Good evening!
A mixed bag of reading this week, as well as a mixed bag of a week -- I’ve had some wisdom tooth troubles, which has been incredibly unpleasant. It did mean that I was relegated to the sofa for a full day yesterday and made a good dent into one of my reads, so I guess that’s a silver lining (would have preferred to not have the toothache, obv).
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I don’t often abandon books that I’m reading, but in the case of Rachel Cusk’s Coventry (2019), I had to for my sanity. I’ve previously read Outline (2014), which I liked a lot, and The Last Supper (2009), which I Iiked less.Outline I thought was intelligent and interesting; The Last Supper I thought dragged a bit but had real bright moments, such as Cusk’s reflection on shopping in supermarkets in foreign countries and how unmoored you can feel looking at ingredients that are unrecognisable to you, without the safety net of a written explanation. Coventry was just dull and dare I say it, self-indulgent.
It’s made up of essays that don’t really have a connection to one another, apart from a deep-seated resentment of her mother that she somehow brings into every subject she’s talking about. I honestly could not tell you what the central thread of the essays were, both at a book-length level, or the essays themselves. She often brings up subjects and her thoughts on them, and just kind of lets them trail off, with no conclusions. It’s very ‘and that could mean this…or perhaps this…anyway my mum is a bitch.’ I read 100 pages of it, which was largely made up of the first section, and then moved on to the second section which was cultural criticism. Turns out her cultural criticism is just as nonsensical as her personal essays so I closed the book and put it on the ‘to be donated’ pile.
I then picked up Ingrid Bergman’s My Story (1980), which was written with Alan Burgess. When I found this book in a second-hand shop, I was intrigued by how this was an autobiography written ‘with’ another writer, and wondered if that meant a ghost writer, and wondered why it would be presented like that. As a matter of fact, Bergman details how she did not feel confident in writing her story herself, so she enlisted the help of a writer to assist her. This makes for an interesting text in that there are parts that are written by her, parts from her old diaries, and parts in the third-person detailing the facts of her life, written by Burgess. It feels as though Bergman sat and gave a semi-detailed overview of her life to Burgess, talking about her feelings and the real events of certain times, which he’s transcribed and put down. It also feels as though he has gone and done the research about these periods that she talks about, getting relevant newspaper articles and reviews and slotting them into the story to create a full picture. I haven’t read anything quite like this in non-fiction, apart from maybe Jean Stein’s West of Eden (2016), but that is deliberately made up of lots and lots of anecdotes from a large cast of people. I thought it would be a bit strange when I started out, but it’s actually been pretty seamless and I’m enjoying it a lot.
I’m up to the end of Bergman’s first marriage, at the end of World War Two. I find this period very intriguing, and it is especially intriguing coming from the perspective of a European person living in America. The Hollywood of this period was in a strange place, hyper-aware of what it was putting out and how that translated into the Home Front spirit. It was also a period in which there was a lot of glamour -- I’m absolutely eating up anecdotes about her being in Paris at the close of the war and being sent a note from two strangers who saw her passing in the hotel lobby, and of big parties in Beverly Hills, and how she was harassed by several men in Hollywood to get a mink coat. Movie stars! What has happened to them!
When I’ve been reading My Story, I’ve found myself incredibly engrossed and unable to get up to do something else that I need to do until I’ve finished a chapter or section. The last time I had that was with Gavin Lambert’s Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and Jean Stein’s West of Eden, both of which are about the Golden era of Hollywood. I feel like I could read any book on this period and just inhale it, I love it so much. I’ve been thinking about this -- I obviously love the films from this period, but I think the inner-workings of it hold a real fascination. It’s like a lost world, almost. I am currently (trying) to write a novel set in this period, and these kinds of books really give me a lot to go on. I also forgot to mention it last week but I wrote about the history of strikes in Hollywood for Little White Lies.
Books on my radar
I’ll probs continue on in this streak of Hollywood reading -- I’ve got a lot of books on it, but I’m gravitating towards Charlie Chaplin’s My Autobiography (1964). I absolutely love Charlie Chaplin (and yes before you think it I know he was a bit of a bastard in his private life, but he was a genius, thank you).