For your stray attention this weekend...

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Hello,

While I was trying to capture what it’s like to publish a memoir, Terri White published a thoughtful piece in the Guardian about her own experiences with her book, Coming Undone. And Elissa Altman has written wonderfully lately about shame and memoir-writing and suffering ostracism after writing your truth. I think I’ve been lucky to work with supportive publishing teams, and it seems to me that we, as an industry, urgently need to develop some standards for protecting authors who create such vulnerable work. As Zeba Talkhani’s Wintering Sessions interview shows, the consquences can be life-changing. How do we ensure that new writers are fully-informed, and what help can we give if it all goes wrong? Maybe we need a life writers’ union.

At the same time, I’m grateful to the writers who courageously reveal the hidden corners of human experience. I recently read Jeanette McCurdy’s I’m Glad My Mom Died, and was reminded all over again why I love reading memoir. I’m hardly the first to recommend it, but it’s a fierce, clear-sighted insight into growing up with an abusive stage mother (although it comes with a lot of triggering eating disorder content), and I couldn’t put it down. Memoir, for me, delivers a hit that fiction never can: the breathtaking jolt contact with the real.

Memoir about intimacy, the revelation that we can find common feeling in lives that are nothing like our own. For the same reason, I was immersed in Salman Rushdie’s interview for the New Yorker, in which he draws dark humour and even wonder from the brutal attack he endured this summer, without avoiding the trauma. It’s a miracle he’s with us, and I can’t but admire his stoicism.

Film can often take us closer to the pulse of lived experience than other media can. Watch the trailer to this film and tell me you don’t yearn with all your soul to see it immediately. All That Breathes is a documentary about three brothers in Delhi who devote their lives to rehabilitating black kites, the enormous birds of prey that circle above their city.  Due to pollution, they’ve started to fall from the sky in alarming numbers. But the brothers themselves are under threat, too. It’s on Sky Documentaries in the UK and HBO Max in the US, and I cannot tell uou know much I loved it.

Well, that’s plenty of real life for today - except for one more thing. I want to leave you with a quote from Gavin Francis’ book, Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence. He read this for us on Wednesday night’s True Stories Book Club (Rookery members can catch up in their feed), and I now think it should be printed out and handed to every single person leaving a doctor’s office:

‘Doctors and nurses are more like gardeners than mechanics, and healing happens thanks to the same force that greens the trees in spring and pushes bulbs up through the earth. Be kind to yourself. Take care over who you listen to, because ideas and expectations are as powerful as drugs and poisons. Human beings understand the world through stories: not all have a happy ending, but each of us has a hand in writing part of our own.’

There is more, and I urge you to read this wonderful book (which comes out in September in the US) to absorb it all. It’s helping me to get perspective during my own long period of recovery.

Take care this week,

Katherine

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