Tag: Autobiography

And… A memoir of my mother

Isabel Adonis is an artist and writer based in North Wales. I first got to know her work as an artist when The Weavers Factory gallery held an exhibition of her show Scraps, Patches and Rags in 2021. The works in the show explored meanings of ‘home’, a theme that is also a strand in And… A memoir of my mother. Here, Isabel reflects on her childhood and her mother’s place in it, alongside an examination of what ‘home’ meant to her mother. It’s a book about fragmentation and division, about how society tries to constrain individuality, and how the search for the true self is almost impossible.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 5

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London

Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse is more than the book I was expecting it to be. I thought it was going to be an examination of city streets and public spaces and how they welcome or exclude women, of a similar ilk to Leslie Kern’s Feminist City. It turned out to be more like Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City. Which is fortunate, because I loved Laing’s book and hated Kern’s. Elkin blends personal memoir with the stories of other women who have worked things out through walking and sought anonymity in city streets across the world. It gave me a lot to think about. This one’s going to be a long one – make yourself a brew.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 3

Strong Female Character

Strong Female Character is the autobiography of Fern Brady. I love Fern Brady. If you don’t know her, she’s a comedian from Bathgate in West Lothian, Scotland. I first encountered her on the Wheel of Misfortune podcast that she created with co-host Alison Spittle. I loved her blunt humour. I loved her even more when she appeared on Taskmaster and wrote a song about why she should be crowned Queen of the Taskmaster house. Her autobiography explains how she came to be the strong female character of the title. My love for her has increased now I’ve read her book. The telling is raw in its honesty, as is Brady in her comedy.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4

In Case of Loss

In Case of Loss is a collection of essays by Lutz Seiler, a German writer best known as a poet. It contains the kind of writing that grabs me completely from the off and makes me wonder how some writers can do that while others take a while to warm up to, or show the mechanics of the writing process too clearly. Seiler, it feels to me, just writes. He won’t, of course. He will hone and craft and weigh each word, but the reader never knows it.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 1

All Creatures Great and Small

All Creatures Great and Small brings together the first two James Herriot vet books, If Only They Could Talk and It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet, plus three chapters of Let Sleeping Vets Lie. It’s the first in a series of five volumes that gather together all eight of the Herriot books. This first volume recounts the fictionalised life of author Alf Wight, a recently qualified vet getting to grips with practice in the Yorkshire Dales.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 15

Hometown Tales: Highlands and Hebrides

Hometown Tales is a book series from the Orion Books imprint of Weidenfield & Nicolson. There are eight books in the series, each pairing a new writer with someone more established from the same region.

I bought the Highlands and Hebrides volume at a Mull Historical Society gig in 2018, because one of the two stories it contains is by Colin MacIntyre, the musician and writer who records under the MHS moniker. I’d read his novel The Letters of Ivor Punch not long before and enjoyed his fictionalised rendition of his home.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 2

No One You Know: Strangers and the Stories We Tell

Jason Schwartzman is a writer of creative nonfiction. I can’t recall where I first encountered his writing, but I do recall thinking it was the other Jason Schwartzman, the one who acts, and being surprised by how well that acting Schwartzman wrote (I know, he’s a screenwriter as well, it’s called humour). I  realised it wasn’t the actor when I found him on Medium and read his bio. I followed him on Twitter, back when I was on there. I liked his eye on the world, the way he interacted with strangers, and how he wrote about his encounters. I was thrilled when his book No One You Know was announced, tried to buy a paper copy from the publisher, and was disappointed when they sent my money back to me because they weren’t publishing in the UK. Eventually, I got a copy on Kindle, and it was worth my persistence.

Although I had already read some of the pieces in this collection, it was good to re-encounter them set loosely in context with other works. The book is structured into ‘chapters’ – some of these are groupings of stories on a theme, others are longer single pieces. The chapter titles obliquely reference what is going on in the stories.

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Posted on by Jan Hicks 4