DIVA Literary Festival

It’s taken me a while to write this, to turn something huge into words that make sense. I think I’ve done an ok job of it.

 

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Ask The Passengers, and coming out

Ask The Passengers, by A S King

When my friend returned this to the library and discovered that I hadn’t read it, I asked her to convince me. This involved no more than the words “school”, “America” and “gay”, and the assurance that she’d loved it. I am easily swayed. I took it home with me that afternoon, and read it in two days. I was that annoying person walking down the road with a book because I just didn’t want to stop reading.

I was asked to write a guest review!

Remember my post about Stella Duffy’s Calendar Girl ? Well, it did pretty well, and Craig Sisterson, who runs Crime Watch: Investigating Crime From A Kiwi Perspective – a fantastic blog with a focus on authors from New Zealand – asked me to write a piece.

I had a ball writing it, and I put a different spin on it than my original post. I’m very pleased with it, so if you want to have a read, you can find it here.

 

 

“I just wanted to read my lesbian detectives novel in peace!” is not a sentence I would have happily said to my mum a year ago

Or, Calendar Girl by Stella Duffy

Stand-up comic Maggie has fallen for “the girl with the Kelly McGillis body”, a mysterious woman who can’t commit herself. Meanwhile, South London detective Saz is hot on the trail of a woman known only as “September”, who commutes between London and New York in a whirlwind of drug smuggling, gambling, and high-class prostitution. A murder brings Saz and Maggie and their respective mysteries together. Smart and sexy, Calendar Girl is a thriller high on attitude and eroticism.

Unbecoming – Jenny Downham

Three women – three secrets – one heart-stopping story. Katie, seventeen, in love with someone whose identity she can’t reveal.Her mother Caroline, uptight, worn out and about to find the past catching up with her. Katie’s grandmother, Mary, back with the family after years of mysterious absence and ‘capable of anything’, despite suffering from Alzheimer’s. As Katie cares for an elderly woman who brings daily chaos to her life, she finds herself drawn to her. Rules get broken as allegiances shift. Is Mary contagious? Is ‘badness’ genetic? In confronting the past, Katie is forced to seize the present. As Mary slowly unravels and family secrets are revealed, Katie learns to live and finally dares to love. Funny, sad, honest and wise, Unbecoming is a celebration of life, and learning to honour your own stories.

This is the third book from the YA Book Prize shortlist that I’ve read so far – I’m very proud of myself! The other two are The Lie Tree and The Rest Of Us Just Live Here. A group are shadowing it at school, so hopefully I’ll read a couple more before the winner is announced next month.

Fun Home – Alison Bechdel

I’m terrible at reading comics.

Flung out of space

‘What do they say makes a play a classic, Therese?’

‘A classic -‘ Her voice sounded tight and stifled. ‘A classic is something with a basic human situation.’

Book challenge #34 – A book with bad reviews

The Paying Guests – Sarah Waters

“For was that all, she thought bleakly, that love ever was? Something that saved one from loneliness? A sort of insurance policy against not counting?”

Book challenge #32: A book with antonyms in the title

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Jeanette Winterson

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world. Mrs Winterson objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story’s silent twin. There are so many things that we can’t say, because they are too painful. We hope that the things we can say will soothe the rest, or appease it in some way. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. Mrs Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent.

On bisexuality

“I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted — romantically and/or sexually — to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way and not necessarily to the same degree.” Robyn Ochs

I’m deviating slightly from my usual book theme today, and talking about something that is very close to my heart: bisexuality.