I promised silly and I can’t deliver. I am sorry!! I tried so hard, several times, but sometimes silliness is out of my reach, particularly after a long day at work of customers being rude about my haircut or upset about the 10p bag charge. I am trying so hard to hold on to my whimsy, and I do think an in praise of silliness instalment is en route, but I used up July’s silliness ordering myself a label maker (to be fair, a tremendous joy) and internally monologuing about what I would say about other people’s haircuts if I was very rude.
Instead we are talking about time! And I am attempting to embrace the things that make substack substack instead of tinyletter, rather than mourning tinyletter, and so this time there are pictures. Is it a nightmare to read? Is it draining all the data in your phone? Is it a pleasure to scroll on the substack app but horrific in your email inbox? (If you don’t have the substack app I don’t recommend it, unless you miss twitter.) Tell me!
There are so many books that do interesting things with time - in Elliot Page’s memoir Pageboy he talks about non-linear ‘queer time’, jumping backwards and forwards in the chronology of his life, in The Missing Ingredient author Jenny Linford explores the role of time in food and flavour, Virginia Woolf wrote about the elasticity and subjectivity of time in Orlando (‘an hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second’), in The Voyage Out (‘the exercise of reading left her mind contracting and expanding like the mainspring of a clock’), the events of Mrs Dalloway takes place over a single day: the word ‘time’ split its husk; poured its riches over him.
I’m especially fond of fiction that takes place over a single day, and so we’re starting with The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya, a novel following two timelines - a 2010 Sicilian holiday taken by a novelist father & his teenage daughter, and then ten years later, the father at his daughter’s first play, about to find out the play is inspired by that holiday and - spoiler - it’s a very recognisable and not exactly a flattering portrait of him. That disastrous, hot afternoon at the theatre, while the daughter and her mother have an uncomfortable lunch together nearby, waiting for him to get out of the matinee, unfurls like a thriller, while the details of the holiday interspersed throughout serve as forensic evidence of a relationship imploding. Hamya’s first novel Three Rooms was brilliant, and reminded me often of Virginia Woolf, whereas The Hypocrite feels something different - perhaps thanks to humour? It is darkly hilarious, and sorry Virginia Woolf fans (of which I think I am, mostly?), but she doesn’t often make me laugh, and The Hypocrite did, on pretty much every page. It is brilliant.
Show Me the Bodies by Peter Apps is nonfiction, about Grenfell Tower, a 24 storey block of flats that went up in flames on 14th June 2017, aided by cladding ‘as flammable as solid petrol’, fire-doors that failed to self-close, no warning alarms - what Apps calls ‘the most serious crime committed on British soil this century.’ 34 days before Grenfell, Apps - journalist and Deputy Editor at Inside Housing - broke a story on the dangers of combustible cladding. It took this book to make me realise exactly how preventable a tragedy Grenfell was. Show Me the Bodies is structured with two timelines, time stamped chapters charting the way the 14th June fire unfolded, interspersed with chapters leading up to a disaster that was decades in the making, a result of deregulation and institutional indifference, leaving a community grieving and still waiting for justice. I don’t want to say too much about the opening of the book, but the way Apps frames the very start has stayed with me since reading as an example of the importance of well-written, well-researched journalism.
While visiting our friend Aoife in Mousehole recently we came across Grenfell Street, above. Underneath the street sign itself is a plaque that reads:
This sign remembers the 72 people, including 18 children, who perished in the fire. Unveiled by Grenfell families, it marks the solidarity between Cornwall and Kensington, with hundreds welcomed for respite by the sea, many hosted here in Mousehole.
Let a stranger turn into a friend!
Onen hag Oll - One and All
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel takes place over several days of a boxing tournament for teenage girls, and each chapter follows each fight - we meet two girls, by the end of the chapter there is a winner and a loser, and then the winners proceed, with the losers hovering around the edges, in the winner’s thoughts and memories. It’s an absolute masterpiece, conjuring such wholly formed characters so quickly and freshly over and over again, their teenage-ness in the the moment as well as running forwards in time - will they remember this fight when they are adults? Do they even still box? How long will they live, will they have children, will they fall in love? It’s an incredibly clever piece of storytelling, as well as being a completely compulsive read thanks to the page-turning quality to the fights. I can’t say enough good things about it, but I keep trying.
Earlier this summer I took a trip to Bristol to see Rita in conversation at Storysmith, where she spoke to bookseller Callum about Headshot and a little about her short story collection Belly Up too. It was such a brilliant, magical, surreal evening and I was incredibly impressed not just by the bookshop but by the bookshop customers, who were so friendly and lovely and full of good book recommendations? A credit to Storysmith! I don’t think any of them would’ve said anything about my haircut even if they hated it. Also - big fan of the chairs.
Wife by Charlotte Mendelson employs a similar structure to Jo Hamya’s The Hypocrite, and to similarly gut-churning nail-biting affect. The present timeline is a single day, marked with timestamps, and follows Zoe as she attempts to leave her appalling wife Penny. This is complicated, in a very real-life way - Zoe and Penny live together and have kids, so leaving an emotionally abusive (I would say, I don’t think Zoe ever uses those exact words?) marriage involves packing up some of a shared house, figuring out where the kids can be on the day (with Zoe’s parents, more on that later), a process eased by heroic friend Dawn who is determined to disentangle Zoe once and for all. There are further complications in more of a deliciously telenovela way - Penny’s ex, Justine, lives in their basement with Justine’s brother, Robin, and it is Robin who is ‘the Father’ to Zoe and Penny’s daughters, and all are involved in various elements of childcare and, horrifyingly, mediation. Between each scene from The Departure Day, we go back in time to the development of Zoe & Penny’s relationship - meeting at a faculty flute recital, while Penny is still with Justine, the removal of Justine, the return of Justine, and so on. Time collapses in on itself as we see repeated patterns from the past, relive good and bad moments from the relationship, and above all else, we get a sense of exactly how much of Zoe’s time has been sucked down the drain by Penny, how wrenching it is to try and get away - but also how incredibly, desperately important that she do so.
Following Zoe throughout The Departure Day is nightmarish - she has meetings with her ex(es?), run-ins with former friends who now think she is the devil, phone calls from her father saying her mother has a headache and therefore they can’t take the kids, can they drop them off later? (Those calls are the bits that really, REALLY stressed me out) - all while Zoe is trying to pack, load, and leave in a moving van. All of this while trying to move house!! SCREAM!!! I really enjoyed it, in the same way I enjoy arguments on reality shows, which is to say I’m entirely gripped but feel quite sick. It is basically a thriller. And made me think, more than once, how lucky I am to have my own gang of Dawns. May we all have at least one Dawn.
Last but not least, Orbital by Samantha Harvey is a very short novel that took me a very long time to read, it is incredibly rich and sprawling and kind of mind blowing, and follows a group of astronauts as they orbit the earth. They go about their tasks on the International Space Station, as one of them has just received news that their mother has died, and so all are reflecting on what they have left behind, what might be waiting for them when they come back, how they feel about coming back at all. The stretchiness of time in space features again and again - they try to track their days in 24hr cycles, but space has its own version, eternity looms constantly over fleetingly tiny lifespans. It’s beautifully written and feels, I think, quite hopeful about the future. I had been reading it for a long time in small chunks, and then I went to see a film I enjoyed very much called Fly Me to the Moon, a rom-com with elements of Mad Men, Hidden Figures & Set It Up, which added a dose of silliness and lightness to the concept of space that enabled me to finish Orbital in one sitting, without getting bogged down in too many thoughts. There we go. A bit of silliness after all.
Happy reading!
Elizabeth (she/her)
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*Time by Anastacia appears on her 2004 self titled album, one of the best albums of all time, in my opinion.