Dear Reader,
I hope you’ve had a happy few weeks. My title gives a summary of how I’ve been, but having read and watched my way through coughing fits I have lots of good things to share. You may get to the end of this round up, which amongst other things includes two whole seasons of This Is Us 🙈, and wonder how many years I’ve been ill for. In reality though, it’s actually only a few weeks since I met up with my daughter in London and walked back to the station with such a zingy feeling of healthfulness and bounce that I had the thought: I can’t imagine ever being ill again. Closely followed by: Why would you even think that? That is such a dangerous thought. Erase it. Banish it from your head before it tempts fate. I don’t believe in that kind of fate, but still, here we are 🤷🏻♀️.
Let’s start with some books. I downloaded The Bookstore Sisters by Alice Hoffman as Amazon kept advertising it to me in my Instagram feed (Such easy prey. Although as it was free, I probably shouldn’t resent their hounding on this occasion). The plot and backstory made it feel a little like what could have been a novel was squashed uncomfortably into a short story1, but I did really love its bookshop setting in Maine and suddenly craved reading something else there, which sent me down a next book research rabbit hole (if I hadn’t already read Gabrielle Zevin’s The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry that would have been the perfect thing to follow with, although technically that’s Massachusetts).
The book I settled on didn’t quite deliver on the cosy-community-Maine front as its characters live in extreme isolation on a small island just off the coast, but Susan Conley’s Landslide is excellent anyway. It’s a story told by the mother of two teenage boys, at a crisis point when her husband is in hospital for a few months following a fishing trawler accident and their youngest son’s life is unravelling. She refers to her boys as the wolves, which I love - it seems to convey both her affection and her inability to contain their wildness2. It’s a quiet sort of book and Susan has this wonderful way of laying out the most raw and honest details that seem to show you everything you need to know. If you enjoyed Audrey Magee’s The Colony, this has a similar bleakness in landscape and feel (that constant island dampness is back), although with more warmth and hope within the characters.
Moving to Memphis for Ann Patchett’s Taft, at least in my own consciousness this is one of Ann’s lesser-known titles, but I was still drawn in from the first pages (I would say I’m not sure it’s possible for Ann to write a book I don’t like, but then remember I didn’t get on with Bel Canto as a book or an audiobook, which seems extraordinary when it’s so well-loved and I love Ann so much 🤷🏻♀️). Anyway, Taft is mostly written from the point of view of a jazz drummer who has given up his career as a musician to run a bar in an attempt to appease the mother of his child. He’s a man I worried might break under the strain of holding himself to goodness (and in some ways, he does), while at the same time totally rooting for him not to lower the standards he’s set. If it had a flaw, for me it was that the final few pages brought it to an unsatisfying end, but read this one for the journey there and it will be perfect. Lots of good side characters and overarching themes about race and class.
Back in England, I’d been tempted by Barbara Comyns’ A Touch of Mistletoe ever since I’d seen its beautiful new cover (reissued by Daunts, after first being published in 1967), but was finally nudged into actually reading it when someone mentioned how brilliant she is in a book group chat. I love thinking of similarities in style/theme while reading3, but found Barbara Comyns almost impossible to pin down because she just has such a unique voice. She’s a little bit Barbara Pym (Excellent Women) in documenting the constraints on women’s domestic lives in mid-century London; shows some of the the eccentricity of the family in Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle; has some overlap with Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived In The Castle in terms of sibling relationships and family weirdnesses (although my mind may just be getting stuck on castle titles, so perhaps we should shuffle politely on from that one); and also has some of the quirky humour around family disharmony of Meg Mason with Sorrow & Bliss. But really, none of those comparisons feel like they fit quite properly. She is just - frustratingly, and brilliantly - herself, absolutely refusing categorisation. Barbara writes about the sadness of mental health issues, poverty, and life swinging off its hinges, with so many uniquely observed details, and such brilliant humour, that the reader is easily carried along. I really loved Barbara’s writing and plan to read more by her, so this is a highly enthusiastic recommendation. And if you read Mistletoe, do look out for the Garibaldi biscuits near the end - I loved that paragraph so much.
Moving onto Things I Watched While I Was Coughing. As I merely skimmed over This Is Us earlier, let’s return to that (if you haven’t watched, feel free to gobble up the entire series and then meet me back here in six months’ time. Or a week depending on your level of dedication). The first few seasons were some of my favourite television ever - I totally fell in love with the gorgeous messy family and the back-and-forth between generations, but then somewhere around seasons 4/5, the format started to feel stale and I wondered if it wouldn’t have been better if it had ended at the point where we finally find out how Jack died. My apathy was compounded when a new season appeared during the pandemic that featured…the pandemic. Even though I was grateful for it being made at all, I just couldn't muster enthusiasm for masked characters infiltrating the very brief period of time when I wasn’t already reading/thinking/talking about covid. But returning to This Is Us a few years later, I no longer felt so weighted down by watching those things and it was once again something joyful, real, full of brilliantly evolving characters, and just the right amount of cheesiness. And goodness, aren’t they all beautiful. There was some weeping near the end of series 6. It did not help with the coughing.
Last Sunday afternoon, my husband said he’d been wanting to watch that thing about the nurse, which I’d also read about and had mentally filed under the same header. It’s actually called The Good Nurse (Netflix) and is based on the true story of a male nurse in America who poisoned potentially hundreds of patients. The film shows his best friend’s courage in helping the police to expose him against the orders of their employer (his best friend was also his coworker). The nurse had worked in nine hospitals and each had covered up their suspicions to protect their own interests… just awful. I’m on the slightly squeamish side when it comes to true crime - it has to be executed in a particular way for me to not just hate myself for watching. But this seemed well done and the decision to tell the story mainly from the best friend’s point of view was probably key to this. As well as the greater exposure having the potential to bring about a shift in hospital practice. You can find a full review here.
Oh and one more recommendation. If you fancy something light and funny, Eternally Confused and Eager for Love was brilliant. It’s a Netflix series set in Mumbai and the title pretty much explains the plight of the central character. Trailer here.
Anyway, please tell me all the things you’ve been reading and watching - I always love real-person recommendations.
With love,
Florence x
Said the person writing a newsletter that could invariably be one of those nightmare scenes from a film where the xerox machine malfunctions and spews out printed paper until the entire room is covered by it (I’m so hoping that scenario is bringing back memories of 9 to 5 for you too - probably one of my favourite films ever. Dolly Parton and Jane Fonda gold).
Several years ago I stumbled across a book on Amazon called Little Wolf’s Book of Badness and although I’ve never read it, its delicious title has always stuck in my head - for some reason, the idea of wolves seems to carry a lot of sweetness. (Although I still feel slightly traumatised by the time my parents said they still had wolves in Cornwall during one of our creepy through-the-night drives to visit friends there).
Why am I so bothered about finding similarities? Mainly because it’s fun, but also because if you liked this, you might like that recommendations are my absolute favourite kind - they just seem the best way to whittle things down in a context that allows for everyone having slightly different reading preferences.
I love Barbara Comyn. They were out of print for ages after the original Virago reprints, but they're all amazing, although The Vet's Daughter is the toughest read I think. Our Spoons Came from Woolworths is one of those very precisely early/mid-20th century books that demonstrates clearly how very far we have come in terms of 'life for women'. And her writing is just like you say - she's such a difficult writer to pin down, as so exactly herself.
The TV show I am recommending to EVERYONE at the moment is being met with much skepticism, but honestly, go with it: LegoMasters Australia (must be the Australian version). It is incredibly wholesome in a lovely autumnal/hygge way, but also very inspiring and creative and just...fun! The host, the judge and the competitors are all so engaging, particularly in the most recent season. I defy you not to want to haul old boxes of lego out of the loft and start building!