Good evening!
Happy March and Happy St. David’s Day, if you are a David and/or Welsh. I can’t believe we’re in March already, both because the year has started to fly by, and we’re in another month of The Situation in Gaza. Please continue to keep Palestinians in your thoughts and to press your elected representatives for a ceasefire.
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂
My twitter/X is @jessf_white and my Instagram is @lunchpoems.
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
This newsletter will be slightly different this week, because of the nature of what I read, and who it was by. I put a slight pause on the book I was discussing last week (Judy Garland by Anne Edwards), because I received some very important post -- an advance copy of Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, which is out with 4th Estate this June.
Julia is my beloved friend, although I had read her work before we knew each other. Her debut book was the short story collection salt slow (2019), which I bought after reading her White Review Short Story Prize-winning ‘The Great Awake’. ‘The Great Awake’ is still, to this day, one of the best stories I’ve ever read, and salt slow is equally as brilliant. By the time her debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea (2022) was published we were sending each other pictures of Ray Liotta in Goodfellas regularly and comfortable enough to do heinous bitching and gossiping and scheming with one another.
I wasn’t writing this newsletter at the time of publication for Our Wives Under the Sea, so I didn’t really need to carry out an extended reading of it anywhere -- instead I just forced people to pre-order it by saying things like ‘I know it seems like I’m biased but it is really, really excellent.’ I don’t generally review my friends’ books for publications (although I don’t do that much criticism because I am a woman reading in her house who is sometimes paid to write). Now, however, I find myself in a place where I very routinely say what I think about what I have been reading to what is actually quite a large audience. It would be dishonest of me to not tell you that Julia is my friend because it does add context to my recommendation that you spend your money on a copy -- but I genuinely do think you should do that, because it’s her best work so far.
Just under a year ago during a trip to London, I was sat in Julia and her partner Ros’ flat, extremely comfortable and cosy, slightly hungover and being entertained by their resident court jester (their cat Tiggy). That’s when I first heard the premise of Private Rites -- ‘King Lear’ at the end of the world. Without providing spoilers, that is actually the best way to describe it. Three sisters receive word that their father has died, which hits them in unexpected and complicated ways. Their father was an architect who was a pioneer in designing buildings that could withstand the rising sea levels and the almost constant rain, and was therefore extremely rich. The question of inheritance comes up, and the sisters have to reckon with their feelings and memories as they are served with the facts of his will.
It was raining very badly when Julie gave me the rundown, which was fitting. The entire thing sounded so excellent, but what really piqued my interest was the fact that she was writing this premise into a world that still expected people to go to work, and to suffer through ,the drudgery of every-day life, even though every-day life had turned into an obstacle course of bad infrastructure and ever-widening class divides. The focus on the cityscape and architecture made me comment that this seemed more like ‘The Great Awake’ than Our Wives Under the Sea, which upon reading it is both true and not quite true. This is really a crescendo of Julia’s interests as a writer, which range from queer women, to climate change, to family structures, to both anonymised and familiar settings. It does hearken back to this earlier work, but it is also a development of it.
A question I am often asked (both directly and indirectly/slyly), is if I lie about my friends’ work being good. I am very aware that the average person is not friends with as many authors as I am (as are other people in our ‘circle’-- ew) -- but the crucial point is that I am simply not friends with bad writers. That makes my life a lot easier as I have never had to lie. I am not lying when I say that Private Rites is beyond excellent. It is a haunting, eerie novel that makes you love and hate its characters, and makes you think critically of larger topics like the housing market and the expectation that we need to work for the material gain of people who don’t care about us. That makes it sound dull, but it doesn’t wear its themes on its sleeve; instead they are woven into a story of a family that could occur now, or 100 years ago, or 100 years into the future. If there’s one thing that Julia likes to revisit, it’s that families both biological and chosen can be difficult no matter the time or place.
After finishing Private Rites (and feeling bereft about it), I went back to Edwards’ biography of Judy Garland, which has continued to be very well-rendered. It’s a relentlessly sad book about a relentlessly sad life, but Edwards does take time to highlight the joy that was evident in the actress’ life, as in her ability to laugh at most things and the love for her children. I will most likely finish it this weekend as I have about 100 pages left, but I can’t see myself changing my mind on any of my current opinions.
More next week!
Books on my radar
I think, like most people, I was surprised to hear that Sally Rooney will be publishing her fourth novel Intermezzo later this year. Well-kept publishing secrets are hard to come by. I’m cautiously excited about this one as a long-time Rooney fan and defender, although I’ll do my best to stay out of any arguments about her because I am 31 and have a job.
I think being 31 and having a job makes it MORE acceptable to get into arguments defending our Sally!! I’m with you - I’m cautiously excited too. Look it’s her first novel where the focus is an entirely male relationship and I am excited for that dynamic.