Susan Faludi on "In the darkroom" at AWF 2017

I was silencing my phone when a burst of applause told me that Susan Faludi had emerged from the wings of the ASB Theatre. To my surprise, when I looked up, the woman I'd seen in author photos and youtube clips wearing an intelligent gaze and understated knitted things in black or crocodile green, was teetering across the stage on very high heels wearing a neon-blue ruffled lampshade. Oh wait, that was Noelle McCarthy, our chair for the session.

Noelle did a zesty job of taking us through the origins of Faludi's latest book and the book itself. In fact, so focused was she on that topic, that I found myself wondering if someone more noteworthy than I had also complained about how, at her Irvine Welsh session at a recent AWF, she had not seemed to have even read his latest book, having instead much to say about Trainspotting, published twenty years before but clearly still in pole position for her -- and probably for most of the audience, come to think of it.

Susan Faludi's latest book, In the darkroom, on the other hand, takes second place to none of her previous work, and surpasses it in personal content and, probably, wide audience interest (although I am now reading one of her books of socio-cultural criticism, Stiffed: the betrayal of the American man, and highly recommend it as very readable and fascinating socio-cultural criticism).

There on the stage, with indeed the intelligent gaze I had remembered, and such understated attire that I can't actually remember what it was, she began, "I had grown up with a father who was an autocrat, the ur-patriarch, physically violent to my mother and their children, in particular, me".

"I had a set idea of who my father was."

If you have read the book or heard about it, you will know what she was leading up to. Many people are surprised by things they learn as adults about their parents, but few are handed as big a surprise as Faludi was, receiving a letter from her father after years of bitter estrangement, announcing that "I have had enough of living as a man" and that he was now going to live as a woman, a complete woman, and call me Steffi.

Ironically, or perhaps not at all ironically, in her career as a journalist and author, Faludi had written about gender issues, and "When I knew what was happening with my father I couldn't imagine another way of grappling with it".

What she had to grapple with now, on top of figuring out her relationship with her father, was figuring out who her father really was, on various levels-- personality, gender, and personal history as well, in particular the all-American Steve Faludi's childhood and youth in Hungary as István Friedman, which included escaping being rounded up and deported as a Jew during World War II. "I thought I had my father pegged but in fact I knew nothing about her."

There was even, on travelling to Hungary to see her father, who had returned there to live after sex reassignment surgery in Thailand, an aspect relating to the history of Hungary, which was going through a shift in those years from communist to free market, and having to reckon with a very bad past.

They argued a lot the first year "about what it means to be a woman", but being a journalist helped her to set aside her own judgments, and learn to back off, "which is not my strength". Journalism, she said, was her "superhero outfit."

Reading the book, I had a sense of two people circling around each other, guarded, but looking for openings. "My father took pride in being a trickster, in slipping out of your grasp", something mirrored in his profession: altering images in the dark room. On her part, Faludi says, "I am a big believer that you can't shed your history, your past experiences".

She encapsulates the thread that runs through her book as "Is identity something we choose, or is it something we can't escape?"

Does she have an answer? "Like all chicken and egg questions, it's both. We can't help but construct our identities on what we've inherited, but at the same time we reconstruct."

The most memorable moment, for me, was the sequence which began with Faludi confessing "I felt such grief that my father had had to lock herself away so deeply." Who hasn't had that feeling, on being finally let in on the secret a close family member or friend has been living with, of seeing the initial indignation at having been left out suddenly swallowed up by sorrow, when the empathy hits home.

It was her father who, on his own, volunteered that she should tell his story in a book. "You could do it like Hans Christian Andersen, with fairy tales," he said. "In fact", Faludi pointed out, "Hans Christian Andersen revealed himself more honestly in his fairy tales than in his autobiographies".

"Hans Christian Andersen's theme is one of transformation; the Ugly Duckling was one of my father's favourites."

"What my father was really inviting me to do was to write the most utmost book I could."

And if your daughter is a journalist known for her straight-shooting, well, what is that going to do to "My father had been insisting that the past had no relevance, that it could be locked away in a dark room"?

George Saunders on "Lincoln in the Bardo" at AWF 2017

So now he was going to appear, the man who gave me my most disturbing reading experience in recent memory (at least until I read Roxane Gay's Untamed state, which has now joined it at the summit). It was "The Semplica-Girl Diaries", one of the stories in the must-read collection Tenth of December. Its hallucinatory defining image shattered me. For months I'd flash back to it while driving, or waiting in the check-out line at the supermarket, or taking off my makeup, each time with the same feeling of claustrophobia and dread, my heart wanting to claw its way out of my chest and the ocean roaring in my ears.

There is a hallucinatory quality to all the stories in Tenth of December, although mostly of a Salvador Dali type rather than the Goya of the Semplica-Girl Diaries. The evident love for science fiction, most noticeable for me in the echoes of Ray Bradbury, though funnier, and his having grown up in Chicago, a White Sox fan, led me to imagine their author as someone who would spend a lot of his time in a basement den with his computer -- or typewriter in the early days -- amid shelves full of his cult books (Bradbury? John Wyndham?) with an athletics cup or two from his high school years. A kind of a big guy, a Root Beer drinker.

Instead George Saunders is kind of small, and kind of monochromatically sandy-coloured. His face is inscribed with a multitude of expression wrinkles, and the prevailing expression is quizzical and bemused. He is talkative!

Paula Morris opened by reminding us that novels have always been a form for experimentation, and in a nice twist she likened what Saunders has just done literally in Lincoln in the Bardo, his first attempt at the form, to all novels, "stories told by a cast of ghosts, exploring what it is to be alive". Turning to him, she asked the long version of what appears in my notes as "1st historical novel - planned? like Hilary Mantel?" -- I confess I don't worry too much about getting down the exact phrasing of interview questions, unless they aggravate or stun me.

Saunders had a friendly, self-deprecating, and predictive (not predictable) reply.

Not really, he said, it was more that "I realised when I was young I had a wedge of talent, and I've been going along on that. I'm not a natural writer. My first drafts are crummy. Though actually, it doesn't mean you're not a good writer. Writing is a craft."

As I said, predictive, because what followed was, for most of the hour, a conversation between two writers, both creative-writing professors after all, about the craft of writing, with Saunders sharing tips such as:

On writing fiction: "You write Frank is an asshole. The gods of fiction don't like it. The gods of fiction say, How so? You explain. The gods of fiction say, Tell us more".

On writing short stories: "When I started I decided, I like Hemingway a lot and I agree with his world view, so I am going to use a Hemingway construction. It was like going on a date with index cards. In the short story, it's important not to know where it's going and let the writing take you where it wants to."

(I actually thought for a second he said "going on a diet with index cards" and maybe he did. It possibly fits even better with the Hemingway style.)

He quotes Einstein, "No problem was ever solved on the original plane of its conception".

He quotes someone else as having said to him, "The story is always talking to you. Listen to it."

He talks about how every story has an understory, and describes it like this: "There's something beautiful (he personifies it as a reindeer) coming up behind you, and if you keep your eyes on the table and don't spook it, the story and the understory will come together".

My favourite lines came when the subject turned to the book at hand. The departure point for the book is Abraham Lincoln's little son's death from typhoid, in the middle of the Civil War. It's known that Lincoln made repeated visits to the crypt where his son's body had been laid in the days after his death. At the heart of the book, which Saunders sets in that time, is the idea that the boy is in the Bardo, the state of existence between death and rebirth according to Tibetan Buddhism, together with a cast of ghosts who, a bit like a Greek chorus, tell the story.

Morris asked Saunders, a practicing Buddhist, to tell us more about the Bardo. Is it a form of Purgatory?

"I was raised Catholic in Chicago", he preambled -- in other words he knows all about Purgatory -- and "Bardo is a little more. My version of the Bardo is that these people full of regret or sick with unrequited love, at the moment of death, they balk at the door."

It was a thrilling image, but my true favourite line came when he was asked about Abraham Lincoln. "I'm in love with him," he said simply, for once without his usual loquaciousness. He talked about the arc of Lincoln's learning and growth. "By the time he died he was 100, 200 years ahead of his contemporaries". He calls it Lincoln's spiritual ascension. Another Bardo, I realise.

In a rare moment of personal, as compared to professional insight (the craft of writing), we got "I have a Pollyanna-ish tendency that gets edited out". He says he has a sardonic view of the world, but he is also sentimental. It took him a while to allow his sentimental side to come out in his writing, now he does, and then he corrects it with his sardonic side.

We didn't get questions or observations on some things I would have liked to hear the author of the Semplica-Girl Diaries pronounce on, things like fiction's subversive possibilities, or existential shackles, or fighting words. We didn't get any anecdotes like the one James T. Farrell, also a Chicago Catholic-raised writer, liked to tell about going to Ireland and hearing a local tell people that they'd lose their immortal souls if they read him.

But this wasn't bad, wryly told:

He grew up in Chicago, the South Side, where I didn't, but where I was born, and know enough to know that it was an area where neighborhoods were called things like "The backs of the yards" -- the stockyards.

"Every human being is full of sentiment but where I grew up there was a lot of crimping of the excess. So it was like 'Fuck off', but it meant 'I love you'."

In that sense, I think that the best way to know the passions of George Saunders is to read him. Here, I've found you The Semplica-Girl Diaries in The New Yorker online.

A.N. Wilson on "Resolution: a novel of the boy who sailed with Captain Cook" at AWF17

A.N. Wilson

Oh no! Not at the ASB Theatre! At the Heartland Festival Room! Run for it, Karen!

Scooting in as the Town Hall clock chimed, I felt as if I'd plunged into a revival meeting: a giant tent (later recognised as the erstwhile Spiegeltent) packed with faithful, all eyes turned to a man standing alone on a little stage, reaching up his arm, finger pointed.

Unlike the Texas tent show at the start of Blood meridian, however, these faithful were all regular bathers, so the air reeked only of the coffees being clutched at this morning session, and the man was not a reverend, although he had at one point been on his way to becoming one. I was at the Writers Festival and the man was A.N. Wilson, historian, biographer, and novelist, about whom I'd been curious for years, seeing his name come up time and time again in connection with waspish comments, contrary opinions, literary scraps.

And here he was in person, pointing to a large digital screen above him on which was written "George Forster, Librarian, World Circumnavigator and Revolutionary".

"You don't often think of librarians as revolutionaries", he was saying. And I, of course, "What?" He illustrated his point with a librarian in a Barbara Pym novel, whose most praiseworthy characteristic was being a wizard of something ineffably conservative, possibly cataloguing. I can't remember, I was too distracted by wondering if didn't he know that Audre Lorde was a librarian? that Mao was a librarian, well, not quite, but assistant to a librarian, the head librarian at the University of Beijing?

George Forster, on the other hand, was himself a head librarian, at the University of Mainz in Germany, where he was an important figure of the Enlightenment and then active in the Jacobin movement, travelling to Paris after the revolution. One of his friends there was a certain Adam Lux -- just as I was thinking, what a fine name for a revolutionary, Wilson commented "a nice name if you don't think of soap flakes" --  who unwisely wrote a poem about the death of Marat. Dryly, "We don't know what was in his head, because his head was chopped off." Forster, by now outlawed from returning to Germany, died penniless in Paris -- of pneumonia, not the Terror, aged only 40.

But the book A.N. Wilson was there to talk to us about, his new historical novel Resolution, picks up Forster at a much earlier time, a time it would be tempting to call a happier time if it weren't so hard to use the word 'happy' with George.

"One of the things you knew about George Forster if you knew him was that he was the boy who had sailed with Cook around the world" says Wilson. He was just 17 at the start of the voyage, Cook's second expedition to the Southern Hemisphere. He had been taken along as assistant to his father, Reinhold, who had landed the naturalist role on this expedition, which, Wilson was at pains to explain to us, was not about colonisation, but a hunt for knowledge.

Reinhold Forster! It was finding his journals of the voyage in a secondhand bookshop that attracted Wilson's interest. "I couldn't stop laughing!" he said. However, this infuriating and contentious man, despite his journals inspiring such laughter, seems to have had no sense of humour at all. On top of being dogmatic and pretentious.

His son revealed an immense talent for illustration (superb renderings of the flora and fauna encountered on the expedition stops), observation (of much more than just the flora and fauna), and recording: once back in England, George wrote a report of the journey, which he called A voyage round the world. It was a huge hit. Some people consider it the first work of travel literature.

Some also found some of George's descriptions somewhat erotic. Here's Wilson's comment, in full, worth every bit of space for how it captures his (to me extremely enjoyable) style:  "You probably remember if you're fond of reading Boswell's life of Johnson, as I am, that Johnson loathed George Forster. In the book there was a scene about Tahitian women swimming which Boswell read over and over again. He told Johnson he liked the style. Johnson said the book had no style."

George had little style as well, and little contentment in the rest of his life. He was ugly (and having had all his teeth fall out from scurvy on the expedition, for refusing to eat up his sauerkraut and roast penguin, didn't help), made a bad marriage, and ended his days in exile, as we have seen, and died pretty much alone.

Every step of the way, the A.N.Wilson wit was all that I had imagined, dry, unpredictable, as mischievous as needed without playing to the peanut gallery. On the occasion of the usual 'wait for the roving mike' line, we had "Roving Mike sounds like an Irish tinker".

But then, just before the end, he gave us another side of himself. One of the main reasons he decided to write the story as a novel, he said, was to explore George's relationship with his father, his shame at his father's idiotic ways.

"I was a much younger son of a father who was more than fifty when I was born, and I spent a lot of time with him. I saw that other people saw him differently than I -- I saw later that they thought he was a terrible bore, and I now see he was, among other lovable things."

And then, before anyone could descend into sentimentalism, he looked straight at us, put down the imaginary pointer he had seemed to be holding, and smiled at us. "I think we've reached the end of the Knickerbocker Glory" he said.

True Stories Told Live at AWF 17

The 18th Auckland Writers Festival has sailed into town, bigger and richer than ever: more than the ocean liner it felt like to me last year, an entire flotilla experience. Books, songs, lunches, salons in the square, a street festival, and the clincher, a sail around the Hauraki Gulf.

I'm going to say that the barge of beaten gold with purple sails in the flotilla has to be the Gala Night with its True Stories Told Live, for whose story is synonymous with applying a smidgin of artistry to your truth if not Cleopatra? For those unfamiliar with the format, the gala features eight writers telling a seven minute true story, or mostly true story, on a theme; this year the theme was "The heart of the matter".

"The heart is the first organ in the human embryo to form. It starts from two small blood-filled tubes and ties itself into an elaborate four-chambered knot. It gives rise to the first cadence we ever hear and the last." These were the first lines of the evening's first story, told by that rare soul, poet and medical doctor Glenn Colquhoun. Then it turned into poetry, a mix of English poetry and the Maori poetic tradition, two small blood-filled tubes which he wanted to tie together "to give rise to a new life". The story-poem was for his great-great-great-grandmother Mary, who had given away her out-of-wedlock baby to a woman who married into the Colquhoun family in Scotland. "I have come 200 years to wake you from your sleep", he distilled for us from the te reo which, following tradition, he sang.

I found myself wishing I could have seen his performance without the glaring, gigantic, electronic image on the big screen which hung above him. He needed to be in his real dimension only, a man, a vast empty stage, something happening that was akin to sacred.

You might be getting the impression that Glenn Colquhoun was the storyteller who most impressed me, and you'd be right. But they were all wonderful.

Glenn Colquhoun

The Irish writer Anne Enright, known for her intelligent, unflinching novels, the 2007 Booker Prize winner The Gathering for one, was rounder (no, I don't mean plump, I mean not angular), funnier and more mischievous than I had imagined her. Her haircut was positively Tin Tin like (a compliment) and her story came from a place in her past, a headland north of Dublin where her family had a house, "some said chalet, more of a shack", and which also housed a lunatic asylum.

Anne Enright

Esteemed theologian and NZ treasure Lloyd Geering (Pip Muir's announcement in her introduction that he was 99 years old was met with a round of applause-- lesson to myself: if you want to be reassured about not losing cachet with age, hang out at writers festivals) told a wonderful story about a trip from Beirut to Baghdad by bus, back when Iraq was still called Mesopotamia. I couldn't stop looking at his limpid eyes behind the glasses, as guileless as children's, and thinking of what Bruce Chatwin said: only the very young and the very old should be allowed to tell their dreams.

Lloyd Geering (photo W. Nichol)

Fijian Kiwi Gina Cole was greeted with a grand round of applause, to my especial pleasure. Gina won the first creative writing contest we ran with Alternative Bindings for the Auckland Pride Festival, and now her first published book of stories, Black ice, is in our collection and was also an Auckland Libraries Top 100 choice for 2016. Her story was about even longer ago than that, her first year at Auckland Uni, a story of misadventure and friendship, wry and warm, impeccably told.

Gina Cole

James Shapiro, Shakespeare scholar from Brooklyn, was the funniest storyteller, as the Brooklyn in his bio might have suggested, as might also the topic, his "harrible" (as they say in Brooklyn) early experiences with Shakespearean productions, studies, and one particular professor.

James Shapiro (photo Mary Cregan)

Ivan Coyote! Shout out to Ivan Coyote! Shiny as a Swiss knife, as an old manager of mine used to say (not about me). An important story and a wonderful story, as are all the stories in The tomboy survival guide, which I'm reading right now, told by a pro. A true pro, I mean: as well as being a writer, Ivan has long been using storytelling to explore gender and identity. Also a person in a notable state of true being, I also mean, after having met them at the Gala Night After Party. Go see Ivan Coyote!

Ivan Coyote (photo J Tymkov)

Mpho Tutu van Furth told a beguiling story about the three princes in her life. The first was "Red rental shoes" who gave her her first real kiss, the second was an English boyfriend of the so very English ways, so odd for apartheid-era South Africa, especially considering that they included cutting the grass in her family's front garden in Soweto, prompting the neighbours to say "Trust the Tutus to be the only family with a white gardener!", and the third, why, "The third was when I fell on one knee to ask Marcelline to marry me".

Inspector Rebus's Ian Rankin closed with a story which started with a poetry contest in high school and the book he got from the library (silent cheer from me) and ended with this wisdom worthy of a writer, a writer of mysteries, no less: "Fiction has to be credible, the real world does not."

Bring on the unlikable women, says Roxane Gay!

Roxane Gay (photo: Jay Grabiec)

One of the pieces I liked best in Roxane Gay's anthology Bad Feminist -- yes, that Roxane Gay, the one who will be appearing this month at the Auckland Writers Festival, and if you can't make it, you'll be able to read about it here -- is the one called Not here to make friends, subtitled On the importance of unlikable female protagonists.

"U" is the scarlet letter of our times, says Gay. It's a brilliant metaphor, unlikability as today's most terrible sin (I remember Hunter S. Thompson identifying stupidity as the number one sin of his time, or maybe it was looking stupid), and for how often it's the female who ends up wearing it, just like Hester with her "A" in Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic tale of adultery among the Puritans.

Apparently the unlikablest protagonist of recent times is Amy from Gone Girl. The equally amoral Patrick Bateman from American Psycho is nominally unlikable, okay, but no critic is saying he needs to display a big "U" on his Valentino shirt. Partly of course it's because he's so much fun to read about, if not to be around, with his "scathing self-awareness" (quoting Roxane Gay) that you have to love (speaking for myself-- Gay more pragmatically deems him "a very interesting man").

But it's not just that. How many men in fiction are allowed to get away with murder -- not necessarily literally -- compared to women? Gay is fierce on "this liking business" which crops up time and time again with female characters, quoting the term Lionel Shriver used for that combination of approval and affection readers were peeved not to have felt for the narrator of her provocative novel We need to talk about Kevin. An ambivalent mother! Horrors!

Why would I want to read about "likable" characters, Gay asks. Just the opposite!

"I want characters to do the things I am afraid to do for fear of making myself more unlikable than I may already be. I want characters to be the most honest of all things -- human."

(I know - you already want to read the whole essay! And you can, on BuzzFeed, where it first appeared, although it's worth getting your hands on the whole anthology.)

Gay either picked up on a trope whose moment had come (she notes that the novelist Claire Messud had recently asked "Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert?" in an interview in Publishers Weekly about her book The Woman Upstairs), or generated new interest in a phenomenon that I'm thinking goes back at least as far as Euripedes's Medea, which is to say over 2000 years ago. At any rate, it's hard to read around in book culture these days without coming across lists like Book Riot's 100 Must-Read Books with Unlikable Women.

So far none of them have featured my most-memorable book with an unlikable woman, Good Morning Miss Dove, a book I read in my formative years, thank you Miss Petit, School Librarian, for the recommendation. You can't be exposed to too many unlikable women -- or, as they were called then, women with "an independent streak" -- in your formative years. Actually, having recently reread the book after finding a copy in the Central City Library basement -- a hallowed copy 'presented' to our library by the Blockhouse Bay branch of the Labour Party in 1976 --  it did me good even now.

Miss Dove herself is not a librarian but a geography teacher, a gray-haired, bun-coiffeured institution at Cedar Grove School where she has been known to generations of pupils as "The terrible Miss Dove", for reasons you can probably guess, having to do with discipline and expectations. She doesn't want to be anyone's friend. She turns down a proposal of marriage from the Bank President. She refuses to let herself aspire to anything except being strong and useful.

As it turns out, she has other things as well, like gallantry and guts, which her pupils can only dimly perceive, if at all. Some come as a revelation even to herself. The biggest of these is when she wants to say something profound about life, after having learned that hers is at risk, and the words which come out of her mouth are "I have been happy".

Good Morning Miss Dove, described in two of its cover blurbs as a minor classic, was my gateway drug to all those books I've loved with tough old women who make different choices and have a different regard for consequences. Miss Brodie from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Aunt Augusta from Travels with My Aunt. Mrs Moore in A Passage to India. I wonder if Miss Petit, the gentle, meticulous librarian who put her in my hands, and who is inextricably linked with Miss Dove in my memory, guessed. I think she did.

Day of the dedications

(photo: @sfpubliclibrary Instagram 15 September)

Time for the book dedications of the year! Not written this year, or not necessarily, but the best I've come across this year. It's a tradition dating back to my very first post for Books in the City, in which -- with the whole world of books available to me as subject matter -- I chose to celebrate the art of the well-written book dedication. That tells you something about my affection for those little solitaires twinkling and winking at us from the centres of white pages.

I'm talking about the best dedications, of course, the ones that speak from the heart with the tongue of a writer, that neither surfeit us with lists (how did that start, those endless pages of acknowledgments in novels, for God's sake!) nor starve us of landmarks, the ones that, despite us knowing they are for a certain someone, we discover are magically also for us.

Here are this year's finds:

1.  Yuyi Morales in Thunder Boy Jr. 

To the Western Addition library in SF where, as a new mother and immigrant, I found my first home in the USA. Nancy, I hope you remember me. You changed my life forever when you put books in my hands.

A book dedication to a library! I had to start with this one. I've shared dedications to an author's typewriter, and to an airlines whose delayed flight inspired the book in question, but this is the first dedication to a library I've come across, via the San Francisco Public Library's Instagram feed @sfpubliclibrary (Western Addition is one of their branches).

As a librarian, I'm going to say that I'm sure Nancy remembers her.

The post went up as we were counting down to Banned Books Week, which was appropriate given that the author of Thunder Boy Jr is Sherman Alexie, whose The absolutely true diary of a part-time Indian is one of the most challenged books in libraries in his country, the USA. The dedication in that semi-autobiographical work also makes a point about home: "For Welpinit and Reardan, my hometowns", it goes, the first being where Alexie grew up, on an Indian reservation in Washington State, and the second the town where he went to High School, his first time off the reservation.

Thunder Boy Jr is Alexie's first picture book, about a boy looking for a name of his own; Yuyi Morales is the illustrator.  Here's a short trailer from the publisher:

 



2. Gloria Steinem in My Life on the Road

Gloria Steinem was asked by her interviewer at the Auckland Writers Festival this year to talk about the dedication to her new memoir, My life on the road. "Shall I read it out loud?" she rejoined. "I don't want to assume everyone has read my book!"

Her reading of it made exactly my point: great dedications have it all there; they don't need to be commented on.

This book is dedicated to:
 Dr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India.
 Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, “You must promise me two things. First you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life".
 Dear Dr. Sharpe, I believe you, who knew the law was unjust, would not mind if I say this so long after your death: I’ve done the best I could with my life. This book is for you.

3.  Jerome K Jerome in Idle thoughts of an idle fellow

After two new books, here's an old one, published in 1886. I knew about this dedication but for the longest time I was mixed up, thinking it was by Italo Svevo, so I could never find it. It could have been by Svevo, who had in common with Jerome K Jerome a love of what in Svevo's native Trieste was referred to with the Austrian term witze, meaning witty paradoxes and contradictions.

TO

THE VERY DEAR AND WELL-BELOVED

 FRIEND

OF MY PROSPEROUS AND EVIL DAYS--

TO THE FRIEND

WHO, THOUGH IN THE EARLY STAGES OF OUR ACQUAINTANCESHIP

 DID OFTTIMES DISAGREE WITH ME,

HAS SINCE BECOME

TO BE MY VERY WARMEST COMRADE--

TO THE FRIEND

 WHO, HOWEVER OFTEN I MAY PUT HIM OUT,

NEVER (NOW) UPSETS ME IN REVENGE--

TO THE FRIEND

WHO, TREATED WITH MARKED COLDNESS BY ALL THE FEMALE

 MEMBERS OF MY HOUSEHOLD,

AND REGARDED WITH SUSPICION

 BY MY VERY DOG, NEVERTHELESS SEEMS DAY BY DAY

 TO BE MORE DRAWN BY ME, AND IN RETURN TO

MORE AND MORE IMPREGNATE ME WITH THE

ODOUR OF HIS FRIENDSHIP--

TO THE FRIEND WHO NEVER TELLS ME OF MY FAULTS, NEVER WANTS TO BORROW

 MONEY, AND NEVER TALKS ABOUT HIMSELF--

TO THE COMPANION OF MY IDLE HOURS,

THE SOOTHER OF MY SORROWS,

 THE CONFIDANT OF MY JOYS AND HOPES--

MY OLDEST AND STRONGEST

PIPE,

THIS LITTLE VOLUME

IS GRATEFULLY AND AFFECTIONATELY

DEDICATED.

Italo Svevo also had a close relationship with tobacco, but in his case it was the cigarette, and in particular the last cigarette. In his book The confessions of Zeno, one of his alter ego Zeno's neuroticisms is to repeatedly smoke the last cigarette, in order to re-experience the joy of quitting. When Svevo was mortally injured in a car accident, he asked at the hospital if he could have a cigarette. His request was denied. Ah, he sighed, that really would have been the last cigarette. 

In addition to the dedication, Jerome K Jerome also wrote a fine preface for his book, which I would love to hear read out loud by John Cleese.

One or two friends to whom I showed these papers in MS. having observed that they were not half bad, and some of my relations having promised to buy the book if it ever came out, I feel I have no right to longer delay its issue. But for this, as one may say, public demand, I perhaps should not have ventured to offer these mere "idle thoughts" of mine as mental food for the English-speaking peoples of the earth. What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow. I cannot conscientiously recommend it for any useful purposes whatever. All I can suggest is that when you get tired of reading "the best hundred books," you may take this up for half an hour. It will be a change.



4. Tony Ross in Sticky ends: twenty-six cautionary verses with sticky ends 

To my dear mum and dad -- they always thought that I would come to one. T.R.

5. Ogden Nash in The Face is Familiar 

This collection of poems by the man who gave us "I never saw a purple cow..." and "If called by a panther, don't anther" is a treasure I found in the Central City Library basement. Although the book was first published in the USA in 1940, our copy is the Australian Edition of May, 1943, a fact which some librarian of the past underlined by recovering the book in wallpaper featuring red and blue stripes interspersed with golden crowns. Not that this would have been her only foray into book preservation. Recovering books in serviceable wallpaper was once a thing in public libraries. I imagine this librarian's ghost floating around in our basement checking up on all her handiwork.

Before disposing of the original cover, the librarian cut out the blurb on its flap and pasted it into the book, turning the book into a sort of time-capsule:

In re-issuing this book in an Australian edition, the publishers are confident that it will add considerably to the gaiety of this land at a time when our sense of humour is in danger of being submerged in a total war effort.

It goes on to cite a poem in the book, a dig at Japanese expansionist tendencies on the eve of Pearl Harbour, which the Australian publishers - how realistically I don't know - hoped the Australians would still be finding funny in 1943.

On the other hand, I myself found a comment apropos of Ogden Nash's death funny enough to note down - or maybe I actually came up with it? It's scribbled in my own hand next to my notes for this post. It'd be nice to think I could be so witty as to quip "Merde! Improperly prepared!" in reaction to learning that one of the most famous rhymers in the history of poetry died from eating improperly prepared coleslaw. Googling brings up nothing. If anyone knows the origin of this genial epigram, please let me know!

I was taking notes because I had discovered that a postage stamp honouring Ogden Nash made history by being the first US postage stamp to contain the word "sex"- "although as a synonym for gender", Wikipedia tells us. Whew!

"It appears under the letter O" the wikipedia pundit continues. With my librarian skills I was able to quickly unearth a reproduction of the stamp, just to check that fact. The pundit had it right.




But I could not believe my eyes when I saw the price of the stamp and realised that this could not have happened in the fifties as I had assumed. In fact, it turned out to be issued in 2002, on the centennial of Nash's birth! What, the word sex made history in 2002? Are we kidding?
                                  
The Amarillo, Texas newspaper article where I found this information contained, further along, a telling insight. The other set of new stamps to come out that year was "Discover Canada", highlighting popular tourist attractions. So, images of Foggy Cove and the Icefields Parkway and Buffalo Jump, vying for attention with Nash's racy poem "The Turtle".

The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks

 Which practically conceal its sex.

 I think it clever of the turtle

 In such a fix to be so fertile.

The dedication I found in the book, to Nash's wife, is not scandalous, antic or clever. It's sentimental, a bit reminiscent of the classic era poetry schoolboys of Nash's time (and of my father's, although he was a generation later) used to learn. "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by..." But it's definitely going straight to the book dedication wall in my pool room.


For Francis

And now to settle for the years,
That flew like frightened birds;
As fee for ten of happiness
I offer ten of words.

Fat is still a feminist issue. So is feminism.

Looking back on Susie Orbach at AWF 2016, and forward to Andi Zeisler.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Susie Orbach!

Carole Beu, usually the Festival’s most ebullient chair, went classic on us, almost reverent.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, Susie Orbach!"

Gentlemen?

I looked around to see if I could spot any men behind me, or across the vast reaches of the ASB Theatre which, as I had just noted down, was fully populated. I certainly couldn’t see any in front of me. Aha, two! And a group! And just further along from them, look, two more... and...and ... here you go:

What is it with men anyway? Women would go to a session with a male protagonist of the culture wars. Women would go to a Foucault session, were he still alive of course. I expect women would flock to a Foucault session. Women would go to hear any number of venerable male cultural critics or theorists, I thought, trying to come up with names of some live ones. It wasn't easy. I mentally saluted the life force and staying power of that amazing AWF 2016 trio Gloria Steinem, Susie Orbach and Vivian Gornick.

I clicked my attention back to the stage as Carole began chatting congenially about a certain Fifi. It didn't take me too embarrassingly long to identify Fifi as Fat is a Feminist Issue, Orbach’s 1978 book in which she used a feminist perspective to attempt to move people on from a blame-the-victim approach to weight “issues”.

Carole proposed, perhaps wishing and hoping, that the book “probably changed the lives of million of women”.

Susie Orbach’s calm response: “It didn’t change the world and the problem has actually amplified. It has now eaten into the lives of our children. There are women in rest homes being made to anguish over what they eat.”

“The book is actually most of all about compulsive eating”, said Carole, who was surprised to realise this when she reread it before the festival.

Orbach has never reread it -- she thinks maybe because she's frightened of it. When she wrote it, her insight was that “Largeness is a way of negotiating the pressures our visual culture places on us, about always having to look at yourself in a critical way. If you’re large, you’re exempt from that”. Today it’s different. “It signifies different things. It could mean being from the other side of the tracks or it could mean you have to look at the real me below the surface.”

But above all, largeness is not actually the issue. “You can be a compulsive eater in many sizes. You can be ‘normal’ and be a compulsive eater. I don’t think the real issue is obesity. It’s our relationship with eating. If we started with that instead of creating a stigma about being one size or another, that would address the problem better.”

The issue, in other words, is the notions attached to body size, the social judgments, the psychological feelings. I had never actually read Fifi, but I’ve now had a good look through it (thanks Auckland Libraries and Overdrive for having that available for me on my laptop in 60 seconds) (progress sometimes really is progress). As its electronic pages slipped past, it felt as though I were voyaging through an asteroid belt where the asteroids were big black words: all those angers, depresseds, turmoils, emptinesses, suffereds, swampeds, mirrors, defenses, and so on. It was a scary insight; what would it be like to live there.

The copy I had checked out was a reissue from 2006, for which Orbach had written a new introduction, in which she pointed out, “Dieting is even more popular than it was when Fat is a Feminist Issue was first published 28 years ago. Eating has become a psychological, moral, medical, aesthetic and cultural statement.”

How well said, how sadly and disappointingly true. And side by side with that goes another of the dark sides of living in our “moneyed world”, as Vivian Gornick described it: those companies making money by selling the perfect body (“though they don’t call it that”) to vulnerable people, mostly but not always women.

For one, the diet industry, raking in billions of dollars for products which don't work and people (consumers) conveniently never stop feeling they need, since only 3% of people who lose weight through dieting keep it off, for all kinds of reasons, from physiological changes to psychological pressures. The cosmetics industry, for another.

“To encourage body-hatred all over the world is a gift of later capitalism. We export it all over the world.” Orbach pointed out. I think it was in one of her columns for The Guardian where she discussed research which found a mathematical correlation between the arrival of commercial television and its army of advertising in various countries, and the increase in eating disorders among the young girls in those countries.

“Now the body is a product we have to make, instead of where we are from. We are going to have the branded body. Not just clothes but our bodies will be branded. The brand will be Barbie-esque.”

More and more people's daily lives feed them a stream of images of celebrities photoshopped and manipulated into an unattainable ideal. How healthy a diet is that? “People come in to me for a problem like a job problem and they also have body hatred but they haven’t come for that. They just assume they’ll have that all their life.”

“What do you hope for young women?” asked Carole.

“What I hope for all of us -- to have a life of meaning.”

I was reminded of a passage I read recently in a memoir which might have been Angelica Garnett's, or possibly Jenny Diski's (I trust I'm not the only person who remembers the sentiment and the sensation of past readings but not necessarily the specimen ID). Angelica had received from her aunt, Virginia Woolf, or maybe Jenny had received from her foster mother Doris Lessing, a note expressing the hope that she would have a happy life. Angelica/Jenny wonders, looking back, at the choice of "happy", rather than "good", which she would have thought a better wish. A life of meaning is a pretty good life, for my money.

I am not sure if it were the psychotherapist in Orbach instinctively making sure that we would leave the 60 minute version of the "50 minute hour" with a good feeling, once the discontent had been aired, but that was how it went. There were some likable closing lines from her --  "What's really satisfying is relationships and contributions and finding things that interest you" was one I liked, and there was one about a good ear being the most powerful thing you can offer which was met with a round of applause, surprisingly to me. I found her line about body-hatred being a gift of later capitalism much more rowsing. "Know your enemy" is powerful stuff too.

Because I am not a psychotherapist, but a reader and a writer, rather than lend an ear, I'm going to plant something in your ear: a suggestion for further reading. Susie Orbach speaks about the body becoming a brand. Andi Zeisler, the cofounder of Bitch Media, has written a provocative book about feminism itself becoming a brand. It's called We were feminists once and I discovered it during the Festival while travelling in the Vivian Gornick, Gloria Steinem and Susie Orbach force field. If something seems not quite right to you about a company selling (and people buying) body-hugging little tees, produced by poor women in developing country sweatshops, with "Feminist" emblazoned on the front, this is your book. Who is appropriating feminism, and why, while doing nothing to progress the "unfinished business of the women's movement" -- as Susan Douglas calls it?

I actually went and bought myself my own copy when I had to return my borrowed copy to the library. A book which teaches me the so very useful term "marketplace feminism" needs to be able to be pulled out again and again.

The many aspects of marketplace feminism and the range of the book can be glimpsed by its entry in the book's index, which points you to the following:  "as appeasement, beauty and", "choice and", "fashion and", "feminism and", "as feminist branding", "Mad Max: Fury Road as", "media and", "movies and", "popular culture and", "as prioritizing individuals", "purchasing and", "Spice Girls and", and, "television and".

-- Karen

Gloria Steinem: not the Queen of the Auckland Writers Festival

Photo Annie Leibovitz

She could have been the Queen of the Festival. She was the first guest whose session sold out. She had the royal touch, mothers lining up to get copies of her book signed for their baby daughters, in a modern version of the laying on of the hands. She was the only guest to have an interviewer summoned from across the seas (Edinburgh Book Festival Director Nick Barley) (not sure why, actually). She had the raiment - that leather jacket!

But here was the thing. She didn’t want to be Queen. She was not here to represent or embody anything. She was here to share some stories about her life, from the many in her book My life on the road. But no nostalgia! ”There’s something about being part of a movement and being on the road that forces you to live in the present -- which is where we should live.”

Nick Barley led her through the salient points in the book. They talked about her parents, her father who treated her as an adult even when she was little “and I’m very grateful to him”, and her mother, who had been a pioneering journalist but had given up her career in those days when no one thought you could have it all, not before having been diagnosed with “anxiety neuroses”. Steinem's stories of them were, for me and I think for many readers, the most touching in the book. They split up when she was only 11.

She never again felt she really had a home. As soon as she was out of school she took off for India. She told herself she was attracted for the theosophy aspect (her mother was a theosophist), “but really… I was escaping”.

In the Indian villages she discovered "talking circles". People would come out of their houses in the evening and sit together around a kerosene lamp to talk about the terrible experiences they shared, trying to sort out the truth and break the cycle.

We got the first taste of her wicked sense of humour. She recalled that many years later the women's movement developed their own form of talking circles -- consciousness raising groups.

"I’m sure a lot of women here remember those, now we call them book clubs.”

Back in the US, her time in India having helped her skive the suburban ideal she had firsthand reasons to distrust, Steinem began working in journalism. And here of course we came to her notorious turn as a Playboy bunny, somewhat misleadingly described in the Festival programme blurb as “She was famously a Playboy bunny, but one who wrote a magazine article entitled “A Bunny’s Tale”, revealing the exploitative working conditions bunnies endured”. She was a journalist, and Show magazine assigned her to write a story about the Playboy Clubs, with the idea she would go undercover as a bunny for a couple of weeks. She wasn't enthusiastic about it, but it was “the kind of assignment I would get”-- which tells you something about the times.

She had thought that it might at least be somewhat glamorous, but she was being set straight on that before even being fitted for her bunny suit. At the job interview she told the woman she was a secretary, and the reply came back: “Honey, if you can type you don’t want to work here”.

The article, which you can and should read online in the New York University Digital Library, made her famous but, she tells us, "It was a bad career move". Being an ex-bunny became the thing she was most known for, despite it being her least favoured characterisation. "At my advanced age people still introduce me as an ex-bunny. People say "What does she know? She was a bunny".

But there was some satisfaction. The gynaecological exam for aspiring bunnies which she blew the whistle on was discontinued soon after her article came out. And in her 1983 book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, she pointed out "My exposé of working in a Playboy Club has outlived all the Playboy Clubs, both here and abroad."

Nick Barley asks a question about Ms magazine which I miss because I’m so stupefied by having heard him call it “Miss Magazine” and asking myself if this could be just an accent thing (I'm still not sure), and then asks her about the historic 1977 conference in Houston on women’s issues, 20,000 women in attendance, their delegates busy drawing up an action plan to submit to the US Congress (the conference was actually sponsored by the US Government).

It’s depressing of course to think how few of their planks have been achieved, and how many of those achieved are nonetheless still threatened (however, as I write this, the US Supreme Court has just blown away attempts by the state of Texas to deny women the reproductive rights the US government has ruled are theirs), but Gloria Steinem hadn’t written a book, and come here to talk to us, just to be our institutional memory, or Cassandra, or whatever.

She talked about the women at the conference, about the Native American women she had gotten to know there, how she had learned so many fascinating things about early Native American history from them. Because, and this is pure Gloria, “We don’t study history from when it started, we study it from when monarchy, patriotism and patriarchy and the other bullshit started”.

About patriarchy, Gloria... Gloria had no hesitation. “It’s about controlling reproduction -- that’s what it’s all about”.

The perfect lead-in for Nick Barley to call our attention to the dedication in My life on the road.

“Such a great dedication. Tell us about it.”

“Shall I read it? I don’t want to say everyone’s read my book!” (a good Steinem laugh) and she does.

 This book is dedicated to: 
Dr. John Sharpe of London, who in 1957, a decade before physicians in England could legally perform an abortion for any reason other than the health of the woman, took the considerable risk of referring for an abortion a twenty-two-year-old American on her way to India. 
Knowing only that she had broken an engagement at home to seek an unknown fate, he said, “You must promise me two things. First you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life". 
Dear Dr. Sharpe, I believe you, who knew the law was unjust, would not mind if I say this so long after your death: I’ve done the best I could with my life. This book is for you.

"You will do what you want to do with your life," muses Barley. "Do you sometimes feel as if you’ve sacrificed your life on behalf of others?”

“I don’t feel like that at all!” and another good laugh.

Gloria Steinem wasn't going in for any of that "I sacrificed myself for you" blackmail. She wasn't going in for recognition, or packaging, or ownership. (She doesn't even own a car, I learned from reading the book.)

"Women say to me with some alarm, 'My daughter doesn't know who you are!' But does she know who she is? Because that's the whole point."

She pumped for all of us filling the ASB theatre to use the occasion as an opportunity to spread the word about what we are doing and thinking. “Use the mike!” she said when Q&A time came around. And some people did, websites were promoted, organisations cited. But a lot of people had questions, and none were turned away.

Q "Where do you want us to be in fifty years?"
A “I want it to be wherever you want it to be. I'm not here to tell you where to go -- you know things I don’t know. “

Q Should we should talk to people who are “against feminism”?
A Well of course. “If I am fucking up I don’t want someone to hate me, I want them to tell me!”

A woman wanted to talk about the rights of sex workers. Steinem was honest; she has a problem with legalising “sex work”, though she does not want to criminalise it. “What happened to mutuality?” Is it about cooperation or submission? She doesn't see it as just another exploitative job, as is the risk if we term it "sex work". In her life, she says, she's only known one woman whose choice to sell her body was truly free of coercion.

Advice to a 14 year old feminist, who wanted to know where to start in her school where "nobody even knows what feminism is": Find an instance of injustice (how do the budgets for boys and girls sports teams compare) and organise people to challenge it.

"Change that one unfairness and that will be feminism”.

I saw a hopeful, funny person, the humour more pithy than came across in her book...

"Who are your anti-abortionists?" No hands went up.
"Maybe they don’t read books!"

... and the hope more matter-of-course.

I’m not sure it was clear to me from the book how enjoyable a member of your, um, book group she would be, but the evening left no doubt about it.

 She sent us out telling us to talk to other people after exiting. I took it as a sort of beau geste, but as it happened, my daughter and I, standing in the signing line with her copy of A life on the road (the Christmas present I didn't choose for her, thinking, What will that long ago stuff mean to her?, only to see her choose it on her own), found ourselves next to funny smart Michele A’Court, author of Stuff I forgot to tell my daughter and it all happened just as it should.

When we arrived in front of Ms Steinem, I heard my daughter say that she didn't care about having her name in the book, she preferred a message, "whatever you would like to say to me".

--Karen

"A little life" and some big doubts at AWF 2016

The last set of our Writers Festival posts opens with Karen going against the crowd. Here's hoping that of the three types of cranky (entertaining, angry and annoying), this will prove to be in the first category.

So doll-like! Of all the ways I had imagined Hanya Yanagihara, author of The Dark Novel of 2015, doll-like was not one. She sat placidly -- or carefully-- in her black armchair like an objet d'art and I am not sure I saw any movement at all below the neck the entire time she was seated. Even her turning her gaze from Anne Kennedy in the interviewer chair to us in the audience during her responses seemed to happen in slow motion.

A low, modulated "Hello" and we were off. Somewhat disconcertingly to me, as I had been lured by the programme listing's promise of 'intense conversation' which seemed to imply opposing viewpoints, by way of introduction we had Anne reeling off a sequence of hyperbolic quotes in praise of the book, something which seemed not to disconcert Yanagihara at all.

I should lay my cards on the table right away. That book, A little life, had left me unconvinced. But I was looking forward to this session. Between the establishment honours it was garnering (Booker Prize shortlist etc) and the ardent reader fandom (a comment left on our online catalogue declared it "an experience, not just a book"), I couldn't help wondering if I had missed something. Or maybe been too in thrall to my personal tics. Like with the gougères.

Gougères, if you don’t already know (I didn't), are French cheese puffs, and, I just realised, a metaphor for my difficulty digesting this book. When Yanagihara describes Jude, her main character, a man traumatised by horrendous sexual abuse suffered as a child, who has become a top of the top litigator, while also having an extraordinary aptitude for theoretical mathematics and extraordinary musical talent, as always wanting to throw together some gougères for when his friends come over, I winced. I wanted Holden Caulfield to be one of the friends coming up the stairs, just to hear what he’d say.

But this is the thing. There is no Holden, because, as Yanagihara told us at the start in her very composed response to interviewer Anne Kennedy’s holding a first tentative light up to her book, “I wanted to make an hommage to the way my friends and I live”.

More in particular, she told us, she wanted to show that becoming an adult doesn't mean you have to get married and have children. For me who works in a library, this didn't strike me as news. But anyway, Yanagihara gives us four male friends, who have moved to New York together after their graduation from University, all rigorously unmarried but who seem to spend their time working, acquiring and achieving just like married men of their ilk.

They acquire wealth (apartments, country houses), habits (various, only in one case of the drug type, but it doesn't take him down), and partners (corporate, sexual, and other), and they achieve success. Lots of success. They all become stars in their fields, and all without doing anything as boring as striving. How is that?

But Yanagihara forestalls any question about her book's credibility (the 4-0 record of the friends being only one of many challenges in that sense). She tells us it's supposed to be that way, because she used a "fairy tale template". We need to suspend disbelief, is what I understand her to be saying.

“This is not a book you can go into and not surrender to it, and I hope what it gives you is the intimacy of a certain world”.

Surrendering to a book is my preferred way to read, but I wasn’t able to surrender to A little life. It might be that books about the world of wealthy Manhattanites just aren't that enthralling to me, unless executed with the wit of American Psycho, for instance, or if it's a fringe version, as in Netherland. So there's that.

But also. The heavy-handed, unimaginative depiction of the violence done to poor Jude, even more than the amount of it (every time he escapes one torturer, he falls in with another just as bad or worse). Yanahigara's editor did say that the sheer quantity of it was simply not believable, she told us, but “I told my editor if things are not quite believable they should still be true".

I suppose she means emotionally true. I'm with her on that, but I couldn’t find any true feeling in the sexual abuse scenes that are, after all, central to the book’s wallop. It should have been there, and it should have been horror and pity, but all I felt was unease and nausea. It gave me pause when I realised at a certain point that it was the same feeling I had in reading the child rape scenes in that Navajo “memoir” (The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams) which turned out to be a hoax, written by an unsuccessful non-Navajo writer of gay leather porn. A suspicion of being rendered a voyeur. That the reading experience was going to be voyeuristic rather than cathartic.

Tenderness, when it appeared, seemed always the outcome of a bargain. And desire? How ironic (or maybe I should say manipulative, given that the reader is, I believe, supposed to think it an image of suffering) the use of a photograph of a man in orgasm (Peter Hujar’s Orgasmic Man) as the cover image for a book in which there is no spontaneous, unbounded sexual desire. In which Jude's lover, new to a sexual relationship with a man, explains it away with an "I'm not in a relationship with a man, I'm in a relationship with Jude".

Was that when the word 'facile' first came to me?  Facile which is one of the adjectives Hanna Yanagihara uses for a group of friends that she described as one of her inspirations for A Little Life, in an article she wrote for Vulture last year:

"...I was an editor at a now-defunct magazine about the media industry called Brill’s Content… It was my first magazine job, and I found it terrifying, like being moved from the high-school literary magazine to the high-school debate team: Everyone was smart and facile and articulate and argumentative.  [...] I found them all fascinating."

I can't help but be reminded of the answer she gave when Anne Kennedy asked her about the writing process behind the book. "I knew exactly where I was going with it" she said.

And so she did. At various points we heard that she wanted it to be a long novel, a claustrophobic novel, a novel with no natural stopping points, where the violence would be "unsanitised", and which would be "very personal" to her. And that is where she went.

I think anyone intrigued by the subject matter of this book -- the lasting effects of trauma, the arc of friendship, its strengths and its limits -- who want to immerse themselves in a story, who are happy to set aside scepticism, who find social or cultural commentary intrusive, who would like to push the boundaries of their emotional endurance, should try going there with her.

Don't worry about the gougères. Maybe talking about gougères in Manhattan is no more pretentious than talking about quiche in my native California (which is to say, not pretentious at all, unless perhaps when the filling is kale, or ramps -- oops, don't they buy ramps in A Little Life?).

As her last question before Audience Q&A time, Anne asked, as interviewers do, “What’s next for you?”

The first laugh of the interview from Yanagihara! A strong, low laugh. But I didn’t catch an answer and I’m pretty sure that if there was one, it was a gloss over.

During Q&A, a sincere young male whom I dubbed “Mr G” in my notes stepped up to the microphone and asked whether Yanagihara could share any revelations that had come to her while writing the book “if it isn’t too personal”.

No, she couldn’t.

“I think this would be a great place to end” said Anne.

--Karen

Susie Orbach and Jeanette Winterson Pop Up at AWF 2016

8:56 PM: The nice helper at the after-hours ticket outlet aka Festival Information Desk is holding the last two tickets to Jeanette Winterson and Susie Orbach’s Pop-up session, cash only, hoorah, I’ve got the cash, and we’re off with minutes to spare, slaloming around a few clumps of festival goers enjoying their Bill Oddie afterglow, just enough time to grab a wine, and, what’s this? The bar is closed! What?

No no, someone says, the bar is IN the room, and points the way. Swerve, final stretch, we push open the doors, and there it is -- the bar, and a room bursting with women (okay I guess there were a couple of men). The widest range of hair colours ever yet seen at an AWF session, reds of all shades, white, blond, black, a variety of hats, all stylish, one shawl with a baby being marsupialled in it. Two front row seats for us and our wines, just behind some happy couples ensconced on double beanbags which have been laid out in the space between the dais and us, heightening my feeling that we’re taking part in a giant slumber party, about to call the radio station to request our favourite songs, all through the night. The buzz is palpable.

It’s time. Our Miss Clavel appears and it’s Festival director Anne O’Brien in person, and you can see right away she’s not going to tell us to go to sleep, she’s exhilirated too, presenting Jeanette Winterson, author and memoirist (Oranges are not the only fruit), and Susie Orbach, psychotherapist (most famously to Lady Diana) and writer (Fat is a feminist issue), together since 2010 and soon to celebrate their first anniversary as a married couple, ready to riff tonight on the theme of madness and creativity.

Once the wild applause fades,  the first thing -- and the second -- they do is ask for the lights to brought up so they can see us. They want to see us! How many guests from their places on the stage have mumbled about how they can't see anyone but who ever asked -- twice -- for the lights to be brought up?

“How many people here think of themselves as creative? Raise your hands!” Winterson throws out. Hands everywhere you look.

“How many people here think of themselves as crazy?” Almost as many.

“Creativity is our birthright as human beings" she pronounces. "Every child is born creative and then we knock it out of them. Not everyone will be an artist but we’re all involved in the creative response.”

“It’s interesting you say that because I’m not sure I agree,” responds Orbach calmly, in the first of several instances of endearing married couple-style banter, mentioning "Winnicott’s theory" that creativity is born of babies searching for a relationship with their mother.

“Yes”, Winterson concedes, it’s clearly about relationships, “not the the lone white male they want you to believe.” But who is to say which relationships? “The thing about artists is you can’t trust them, you have to trust the work. I’ve always thought a creative work is first and foremost a lie detector.” Her “autobiographical” novel Oranges are not the only fruit comes to mind, the one of which she once said, “I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful”.

She wonders how we are doing, could we see them well enough, considering that we are going to be spending an hour together, and invites Orbach to join her in perching on the backrest of the ottoman instead of sitting on its seat. Marvellously, they suddenly go from being talking heads to being individuals in flesh and blood, Winterson looking a bit like a mischievous chimney sweep in her black stovepipe-ish jeans, shirt and leather shoes with stitching around the toes which managed to suggest a certain elfin upturning, and Orbach like a sexy Parisian concierge with her black silk chemisier and skirt, and head of untidy curls.

The role of anxiousness is touched on, with Orbach describing the psychoanalyst’s “50 minute hour” as a place of both anxiety and extraordinary creativity. Winterson agrees, replying eloquently, “What is home? Where do I belong? What is my culture? These massive questions: the creativity we make is a sort of an answer”. And, “It’s not just a personal answering, it’s a gift -- we want it to enter into other people.”

“Why do we get so damn scared?” Orbach asks, turning to the question of bravery, of daring.

Winterson talks of when she was writing Why be happy when you could be normal, and how the question emerged for her of how much to reveal. In the end, she says, you need to find the "place you have to access in order to do the work you have to do”.

“In my generation,” says Orbach, who will turn seventy next year (Winterson is in her fifties), “daring to express yourself sent women into breakdowns”.

Something creative people must have, agrees Winterson, is enough confidence to risk bringing out another part of themselves. “Often what we call creativity is recklessness or ruthlessness,” she acknowledges.

Towards the end, they reminisce about their youth. “The search I was in could have led to depression or psychosis but the women’s liberation movement came along,” says Susie Orbach. “That’s how I got out of being crazy” -- not counting the craziness of youth, of course!

On Winterson's part, even with the hard childhood she’d had, locked repeatedly in the coal cellar for punishment by her missionary adoptive mother, not allowed to have books at home (she hid them under her mattress, where her mother found them and burned them), she has something almost romantic to say about the escape route she had created. “My best friends were dead. When I needed them I went and got them off the shelves of the public library.” And launches into an effusive description of a chance reading of TS Eliot on the library steps, aged 16, as Orbach smiles benignly. Generously. "I think that's wonderful," she says.

Kiwi author Joanne Drayton, another brave front-rower sitting a few seats down from us, asks if they think creative opportunities are diminishing in today's world.

Orbach allows as how she thinks there’s been a democratisation of creativity, even as we live under an economic structure that dictates where we are to find satisfaction. Although the first of those postulates could be seen as positive (and in fact Winterson is enthusiastic about the idea of democratisation and takes it as a sign that things are improving), she can't however ignore the alarming fact that 24 million people follow someone on youtube who shows you how to make yourself up so you look like Barbie.

Yes, says Winterson, “The best and the worst is now visible, it’s in your face all the time”. But, she concludes, “I’m optimistic, I think people will sort it out.”

Sometimes I feel that way and sometimes not. And I have to wonder if, brainy as she is, that isn’t true for Jeanette Winterson too. But right then, there was no doubt that she was speaking from her heart. That was what was so wonderful about the evening: the standing up (or perching on a backrest) for spontaneity, in a medium like the literary festival circuit where spontaneity is regrettably, if perhaps inevitably, in short supply.

As I’m writing, all I can think is how glad I am I got to see them like this, in their own orchestration, turning a crowd of curious admirers into friends for the hour, rather than watching a film of them walking around the Auckland Art Gallery peering at creative works and dropping bon mots about creativity as some guy from TV3 followed them around with a videocamera, as I chanced to see a short clip of. Actually, I couldn't have seen more if I'd wanted to, as it was on the Auckland Art Gallery's facebook page, and as I'm not a facebook user, the view was obscured by a banner inviting me to join facebook today.

What a happy privilege to have had the Orbach-Winterson experience live and off the network!

--Karen