What's got my attention this week #92
Books, podcasts, links and TV recs to get you through the weekend
SCROLLING
• This piece on the Gen X career meltdown strikes a lot of chords. (Gift link.)
• Love this interview with Carrie Coon. And this one with Bridget Christie.
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• The missing women of autism.
• This is a lovely piece by about her friend Clemency Burton-Hill, who suffered a catastrophic brain haemorrhage in 2020.
• Does luck exist?
• The New Yorker ran the first extract from Joan Didion’s therapy journals. I’m still not sure.
• I had never heard of Judith Viorst until this week, when I read two excellent posts about her. Firstly, the always fascinating Oldster questionnaire. Second, “at 94, I’m still worth looking at.”
• Should we be scheduling time to worry now?
• doesn’t want you to get your menopause info from Oprah.
• is grateful to her mother for going grey.
• Love ’s anatomy of her marriage.
• Remembering who you were back then.
• The 10 reasons men put women in asylums are still too familiar.
• Would you go 10,000 miles to visit a tree?
• The privilege of being lonely as a woman.
• “I’m terrified of losing memories of the people I love.”
• If your group chat is ruining your life, erm, leave?
• Nigella Lawson never brushes her hair, and nor do I. £
• God I love this piece about manic pixie dream dudes, .
• So, you want to be the hottest person in the care home?
• makes a fantastic case for eating cake.
(A note about the links: some are behind a paywall, but almost all (eg The New York Times, New Yorker, The Cut, and many, but not all, Substacks…) allow a few free articles if you register. Those that definitely don't are marked £.)
READING
Hunchback, Saou Ichikawa (translated by Polly Barton)
Shaka Isawa lives in a care home. She has severe spine curvature and uses an electric chair and ventilator. Her inner life is lived online, where she writes erotic fiction and tweets out her fury, believing her darkest thoughts are safe behind her nom de plume. Then a male carer discovers her online identity and offers her the chance to live out one of those thoughts. In just 97 gripping pages Hunchback is bold, funny and confronting. It’s honestly the most extraordinary book I have ever read. Saou Ichikawa was the first disabled author to win Japan’s Akutagawa Prize and is longlisted for the International Booker Prize. If she (and Polly Barton, whose translation is mindblowing) aren’t shortlisted, I will throw things!
• Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa is out now in paperback. You can buy it from amazon, The Shift bookshop on bookshop.org, Waterstones or your local indie.
WATCHING
Dying for Sex, Disney+ UK/FX on Hulu US
I haven’t seen this yet, so can’t vouch for it personally, but all the reviewers – even Rotten Tomatoes – seem to love it. And that never happens. So all signs are that this “darkly comic” tale of a 42-year-old woman who puts a bomb under her marriage and goes on a sexual odyssey after being told her breast cancer has metastacised is going to fill The White Lotus shaped hole in your/my life. Based on the hit podcast of the same name, in which Nikki Boyer and her best friend Molly Kochan discussed Molly’s cancer diagnosis and subsequent sexual quest, this stars Michelle Williams as Molly and Jenny Slate as Nikki. Williams is never not brilliant and, if you believe everything you read, Slate is “a phenom”. So, brace yourself for masturbation, menopause (how unfair is that?), S&M and bring a large box of tissues.
Not Watching: Holland (Prime). I love Nicole Kidman and I love Matthew Macfadyen. So what could go wrong? Or, perhaps, what could go right? I took one for the team and watched this so you don’t have to. Consider yourself 108 minutes richer.
LISTENING
• this week I have inhaled all six episodes of Broken Veil, a series of loosely interconnected paranormal stories that all centre around a haunted, hidden Essex. An actor goes for a medical check up at a place that doesn’t seem to exist. A standup plays a corporate gig in a Severance style anxiety dream venue, and then there’s the mysterious Station 14… I’m already chomping at the bit for another series. If you’re a fan of, for instance, Uncanny, this will be catnip.
AND ON THE SHIFT PODCAST THIS WEEK…
…my last guest of the season is the British daytime TV legend, Lorraine Kelly. Lorraine and I had a cuppa in Dundee and talked about life the universe and absolutely blimmin everything – from mums who keep you in your place, toxic people in telly and getting the sack on maternity leave to why she had to be interviewed about menopause on her show because no-one else would, the sheer joy of being a granny and why she doesn’t want to look like a boiled egg!
• What are you watching, reading and listening to this month? I’d love to know.
* A note: this post contains affiliate links, which means that a very small percentage of any sale goes to help fund The Shift. If it’s orange (or underlined if you’re reading in the app), it links! (But not all orange/underlined links are affiliates…)
The Anatomy of a Marriage piece is such a lovely companion to your essay about your wedding anniversary ❤️ thank you for sharing it.
Thank you for these updates. I see the new book about Joan Didion is getting good reviews. I only finished reading The White Album a couple of weeks ago and really enjoyed it. So I might venture towards this new publication. I have seen very good reviews for Hunchback in different places. I am currently reading Tommy Orange's Wandering Star. I really like his writing and have learned a lot about native American history and culture, in an accessible way through his books. Next to be read on my list is Tessa Hadley's The Part.