Some of the things I have enjoyed lately.

Including a couple of things I didn't expect to enjoy.

Hello! Apologies for no newsletter last week - I have been on vacation. I’m about to start a really intense two months of book tours and promotion and I decided - for once - to go into it properly rested. It has been heavenly, even if the news from afar has looked pretty hellish. So I thought I’d quickly share a few book and film highlights while I’ve been offline.

Babygirl

I know this film has been much talked-about, and there was a perverse part of me that was reluctant to watch, but oh my, I’m so glad I did. I know much of the discussion around Nicole Kidman tends to centre on her face these days, but every now and then she knocks it out of the park with a performance that reminds you why she is up there in the A-list. I don’t want to say too much about the plot, as one of the most enjoyable aspects of the film is having no idea where it is headed. But Kidman’s performance is brave and exposing, and honest about the complexities of female desire, with all is weirdness and potential ugliness. There is an also a scene in which her daughters mock her Botox habit, which felt very meta. The director, Halina Reijn, was unfamiliar to me, but her direction was so interesting too - the film has a dreamlike quality, you constantly feel a little off-kilter, perhaps reflecting Kidman herself, and the sound design shifts so that sometimes you are overwhelmed by the background noise. The film opens with a sex scene and I said out loud within twenty seconds: “this is a female director” simply because it was so much not about the male gaze. No tits! No arse! So much of it had to be experienced through Kidman’s expressions, rather than an invitation for us to stare at her body. The male lead - possessor of a curiously blank features - doesn’t even get a backstory. The script trusts the viewer’s intelligence, and leaves you with a lot to think about, very little of which is spelt out. But it is Kidman’s performance that I was still thinking about this morning; there are a couple of moments where the camera holds on her in the way that it did in Birth, where the camera stayed on her face for an astonishing two minute scene, and so much is conveyed by almost nothing. It reminded me of the book Three Woman by Lisa Taddeo - you will either love this or hate it. I am firmly in the former camp.

Everything’s Fine by Cecilia Rabess

I picked up this book in my local bookstore on the way back from somewhere just because the blurb appealed to me. And now I’m surprised I haven’t heard of Rabess before. This is a romcom, under which lie the darker themes of racism, class and economic differences as a barrier to success, the dehumanising effects of working for a brutal corporation and whether it is possible for someone so different from you to ever truly understand you. It is so acutely observed that I kept wincing. There were moments where I could not put this book down and had believed I was in for an ultimately fun ride, complete with unexpected meet cutes, overheard obstacles to love, friendship groups who are rooting for or against our star-crossed lovers. But then the ending threw me. In the same way that I have often said that I don’t think Me Before You would have been half as memorable had it gone for a different ending, then so did the ending of this book leave me thinking about this couple, their futures, the possibility that one of them was sleepwalking towards a catastrophic loss of self. Highly recommended.

All Fours by Miranda July

Yup, another cultural event I was reluctant to come to because it had been so heavily trailed. But my best friend told me I had to, and I listened to it on audio, read by the author herself, and her curiously flat tones gave it an edge I don’t think I would have got from print. This is another study of a woman on the cusp of middle age and simultaneously teetering right on the edge, and while there are elements of this story that make my toes curl a little (the non-binary six year old, the relentless self-obsession), there is so much good stuff about what it is to be a woman at this crossroads. One elongated section, in which the author bemoans the discovery that she has passed the point where any man she fancies will ever look at her with desire again (plot twist: she’s wrong) is particularly beautifully thought out. I can’t even begin to list the craziness in this book - the 20k dollars spent renovating a motel room she will move out of in three weeks, the posting of a dance routine on instagram in the hope that her would-be young lover will see it, the chair with CALL ME left in a park - but in the madness there is a raw honesty you don’t see portrayed often, and an explanation of the logic that brings the protagonist to the lowest of low places. So that at all tines the crazy seems pretty much reasonable and sometimes even understandable.

The Names by Florence Knapp

This one isn’t out until May, but I suggest you put it on pre-order. This is a high concept book - a kind of Sliding Doors in which the fate of a family shifts according to what Cora, an abused young mother, decides to call her baby son. We see all eventualities. Now, I’m not sure I would pick up a book based on that description, so all I can say is this beautifully written, and wise and tender first novel is an utter original. And it shows with startling clarity what happens when violence passes down the family line; and how nobody - even the perpetrator - is spared from the cost.

That’s it for now! Do post your thoughts if you have consumed any of the above.

Jojo xx