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Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson review – heartbreak and joy [15 Feb 2020|07:30am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/15/red-at-thebone-by-jacqueline-woodson-review The repercussions of a teenage pregnancy are felt down the generations of an African American family In US author Jacqueline Woodson’s haunting novel, a 16-year-old girl’s coming-of-age party prompts an avalanche of memories for her middle-class African American family. Melody is smart, pretty, private school privileged and much adored by her father, Aubrey, and proud grandparents, Sabe and Po’Boy. Melody is also the product of a teenage pregnancy that has left her estranged from her mother, Iris, who chose the distance of college in Ohio over nappies, baby bottles and the domesticity of her parents’ Brooklyn brownstone. The baby bump deprived Iris of her own introduction into society: now she must look on as her daughter descends the stairs wearing the white dress she was not permitted to wear and is serenaded by an orchestra playing an instrumental version of Prince’s “Darling Nikki”. On a spring day in 2001, while Melody and Malcolm, her childhood friend and date, swirl around the dance floor, so do the memories for the teenager and the key players in her life. Melody can’t help but observe that her relationship with her mother is full of regrets and thorns. “That afternoon, the years that separated us could have been fifty – Iris standing at the bottom of the stairs watching me. Me looking away from her. Where was I looking? At my father? My grandparents? At anything. At anyone. But her.” Continue reading... post comment

Fighting the tyranny of ‘niceness’: why we need difficult women [15 Feb 2020|08:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/15/feminism-feminists-tyranny-niceness-complexity Today’s thumbs-up, thumbs-down approach to feminism is boring and reductive. It is time to embrace complexity Difficult. It’s a word that rests on a knife-edge: when applied to a woman, it can be admiring, fearful, insulting and dismissive, all at once. In 2016, it was used of Theresa May (she was “a bloody difficult woman,” Ken Clarke said, when she ran for Tory leader). A year later, it gave the US author Roxane Gay the title for her short story collection. The late Elizabeth Wurtzel took “in praise of difficult women” as the strapline for her feminist manifesto in 1998. The book’s main title was, simply, Bitch. The word is particularly pointed since it recurs so often when women talk about the consequences of challenging sexism. The TV presenter Helen Skelton once described being groped on air by an interviewee while pregnant. She did not complain, she said, because “that’s just the culture that television breeds. No one wants to be difficult.” The actor Jennifer Lawrence told the Hollywood Reporter that she had once stood up to a rude director. The reaction to the incident left her worried that she would be punished by the industry. “Yeah,” chipped in fellow actor Emma Stone: “You were ‘difficult’.” Continue reading... post comment

The Bilingual Brain by Albert Costa review – the science of learning [15 Feb 2020|09:01am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/15/the-bilingual-brain-albert-costa-review Why it’s never too late to learn another language ... a witty, charming guide to opening our minds A third of the way through this absorbing and engagingly written book, Albert Costa describes a family meal: “The father speaks Spanish with his wife and his son, but uses Catalan with his daughter. The daughter in turn speaks Catalan with her father but Spanish with the rest of the family, including the grandmother, who only speaks Spanish though she understands Catalan.” It’s what Costa calls “orderly mixing”, and, depending on which restaurants you visit, a common enough situation: everyone is bilingual here, but the language used changes according to who it is directed at. Given that everyone at the table understands both languages, would it not be easier and less confusing if everyone just chose one language and stuck to it? That sounds logical, but the bilingual mind doesn’t work that way. If you do not believe it, Costa suggests “having a conversation with a friend in the language you do not usually use and see how far you get”. Not far, he observes. And Costa should know – not just because he was an expert in language acquisition (he died last year), but because the family he is describing is his own. One of the reasons this book makes sense of its complex material – from basic code-switching tests to the latest technology in brain imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation – is that Costa is such a charming and witty guide. This is a rigorous book about complex science, and much of it could have been intractably technical or riddled with statistics. But Costa has a winningly informal style, a deadpan wit, and mixes laboratory findings of cognitive neuropsychology with examples from everyday life, TV programmes, sports and politics. In one set of cognitive tests, he shows how people are more risk-averse in their second language, and more gung-ho in their first. Costa suggests the practical applicablity of such research by advising us to visit casinos where people speak a language we are less comfortable in – it substantially reduces the likelihood of our going home shirtless and barefoot. Continue reading... post comment

Adults by Emma Jane Unsworth review – life in the Instagram age [15 Feb 2020|11:58am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/15/aduts-emma-jane-unsworth-review This smart, funny novel about social media and modern romance from the author of Animals mixes humour with grief and betrayal Early on in Adults, protagonist Jenny agonises over a caption for an Instagram post of a croissant. She auditions various phrases and hashtags, messaging her long-suffering friend Kelly for her input. Eventually, she posts the photo, and the waiting begins: “It’s like that conundrum of the tree falling in the empty forest,” Jenny muses. “Does it make a sound if there’s no one there? If you put something on social media and no one likes it, do you even exist?” It’s a scene that will make many readers wince, in a novel that acutely captures the anxious ruminations of a life lived online. Jenny is 35. She works for an online magazine, Foof – “as awful as it sounds” – and has a famous photographer boyfriend. She is obsessed with Suzy Brambles, an Instagram influencer whose “kickboxing lessons and almond eyes” induce compulsive envy. She has friends on whom she depends rather too much, and neglects and mistreats Kelly in particular. Jenny gets sucked into ever more frenetic online dramas, and her social media habit begins to have a corrosive effect. When her relationship breaks down, her mother Carmen – a spiritual medium, something of a drama queen, and a patchy but warm caregiver – comes to live with her, with mixed results. Continue reading... post comment

‘I’ve come to rely on the kindness of strangers’ | Marina Lewycka [15 Feb 2020|02:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/15/marina-lewycka-dysarthria-illness-rely-kindness-strangers There’s probably a funny side to dysarthria, says the prizewinning author, but she hasn’t found it yet My new book is called The Good, The Bad and the Little Bit Stupid, and when I start to talk about it, I can tell from the patiently sympathetic look on people’s faces that they think the last bit applies to me: little bit stupid. You see, it takes me a long time to get the words out, and by the time they are out they have been thoroughly mangled by my uncoordinated lips and tongue. It is called dysarthria, and it’s one of the effects of my condition, along with loss of balance so extreme that I stagger about like a drunk, and sometimes fall down with a crash. If only I could really be drunk: that would be some consolation, and it would wear off. There is probably a funny side to this, but if so I can’t find it – I’m concentrating too hard on staying upright. Continue reading... post comment

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