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She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey review – the inside story of Weinstein and #MeToo [18 Sep 2019|06:30am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/18/she-said-by-jodi-cantor-and-megan-twohey-weinstein All about power ... the reporters who broke the Weinstein story give the full account of who talked, and how #MeToo began Three events define the #MeToo era. The first was the release, in October 2016, of the #Pussygate tape, on which presidential candidate Donald Trump was recorded boasting about his seduction technique: “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” A year later, the New York Times published a story about the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s decades of sexual aggression against both A-list actors and junior employees. (He lost his job, but still denies many of the allegations.) In the autumn of 2018, an academic called Christine Blasey Ford testified to a Congressional committee – and the world’s media – that the Republican supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had assaulted her at a drunken college party, in front of a male friend. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said. Kavanaugh sobbed openly, lied about small details, and denied the accusation. His nomination was confirmed. The #MeToo movement has a mixed record, and Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who broke the Weinstein story, embrace that complexity in She Said. Painstakingly researched, their account is less interested in Weinstein the Monster than the structures that enabled him to flourish. Continue reading... post comment

'We see with the brain': creating a comic book for blind people [18 Sep 2019|07:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/18/we-see-with-the-brain-creating-comic-book-for-blind-people-chad-allen-unseen Chad Allen explains how losing access to comics after becoming blind inspired Unseen, the first audio comic aimed at readers who see with their mind Comic books were not at the top of the list of the things that Chad Allen would desperately miss when he went blind, but they were certainly on there. Growing up in Rhode Island, a friend’s older brother had a huge collection of Marvel and DC comics, which the two younger boys would carefully remove from their protective sleeves to immerse themselves in the four-colour world of superheroes – especially Allen’s favourites, the Hulk and the Punisher. From a young age, Allen was dealing with some of the effects of what would develop into full-blown sight-loss: “It started off as night blindness, and if I came out of a movie theatre into the sunlight I wouldn’t be able to see for a while.” Continue reading... post comment

Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth review – the repercussions of childhood suffering [18 Sep 2019|08:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/18/will-and-testament-by-vigdis-hjorth-review Dark humour, drunken rants and dreams of escape in a bestselling autobiographical novel from Norway “It is terrible that someone who has been destroyed spreads destruction, and how hard that is to avoid.” There are three generations of destructive parents and children in Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament. The protagonist, Bergljot, was sexually abused as a child by her rich and powerful father, who once half excused himself by alluding to the terrible experiences of his own childhood. Now in her 50s, Bergljot fears that she too has been a destructive parent, and her daughter writes a moving letter to her grandmother and aunts telling them that her mother’s childhood has impacted on her own: “I’ve seen Mum as broken and distraught as a human being is capable of without dying.” The book was a bestseller when it was published in Norway in 2016, partly because readers recognised Hjorth’s own family in the tale of intergenerational destruction and seem to have been titillated by a story presented in the press as disguised autobiography. Hjorth’s sister was so offended by the depiction of their parents that she wrote her own more rose-tinted autobiographical novel, Free Will, and that became a bestseller as well. Continue reading... post comment

Top 10 novels about burning issues for young adults [18 Sep 2019|10:58am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/18/top-10-novels-about-burning-issues-for-young-adults From Black Lives Matter to the south London modelling circuit, the tangled mess of real life provides plenty of raw material for YA fiction Newspapers and novels – fact and fiction – are often seen as polar opposites. But as a writer of both, I have come to find that fiction and non-fiction are simply two sides of the same coin. My YA Nordic thriller, The Sharp Edge of a Snowflake, was inspired by two of the biggest news stories of last year and the fearless women behind them. In 2018, the journalist Carole Cadwalladr revealed that a British company called Cambridge Analytica had harvested the personal data of millions of Facebook users without their consent and used it to influence elections. Around the same time the #MeToo movement was gaining momentum. In 2018, the actor and activist Rose McGowan released her captivating book, Brave, in which she exposed the predatory misogyny within the film industry and told of how the most influential man in Hollywood sexually assaulted her. Continue reading... post comment

Year of the Monkey by Patti Smith review – memories of the magic and the mundane [18 Sep 2019|11:00am] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/18/year-of-the-monkey-by-patti-smith-review From looming political crisis to a leaky flat – a troubled year in the life of a great American punk poet At the start of 2016, Patti Smith’s friend the producer, manager and rock critic Sandy Pearlman was hospitalised after suffering a brain haemorrhage. She first met him in 1971 when he attended one of her performances during which she read poetry against a backdrop of feedback, courtesy of guitarist Lenny Kaye. Pearlman approached Smith after the show and suggested she front a rock band, but, as she recalls in her new memoir: “I just laughed and told him I had a good job working in a bookstore.” Later she took his advice and went on to make the landmark punk album Horses. Their friendship endured, leading her and Kaye to his bedside nearly 50 years later as he lay in a coma. “We stood on either side of him, promising to mentally hold on to him, keep an open channel, ready to intercept and accept any signal,” Smith writes. But the signal never came; six months later, Pearlman died. Her account of 2016 shows it was a difficult year all round. Along with the loss of friends, she is poleaxed by the rise of populism, the dirtiness of the US election battle and looming environmental catastrophe. She is also discomforted by her impending 70th birthday. And so, after a run of New Year gigs at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and a stretch back in her leaky New York flat, Smith engages in what she calls “passive wandering, a small respite from the clamouring, the cries of the world”. She travels to Arizona, California, Virginia and Kentucky. Continue reading... post comment

Stella Count shows gender bias in book reviews is changing [18 Sep 2019|06:00pm] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/19/nearly-half-of-all-book-reviews-in-australia-in-2018-were-of-works-by-female-authors Within six years of its introduction, nearly half of all book reviews in Australia in 2018 were of works by female authors Researchers have praised most Australian publications for reaching gender parity in their book review sections last year. Of published book reviews in Australia in 2018 49% were for books written by women, according to research published on Thursday by the Stella Count. Continue reading... post comment

Canadian author Graeme Gibson dies aged 85 [18 Sep 2019|06:35pm] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/18/canadian-author-graeme-gibson-dies-aged-85 Long-term partner of Margaret Atwood had dementia but continued to travel with her on book tour for The Testaments The Canadian author and conservationist Graeme Gibson has died at the age of 85. Gibson was the long-term partner of Margaret Atwood, and was with the novelist while she toured to promote her new book, The Testaments. Atwood said in a statement this afternoon that her family was “devastated by the loss of Graeme, our beloved father, grandfather, and spouse, but we are happy that he achieved the kind of swift exit he wanted and avoided the decline into further dementia that he feared”. Continue reading... post comment

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