What's got my attention this week #84

Links and recs to get you through the weekend

This is the house that Demon Copperhead built. Called Higher Ground Women’s Recovery Centre, it’s how Barbara Kingsolver spent her royalties from Demon’s success. The woman is a total legend.

SCROLLING
• According to the New York Times, Gen X women are having the best sex. What d’you reckon? (Gift link)
• I can’t get the dead eyes of Bianca Censori on the Grammy’s red carpet out of my mind. This take by Naomi Fry is worth reading.
• Love this beautiful piece on the precarity of life by

Clover Stroud

.
• “My autism diagnosis felt like a eureka moment, but where’s the support?”
• Banking on capturing youth will eventually bankrupt you.
• Another granny takes on the patriarchy. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Monique El-Faizy

.
• The quiet rebellion of a little life.
•

Sinéad Gleeson

on Edna O’Brien and Blue Road. (Anyone else think she looks like Miranda July, or vice versa, in the opening pic?)
• Timing is everything, says

Tasmina Perry

and, damn her, she’s right.
• The importance of relational mobility.
• Joan Didion’s post-therapy journals are about to be published. Would you want your diaries published after your death? (Gift link)
• No Buy 25 is trending, but should we buy it? asks

Tiffanie Darke

.
• Peeing in broad daylight in a layby off the M4 – a divorce narrative.

Dr Lily Dunn

we salute you.
• Should we expect the women in Trump’s orbit to know better?
• Talking the madness and possibility of perimenopause with

Clover Stroud

last night. Thanks so much to everyone who came along. (Video)
• The woman who lives without money.
• As a professional houseplant-slaughterer I really enjoyed this by

Tove Danovich

.
•

Annie Macmanus

on taking up football (soccer) in her 40s has made me want to lace up my boots.
• ICYMI, yesterday’s newsletter is all about the youthification of women’s obituaries.
• Hell is other people chewing. Yes!
• The joys of stick nation.
(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 £.)

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READING

Old Soul, Susan Barker
On the face of it, Jake and Mariko have nothing in common except a missed flight at Osaka airport, but they soon discover they have lost loved ones in eerily similar ways. Before their deaths, both Jake’s friend and Mariko’s brother encountered a mysterious dark-haired woman who has crossed decades, generations and continents and yet never seems to age. (And, no, you haven’t guessed it already!) In two engrossing storylines, we follow Jake as he hunts down victim after victim to build a picture of the woman who links them, and “the woman” as she stalks her latest prey across the desert. Compelling, convincing, page-turning, beautifully written horror at its very best.
• Old Soul by Susan Barker is out now in hardback. You can get it at the bad place, or buy it from The Shift bookshop on bookshop.org instead.

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WATCHING

The Outrun, available to buy or rent on Prime or Apple TV+
Amy Liptrot’s memoir, The Outrun, about a woman returning home to Orkney to recover from alcohol abuse and depression, was one of my favourite books of 2017, so adapting it for screen was always going to be a big ask. Co-written by Liptrot and award-winning German director Nora Fingscheidt, the film stars, and is produced by, the always-outstanding, Saoirse Ronan. At 30, Rona (Ronan) is out of rehab and has swapped the wilds of East London for the considerably wilder climate of her youth. There she cold water swims, volunteers for the RSPB and attempts to process the genetic inheritance of her father’s bi-polar episodes and alcoholism, all while staying on the wagon. It’s a gruelling watch in places but also a beautiful, clear-eyed homage to the landscape Liptrot called home. My main concern was that much of Liptrot’s book is an introspective one-woman show, but this is more expansive and, anyway, Ronan is more than up to that challenge.

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LISTENING
• To the BBC podcast Diddy on Trial. 14 episodes of grim taking you through the allegations against “hip hop mogul Sean Diddy Combs”. For the life of me I don’t know why I started. Somebody stage an intervention.

AND ON THE SHIFT PODCAST THIS WEEK…

…for the last in my round up of archive episodes, I treated to myself to a rerun of my favourite conversation from last year. Before All Fours was published, to massive acclaim,

Miranda July

joined me to talk about her own trip off the oestrogen cliff, reimagining relationships as we get older, the menopause whisper network, outing herself as “no longer young”, getting out of the anxiety cul de sac and why ageing is “unexpectedly wild”.

The new season of The Shift podcast starts on Tuesday, get it wherever you get your podcasts!

• Good recommendations are hard to find! Please share the things you’ve loved watching, reading and listening to in the comments.

* 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, it links! (But not all orange links are affiliates…)

Image: Beth Spencer