Activity

[...] I vowed not to give or lend him any more books after that and whenever he asked me what I was reading subsequently I would answer most mellifluously, ‘Something that you’d find very dull but that I happen to like a great deal.’ And we’d both laugh at that, which was better than the air turnin…

[...] Showalter’s study argues that cultural notions about how women ought to conduct themselves have made women mad – a point of view I shared, though in a more nascent unspecified form. It was just a feeling really. As I read on this feeling soon began to deepen and darken emphatically and as it …

I liked flicking through them, seeing all the long serried German words

when I was that age had none of the clarity and assuredness of Sagan’s work, they were autotelic and inscrutable and quite often when I read back over them I didn’t understand them at all

[...] Strange to think but when I first wrote the tale I hadn’t yet read a single word by Italo Calvino, Jean Rhys, Borges, or Thomas Bernhard, nor Clarice Lispector. I had read Of Mice and Men, and Lolita, and ‘Kubla Khan’, and The Diary of a Young Girl. I had not yet read The Go-Between or Wuthe…