Novelist Julie Myerson seen in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK 16/09/2003 COPYRIGHT PHOTO BY MURDO MACLEOD All Rights Reserved Tel + 44 131 669 9659 Mobile +44 7831 504 531 Email: m@murdophoto.com STANDARD TERMS AND CONDITIONS APPLY see for details: www.murdophoto.com No syndication, no redistrubution, Murdo Macleod's repro fees apply international book writers author books Edinburgh myerson fiction julie Photograph: Murdo Macleod
The Cuban missile crisis stalks the close of series 2. As Sterling Cooper's staff – unsure that the world will still be there on Monday – hurry home to be with loved ones, Pete is touched to find Peggy "still here", and offers her a drink.
They sit there on the sofa, knee to knee, her coat clutched on her lap, whisky tumblers in their hands and – emboldened by the apocalyptic atmosphere – he asks her why "you never let me talk about what I want to talk about?" She does the Peggy Face – amused, intelligent, mistrustful. He takes a risk then and tells her that she's "perfect", and that he loves her. And you can't help it, your heart jumps. It's what we've wanted him to tell her for a long time.
Peggy replies that she's not perfect. Then she shuts her eyes and tells him the truth. That she could have had him in her life, could have shamed him into being with her. She tells him that she had his baby "and gave it away" because she "wanted other things".
Pete's face is a picture of terror and bewilderment. Peggy tries to explain further, but Pete can't, or won't, take it in. "Why would you tell me this?" he wonders. He means it. Before she leaves, Peggy touches him briefly on the shoulder. You glimpse a single tear standing in his eye.
The scene is crushing. Part of its power lies in what has preceded it – the atmosphere of quiet panic as the world waits for darkness to descend. But it's also Pete. Self-seeking, self-loathing, supremely ill at ease with himself, and on a perpetual quest for something he does not understand, he's by far the most compelling character in the show.
He knows he used Peggy when he slept with her, but he's paid an unexpected price by falling in love with her. He recognises her worth (and we like him for that) but you sense that she will remain mysterious to him for ever.
When I first watched this episode, I didn't know what moved me most: Pete's loss, Peggy's loss – because it is a loss – or the helplessness of the whole world. Or maybe just those brisk, empty and forlorn brown spaces which are the Mad Men offices – evoking passions unspoken, truths denied and the loneliness and futility of so many frustrated lives and hearts.
Best summer books 2018, as picked by writers and cultural figures – part seven
From Pulitzer prize-winners to Penguin classics, poetry anthologies to the latest page-turners, here are the books to take to the beach this summer
Sun 8 Jul 2018 09.00 BST
Niven Govinden
I recommend Territory of Light (Penguin, translated by Geraldine Harcourt), Yuko Tsushima’s stories of marital disappointment, parenthood and loneliness following a separation in 70s Tokyo. It’s unflinching and brings to mind Elena Ferrante’s early work. Caryl Phillips’ novel A View of the Empire at Sunset (Vintage), about the becoming of Jean Rhys, fully inhabits the despair of damp prewar London and stifling colonial society abroad. Edouard Louis’s History of Violence (Harvill Secker), detailing a sexual attack and its aftermath, is shocking, but also tender in its examination of class difference and queer desire. Books I’m packing for Arles include Annie Ernaux’ s The Years (Fitzcarraldo Editions, translated by Alison L Strayer), Will Ashon’s forthcoming Wu-Tang epic, Chamber Music (Granta) and Nikesh Shukla’s The One Who Wrote Destiny (Atlantic).
Mark Kozelek
I’ve been travelling over the last month and I’ve been bouncing back and forth between books during my travels. The first is called Iron Ambition: My Life With Cus D’Amato (Sphere) by Mike Tyson and Larry Sloman. I’m a fan of Cus D’Amato, who also trained world champions Floyd Patterson and José Torres. I’m also reading Nietzsche for the first time, partly because Cus had Mike reading Nietzsche at 15 years old. I’m halfway through Thus Spake Zarathustra (Wordsworth, translated by Thomas Common) and will admit I can’t make head or tail of some of it. I think the book is telling me to believe in myself, to think at a higher-than-average level, and to not get bogged down with petty things. Ideal holiday reading.
Suzanne O’Sullivan
Anybody who wants a real treat must read Martina Evans’s Now We Can Talk Openly About Men (Carcanet). Full of insight and humour, it tells the story of two women’s lives in Ireland during the civil war. As a poet, Evans’s ability to choose just the right word is unerring. I also highly recommend Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am (Tinder), a memoir that rivals the beauty of her novels. My own summer holiday will be spent in Sweden doing research for a book. While there, I plan to reread some old favourites – starting with Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Vintage).
Julie Myerson
Rachel Cusk’s Kudos (Faber) is one of the most astoundingly original and necessary books I’ve ever read. It made me laugh, think and cry. She’s my friend, but I recommend it without apology: I envy anyone who hasn’t read it yet. I was startled, but also very moved, by the almost abrasive directness of Rose Tremain’s memoir Rosie (Chatto & Windus). It did exactly what memoirs ought to do: made me want to rush straight back to her fiction. My ideal holiday (a bit of a fantasy at the moment) would therefore be a fortnight in Rome with all of Tremain on a Kindle, along with John Updike’s Rabbit (Penguin) quartet – which people have been ordering me to read for years – as well as Motherhood (Harvill Secker) by Sheila Heti, which I’ve been hoarding, and Never Anyone But You (Corsair) by the unfailingly brilliant Rupert Thomson.
Nicola Barker
I know it sounds a little sad, but I tend to get really excited when I receive the Polity Press’s new catalogue. They publish so much clever, challenging and fascinating stuff. Over the summer I plan to read Alain Corbin’s A History of Silence (Polity). Corbin writes sparely, beautifully and with an exquisite fastidiousness about, well… something and nothing: quiet. In the first chapter he recommends George Rodenbach’s The Bells of Bruges (Dedalus, translated by Mike Mitchell) and Max Picard’s The Flight from God (St Augustine’s Press). I intend to consume all three of the above, at home or on trains, in an atmosphere of gentle reverence.
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Luis Alberto Urrea’s The House of Broken Angels (Little, Brown) is a great American novel, if we understand “America” to be all of the Americas, including Mexico. It’s profane, funny and moving. Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (Portobello, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori) takes a universal space, the convenience store, and turns it into the setting for a darkly comic (and very short) novel about alienation and identity in an urban, capitalist society. Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (Mariner) is a collection of essays about race, writing, politics, queerness and sexuality that is urgent and insightful. I’ll be in Paris for much of the summer, and I’ll be takingÉdouard Louis’ The End of Eddy (Vintage, translated by Michael Lucey), Leila Slimani’s Lullaby (Faber), Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (Portobello), Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko (Head of Zeus), Lisa Ko’s The Leavers (Dialogue) and Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart (Bloomsbury).
Philip Hensher
This year, I’m packing José Saramago’s novels - I’ve only just got round to him, and I’m knocked out by the worldly precision and the combination of substance and grandeur. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (Vintage, translated by Giovanni Pontiero) was a revelation, and I’m looking forward to the half dozen more now in a pile. The two new novels I really want to take away are both by favourite Australian authors: Michelle de Kretser’s The Life to Come (Allen & Unwin) and Tim Winton’s The Shepherd’s Hut (Picador). They’re both writers of wonderful freshness and energy. Just right for two weeks’ retreat at an Austrian health farm, to fit in between forest walks, massages, advanced treatments and 650 exquisitely tantalising calories a day.
Viv Albertine
One of my favourite books this year was Nine Island (Catapult) by Jane Alison, which is funny and wise and such a closely observed account of a single woman’s life during her time living in Florida. It’s so vividly described that I didn’t read it as fiction, which shows how good a writer Alison is. Her protagonist J’s reflections on sex, love and other people are so unapologetic and honest, I felt less alone and freakish while reading the book. Another that had me in its grip, due to her insightful and direct voice, was Kudos (Faber) by Rachel Cusk. Cusk has a piercing intellect but demonstrates it through perspicacity, not by showing off on the page. I came to the graphic memoir Persepolis (Pantheon) by Marjane Satrapi via my 19-year-old daughter. It is set in Iran around the Islamic revolution when the author is 10. We accompany her through her gradual awakening to politics, love, oppression and the complexity of families – and her drawings are enchanting. I am going to Hastings, East Sussex, for a week’s course at the art school. The books I’ll take with me are Motherhood (Harvill Secker) by Sheila Heti, and Zadie Smith’s new collection of essays, Feel Free (Hamish Hamilton).
Nikesh Shukla
Ponti (Picador) by Sharlene Teo is a sultry, hilarious dissection of mother-daughter relationships, and the effect of time and teenagehood on friendships, against the backdrop of Singapore B-movies. It oozes confidence. On Michael Jackson (Granta) is Margo Jefferson’s excellent, empathic take on the singer, encapsulating the pressures of being a child star, the most famous person on the planet and having a complicated legacy that can sometimes make people forget about the music. Meanwhile, Crudo (Picador) by Olivia Laing is a hot and heavy look at post-Brexit Britain through the eyes of newlywed Kathy as she summers in Italy. It’s Olivia Laing’s fiction debut and is very much a self-assured interrogation of the times we live in. James Smythe’s I Still Dream (Borough) is his most accomplished work – a past, present and future of AI, which is as human as it is otherworldly, and utterly engrossing. I am going to east Devon and will be taking the short story collection Heads of the Colored People (Chatto & Windus) by Nafissa Thompson-Spires, the memoir This Really Isn’t About You (Picador) by Jean Hannah Edelstein and Londoners (Granta) by Craig Taylor.
Paul Morley
Don Paterson’s wonderfully learned The Poem: Lyric, Sign, Metre (Faber) is pure joy for footnote freaks and those who like to get high thinking about thinking. Not so much about how to be a poet as how to be in a poem, or even be a poem, it also works as a great book about music. DG Compton’s The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (Gateway), written in 1974, coolly anticipated society being occupied with reality TV, and continues its journey from depicting an imaginary world to approaching nonfiction. I’ll be in Lisbon, switching between Shirley Collins’s All in the Downs (Strange Attractor) and Lamont Hawkins’s Raw: My Journey Into the Wu-Tang Clan (Faber), to see what they have in common. I’ll also be taking a handful of those nourishing one-pound Penguin Modern classics so I can go on holiday with George Orwell’s Notes on Nationalism, Albert Camus’s Create Dangerously, James Baldwin’s Dark Days, Kathy Acker’s New York City in 1979 and Samuel Beckett’s The End.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson – review
Jeanette Winterson's account of her abusive upbringing by an adoptive mother and her journey to find her real family is by turns hilarious and harrowing
Julie Myerson
Sunday 6 November 2011 00.05 GMT
J
eanette Winterson once asked her adoptive mother – stringently immortalised in her first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – why they couldn't have books in the house. "The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late," answered the peerless Mrs Winterson. As advertisements for reading go, it's pretty seductive. But it also happens to be wonderfully true of this vivid, unpredictable and sometimes mind-rattling memoir. You start it expecting one thing – a wry retake of her working-class gothic upbringing – and come out having been subjected to one of the more harrowing and candid investigations of mid-life breakdown I've ever read. This book is definitely of the sort that Mrs Winterson feared most: truths that most of us find hard to face, explored in a way that disturb, challenge, upset and inspire. And so yes, by the time I realised what it was really about and what it was going to do to me, it was definitely far "too late".
Jeanette Winterson was adopted as a baby by a couple who had been hoping for a boy. An evangelical Pentecostal Christian who possibly had never had sex with her husband ("They're his only pleasure," she said of the three packs of Polo mints she gave him every week), Mrs Winterson weighed 20 stone and kept a revolver in the kitchen drawer. If someone knocked at the door she "shoved a poker through the letter box". As Winterson very memorably puts it, she "did not have a soothing personality".
When her adoptive daughter upset her – inevitably and often – she'd say that the devil had led them to the "wrong crib". The young Jeanette was frequently deprived of food or locked out of the house or into the coal hole. Secretly, she began to read. But when her mother discovered the stash of books, she burned them. Lonely and bereft, she fell in love. But when her mother discovered her in bed with a girl, she took her to church and subjected her to three days of praying and beatings – not to mention a chilling attempted sexual assault from one of the elders – to "exorcise" the evil spirits.
Finally, after starting another relationship with a girl – and this time facing a stony ultimatum from Mrs Winterson – Jeanette ran away from home. She slept in a friend's car, and then in a sympathetic teacher's spare room. The teacher encouraged her to apply to Oxford. The rest is history.
Many years later – and Winterson admits to skipping over the large middle chunk of her life – a long-term relationship with the theatre director Deborah Warner comes to an end and Winterson goes "mad". Realising that it is, in part at least, her own inability to balance and temper her craving for reassurance that has caused the split, she has what amounts to a serious breakdown and attempts suicide. A little later, and by now in love with the therapist Susie Orbach – who seems in some way to be the angel of stability and calm that Winterson deserves – she feels safe enough to start to follow the trail that has always both tempted and frightened her: the one that might lead to her birth mother. Pages, months and many legal and emotional tussles later, it does.
And here's where this book – which up to this point had been funny enough to make me laugh out loud more times than is advisable on the No 12 bus – turns into something raw and unnerving. It turns into something you need to read in private, simply because you can't tell what will happen next or what you'll feel about it (Mrs W, you were right all along). The idea at its core, that it's possible to get roughly halfway through your life and find that the things you thought you'd dealt with, laughed off, survived, have come back to wallop you hard – endanger you, even – feels urgent and universal. And Winterson, with her fierce impulse for honesty, seems determined to unpack it all at some personal cost.
All of this, you realise, is still very recent – it's current affairs, not history – and it involves real people. Some have their identities disguised and some don't. But if Winterson is open about others, she's also (typically) unsparing of herself, heartbreakingly so in fact. Her analysis of events feels swift and direct – barely processed at times. It does not make for an easy journey for the reader. It is very hard, for instance, to watch someone who clearly loves being alive as much as she does, deciding almost coldly to let herself die. And her response to meeting her real family – comically tentative, wary, needy, yet in crucial ways underwhelmed – is also bravely told. You catch yourself, breath held, desperately wanting there to be something good in it for her.
This book is a gamble, but then that's perhaps one of the less surprising things about it: Winterson has always been a risk-taking writer, instinctively tempering her own slightly bolshie directness with humour, compassion and kindness. All the same, I found myself feeling oddly protective of all these good people, the author included – hoping that their presence on these pages won't make them too vulnerable, hoping there won't be repercussions for anyone (hoping, in short, that the Daily Mail will stay away).
Of course, one of the book's queasiest ironies – and one you sense Winterson is fully aware of – is that it was Mrs Winterson who made her into a writer. By attempting to stunt her daughter's emotional and imaginative growth with fear and religion, she succeeded in doing the exact opposite. She created someone who learned to live in her head, and to love, trust and remember words: "Fuck it, I can write my own," was young Jeanette's thought as she watched her beloved books burn.
If this were a novel, you might leave it like that. But real life is a baggy old thing, never so straightforward, and one of this memoir's bizarrest moments – and most glorious contradictions – is the one where Mrs Winterson reads Jane Eyre aloud to a seven-year-old Jeanette, cunningly changing the ending as she reads, to have the hapless governess marry the sanctimonious St John Rivers. Megalomaniac passion-killer she might have been, but here was a woman who was clearly excited by narrative, who cared how things turned out, who was – surely? – fascinated by those unpredictable and dangerous things called books.
The triumph of this memoir is that, with understanding, intelligence and a verbal agility that leaves you in awe, Winterson dares, in the strangest way, to celebrate this. In fact its many sparkling contradictions are what make me love it most. As Winterson says when she realises that she doesn't like hearing her birth mother criticise Mrs Winterson: "She was a monster, but she was my monster."
Julie Myerson … ‘I need to be able to lose myself when I am writing.’ Illustration: Alan Vest
MY WRITING DAY
Julie Myerson: ‘I am a solipsistic maniac who can think of nothing but the book’
The author and columnist on her powers of concentration, the importance of Pilates and the trials of co-existing with an inquisitive tabby cat
Julie Myerson
Saturday 30 December 2017
Iwrote my first novel at evenings and weekends, with an office job, two babies and another one on the way. I also had debilitating back pain and often had to lie down on the floor between paragraphs. I now wonder how I did it (a husband untroubled by childcare is the honest answer). These days it’s all very different but it still feels like the biggest luxury, to be allowed to think, write and work exactly when and how I want to. The only non-negotiable is twice weekly Pilates: if I didn’t stretch my body seriously and regularly, I don’t think I’d be able to sit and write.
Otherwise, my requirements are straightforward: a desk, a good chair, a screen and a door that shuts. I do need quiet (right now the bell ringers are rehearsing at the church next door and it’s not ideal). I also need it to be daytime – I’ve never been able to write a coherent word after about 6.45pm.
What I don’t really need is for a tabby to sit on my desk and stare at me or pat the cursor with her fat furry paw, but I seem to have that anyway. But I do need calm, or the appearance of it. I have never found chaos creative. I need to be able to lose myself when I am writing, and I can’t do that if I’m even slightly anxious about what might happen next.
I wake up, have coffee, do my meditation and the Guardian quick crossword (often simultaneously, which is not good), put on a wash, wipe the kitchen counters, send my children some annoying texts and answer emails. Which sounds boring but it’s vital – I can’t sink into my writing until I feel there’s nothing else pending, no one and nothing else to worry about.
Once I start, my concentration is absolute. Nothing distracts me. All my working life I’ve had to set alarms to prise me from my writing trance and remind me that kids need picking up or appointments need to be kept. But if this makes it sound as if I work very hard, I don’t. In fact the first months of writing a novel always feel like a con. I’ll tell people I’m writing something – and I probably am, or trying to, or thinking about trying to – but the so-called writing is as likely to be happening in my head, on the bus, on the backs of shop receipts, in the bath, even while talking to someone who (wrongly) presumes they have my full attention.
Once I’ve started thinking about a novel, it’s as if I’m hyper-sensitised. I am curious, open, alert to anything and everything. I daren’t pass up a single random detail or idea, just in case it turns out to be relevant. But at this stage of writing, I’m still laughably unproductive. I’ll tread water for pages and pages, sometimes spending weeks on a couple of (very bad) pages or even paragraphs, only to delete, delete, delete.
I’d love to be one of those writers who can do a whole draft and then rewrite it better, but I can’t. The only way I can find the story is by writing. And unless the last page I wrote startles and excites me – unless it feels, actually, as if someone who’s not me has written it – then I can’t move on in any way at all.
And even when I do move on, it’s still unlikely I’ll have any idea of where the novel’s going. I follow my instincts, almost always in the dark. If I knew what the book was, I doubt I would write it. The need to write comes from not knowing. It’s like solving a problem. I only write in order to discover what I have to say.
The second stage, though, is ferocious. Now I am mad, distracted, terrible to live with, a solipsistic maniac who can think of nothing but the book. I used to be slightly appalled at how a novel would suck up all my energy – physical, emotional, everything – but I’m used to it now. During this period my family and friends are saint-like, as I duck out of meetings, forget to answer emails, ruthlessly cancel on people. I will write for hours at a time at this stage, staying at my computer sometimes until I am in physical pain. But still I can’t speak about what I’m doing or show it to anyone until I am satisfied, or at least no longer embarrassed by it.
I’m finishing a novel right now and am still at that final, brutal stage. It doesn’t help that it’s Christmas. My poor family. The tree is up and people will be getting presents, but only just.
In brief
Hours: seven or eight a day right now, then I fall apart Words: I’m a deleter. A good day ends with less, rather than more Cups of coffee: three; espressos with almond milk, but no more or I’m unmanageable Instagram posts: I’m a Colourpop fiend. When I’m sick of words, I make pictures!