I tried out the audio function on Substack. If you like it let me know! If you don’t, well I guess the analytics will deliver that message. I think to listen to it you have to click on the headline ‘stories we need’ and it takes you to the Substack page for the post and you can click on the triangle there and it plays. I’m not going to be doing any tech stuff adding it to any podcast platforms because I hate work. So if the experiment fails we’re not going back. That’s a Lost reference for you.
I am a mostly digital device reader, which is seen as a crime to many. But I have moved house a lot and I find the physicality of books really difficult. Blame the hardback version of The Goldfinch. It was my book club’s read one month in 2013, I think, and I was getting the Dart to work from town every morning. I would walk to the station from Stoneybatter. It was a long journey to cart a brick of a book. Then I’d only progress a page or two by the time I got a seat, as the train raced along the licking grey-blue bay after saying goodbye to workers at the usual suspect stops.
This week as people post about their plans to stave off the inevitable scratching the walls feeling, I felt guilty about my reading habits. Lush hardbacks sinking into marshmallow duvets or resting on molasses stained tables made me feel a bit dirty. I am a shitty consumer. (However, here’s one fabulous local history book about Tipperary you can buy from a local bookshop in Tipperary.)
But then again I’m not in the mood for new stories. I want the old, the familiar which reveals itself again and again. Stories which may remain technically the same, but then a changed perspective, a new heartbreak since the last time you visited, can alter the experience. It’s like how the Baroness in The Sound of Music assumes the position of Most Interesting Woman in this Movie as you age into womanhood. Gritty resistance narrative sequel please.
I believe the path to true enlightenment involves being able to, metaphorically speaking, drive in the dark with a blindfold on. So don't feel bad about not posting the 50 new books you bought. Reread the stories you love and need and make you gasp still.
The part in the book within the book within the book in The Blind Assassin where they escape and ride? Very much a necessary reread in these trying times of physical distancing. The part in American Wife where Alice confesses she did not vote for her husband? That kind of private truth-telling you can cling to as you see someone you enjoy behave like a dickhead during the one time in our lives we have been asked to pause our western individualism. Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels are not just clever little puzzles. The entire series culminates in pages which address the human cost of violence, the ask of loving someone else and metaphysical poetry. I remember finishing Busman’s Honeymoon as a teenager during a long and lonesome Irish summer, immediately going downstairs to my family home’s kitchen and sitting at the oil-cloth covered table opposite my mother and sister and crying about the beautiful book I just read. In this memory, the sunset spills from the open front door into the kitchen across moss green fake-tiled lino.
Cling to the stories, fake or real, that you need.
P.S. If you want to help a creative endeavour in the coming weeks, I’ve promised this anthology an essay. It is called So Hormonal and is being funded on Kickstarter. For £15 you will get a copy of the book. Click please. I’m focusing on male scientists and female bodies. It’s taking shape.
Stories we need