I cultivated a serious case of internet paranoia and abandoned my entire public internet persona, like a snake shedding a skin and wriggling off, half-naked, into the hedgerows for shelter;
I ceased to be a bookseller, as it was proving deleterious to my health;
I spent about half a year trying to restore said health to its pre-bookselling state (which is still not great, as health states go, but we work with what we’ve got and in my case that mostly constitutes garbage);
I obtained a gentle, sitting-down job as an admin human, which admittedly does require me to be human, but also permits regular work hours, weekends, public holidays, and more money (with which to buy books);
I started work on an exciting creative project with marvellous co-writer Carlota, more information to follow hopefully really soon;
I learned how to walk in heels.
More actually relevant content coming soon, but I wanted to check in! It’s been a difficult half-a-year at the Waverly place, but I’m crossing my fingers that the worst is over and I will be Properly Back with all due speed.
For the uninitiated — which I’m guessing will be a lot of you — The Deepwater Bride is a short story by Tamsyn Muir; it’s about Lovecraftian seer-women and eldritch nightmares with a penchant for Starbucks. And it is also somuchbetterand smarter than I just made it sound. Here be spoilers; tread carefully.
It was yesterday! I am not sure how you could have missed it, because it was excellent — such a lovely atmosphere in the shop, so many customers excited to talk to me about their experiences of Mockingbird and their hopes for Watchman. Plus, I got to hold down the store’s Twitter feed all morning. Nothing like 1500 unread tweets showing up on your computer in the space of five minutes to make you feel like a legitimate Social Media Pro.
If you came into Waterstones Oxford yesterday, thank you for making it so much fun! Here are some pictures from the day, to demonstrate what an excellent time we had:
In the interest of covering as much literary ground as possible, and clearing out a pretty heavy backlog of books I want to talk about, I’ve decided to start doing a regular feature of bitesize reviews and recommendations. It’ll feature three books at a time, and it’ll be called Waverly Reads a Thing because I am extremely creative when it comes to nomenclature, ask anyone. Of course, I’ll still be posting longform reviews and essays when it feels right to do so! But I think this will be a solid way of sharing books with you that merit recommendation, but don’t urgently make me want to hold forth at length.
The format is probably best explained through demonstration, so without further ado, here’s Waverly Reads a Thing round one: Continue reading →
When I was about fifteen, I picked up a copy of Miranda July’s short story collection, No One Belongs Here More Than You, in Paris’s famous Shakespeare and Company. My friend, who was much cooler and artsier and better suited to the Left Bank than awkward teenage me, insisted to me that I would love it — ‘it’s so real,’ she told me, ‘so insightful. You have to.’ So I did.
I didn’t love it. It was fine, and there were certainly individual lines and turns of phrase that stuck with me, but I wasn’t as compelled as I hoped I’d be. The protagonists, who I knew were meant to seem sensitive, came off as little more than self-absorbed and frustrating, incapable of overcoming their circumstances; there was no resolution for any of them, and it annoyed me. I read the collection once, set it aside, and chalked it up to my own inadequate tastes.
Obviously I’m not fifteen anymore. I reread the collection just this year, having unexpectedly loved The First Bad Man when I received a proof copy. The characters who seemed unjustifiably incapable seven years ago no longer aggravated me; instead, I found myself sympathising. As you get older, as the pace of your achievements starts to slow down and your expectations of yourself start to slip, I think you start to sympathise a little more with fragility. It becomes easier to connect to — for example — a middle-aged woman who develops a hopeless, lonely passion for Prince William and who is haunted by the prospect of an earthquake that will end the world, when you yourself have experienced a little more of life, and become a little more aware of how fragile you can be yourself.
My lovely proof copy!
July writes about people who are too soft for the world around them. She also — or perhaps just as a consequence — writes about strange, fraught interpersonal connections that ultimately turn out to be irresolvable, or unreturned, or never to be admitted at all. They don’t ever become anything that’s easy to pin down or define. What label could you attach to a relationship premised on life is easy with you here, and when you leave it will be hard again? What can you call the group of people who learn to swim without a swimming pool, lying on the floor kicking it loudly as if angry, as if furious, committing to that shared illusion all together? She doesn’t let anything be easy, or simple. Perhaps that is frustrating when you’re fifteen and things are simpler, in their trying fifteen-year-old sort of way. When you’re twenty-something and struggling to hold down a life, it is real. It is insightful.
Conclusions we can draw from this include ‘maybe my friend was just a bit prescient,’ or — perhaps more reasonably — ‘Miranda July is not for everyone.’ There certainly are people in the world who have their lives together; I know this because most of them seem to be Facebook friends with me. But for those of us who are still figuring it out a bit — for those of us who are still a little bit fragile in the face of a system that doesn’t always like us so much — I think there’s a lot of value in the kind of thing that July writes, and in the kind of person that July prefers to represent on the page.
No One Belongs Here More Than You is obtainable here, and you can find her novel The First Bad Man here. Miranda July haven’t always been on the best of terms, but it’s love, deep down; I’d recommend both.
The Waverly Place 