So, sadly my mother died last week, swiftly and peacefully when it came to it. I’m not sure how I feel right now, except mostly relieved that she is at peace. I didn’t realize quite how upsetting I found it to see her in a situation that I knew she would absolutely have hated, had she been more aware of it. My family’s collective attention is now on the funeral, which I must admit I’m not looking forward to. I don’t even like funerals for people I don’t know that well. Still, it is a ritual to be experienced, and I always remember reading (though I forget where) that we put ourselves at the mercy of future events because we imagine them in isolation, informed only by our hopes and fears. In the event, there’s so much more going on and our own agency to hand and many factors we haven’t imagined working in mitigation. I like that thought.
My mother’s final illness has dominated this year, really, and reading has certainly suffered. February had the added obstacle of the hellish flu-cold that Mr Litlove brought back from a Saturday morning rowing outing. We are going to have to rethink this business of him leaving the house because he’s had a run of catching infections lately. One of the oddities of CFS was that it seemed to prevent me from creating snot. I’d have colds, but dry ones. Well, this bug not only broke a thirty-year duck but decided to spend three weeks making up for it. Perhaps it was just my sinuses being in shock, but it came with a headache that made me disinclined to read. Gosh I’m hoping this year improves. I have no need of triumph or celebration. All I want is the restful banal, just a few mundane months of nothing much happening, that would be great, please.
Anyway, the upshot of all this was complete failure in the Reading Indies challenge, which was a shame because I had a lot of plans, as per usual! I did pick up Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick and read the first couple of chapters. Now, let’s be clear, I think this is going to be a fantastic book. It concerns the author/narrator and her mother and their joint experience of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The mother caught it first and then the daughter developed it too – or possibly assumed her mother’s symptoms in a strange act of symbiosis – and this book recounts the hopeless tangle of diagnoses, of medical treatment (or lack of it), of pejorative psychological aspersions cast on them, and of their own relationship to each other. Hattrick does a brilliant job of writing from the center of this muddle in a way that makes you feel what it’s like to live with a debilitating condition that no one understands and many reject. She also manages to bring in the experiences of other women writers who suffered chronic illness like Virginia Woolf and Alice James, and does it so cleverly in a seamless way. So, I think it’s great, and it was far too good and evocative and accurate for me to read this particular February. I do intend to return to it when I’m feeling stronger.
There are a couple of books I will review shortly. I absolutely loved Anne Tyler’s Three Days in June, and was especially grateful for the sheer charm and compassion of her storytelling. I also read Sammy Wright’s Exam Nation with Mr Litlove. I have a great deal to say about this book but for now I’ll say only that I agreed wholeheartedly with its premise, but was extremely disappointed by its execution. I’m now reading Monsters; A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer and am finding it similarly mixed. It began with some interesting concepts but has now become very frustrating. It’s a look at cancel culture with particular regard to writers, filmmakers and artists and I sincerely hope it won’t turn out to be a wasted opportunity. But – for instance – after a long chapter berating male critics for taking their perspective to be universal and failing to understand the huge influence of their subjectivity, we’ve just had a long chapter on genius in which Dederer has made a ton of unsubstantiated generalisations about what genius is, what it does, how it behaves. I disagree with a lot of them – not least that women can’t be geniuses, um, hello Virginia Woolf? – and am mildly gobsmacked that she doesn’t feel the need to own this understanding as entirely subjective. The bad behaviours that men adopt are STILL bad behaviours when women do them. I’m finding the book generally to be a lot of opinion and not much evidence. Ah well, we shall see.
What I have been reading a lot of lately are books I won’t be reviewing here. I craved sheer comfort and listened to a compilation of BBC dramatisations of Lord Peter Wimsey novels (Murder Must Advertise, The Nine Tailors, Gaudy Night, Busman’s Honeymoon). Then I moved onto another compilation of Brother Cadfael mysteries. I haven’t read these since I was a teenager but have been finding their uplifting, positive spirituality to be a great solace. I’ve been grateful to have this comfort.
Finally, new books have, of course arrived.
Five nonfiction titles, all about writers writing apart from Bound by Maddie Ballard, which I came across in a brilliant review by Karen. It concerns dressmaking, at which my mother was a pro, and which I’ve recently taken up myself. Looking forward to reading all of these in better, easier months ahead.