, as I mentioned, I mostly bought, borrowed and swapped). In comparison, the Sims 4 already has 15, with a further 12 smaller game packs. For context, an expansion pack will set you back £34.99, a game pack £19.99 - that’s £740.73 worth of content, and, as it’s all digital, there’s none of the same playground economics I grew up with.

The Sims has always been a product that is for sale, but now it feels like the free sandbox has been replaced by a guessing game of what’s next that’s impossible to keep up with. Without any expansion packs, the Sims 2 still had a lot of possibilities. The Sims 4 has stripped the game down to its barest parts, meaning you have to spend money to get something with any replayability.

I’m a grouch, of course I am. I am completely clouded by nostalgia of how this game was when I was eight or twelve. Even hearing the Sims 2 music takes me straight back to sitting on someone’s Dad’s dining chair, booting up the game for the first time. There was no shame then, and there’ll be none now.

With gratitude to the following publications:

• “Game Master” by John Seabrook for The New Yorker

• “Girl Games” by Sentimental Garbage, hosted by Caroline o’Donoghue

• “How Bisexuality Changed Video Games” by verilybitchie

• “The Mysteries of the Sims 2” by Izzzyzzz

• “Will Wright: Inspired to make The Sims after losing a home” by Tracey Taylor for Berkleyside