Elizabeth Strout (2016) Olive Kitteridge Having read (and reviewed) Olive, Again , Anything is Possible and My Name is Lucy Barton in the last few months, Olive Kitteridge is the best Elizabeth Strout novel I’ve read. Some authors, most authors—myself included—tend to write the same story again and again. Different haircuts, shiny shoes, but the same characters appearing again, renewed. From writer to reader there needs to be an emotional...

I love writing that takes you on multiple journeys - that's just one reason I've chosen these two wonderful pieces from fabulous choices this week. Story of the week goes to Parson Thru and his atmospheric wander across time: https://www.abctales.com/story/parson-thru/buses Poem of the week is full of startling images, ideas and emotions, a woderful piece from Noo: https://www.abctales.com/story/noo/music-binds Here's the inspiration point:...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000frcl/storyville-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-porn-superstar I missed the first few minutes of this. I expected to see (not that I watch porn) blonde hair and silicon breasts and a solid arse so big it would have shamed a Kardashian and housed half of dancing Africa with bongo drums. Instead I got this guy, who called himself Jonathan Agassi and he was in Berlin. He dressed down to go out in a pair of tight-...

This was one of Bob’s book, I inherited. The second evangelic one I’ve read that somebody obviously had given him. A message inside the flyleaf: ‘Be Inspired!’ I guess Bob was looking for something. We all are. I had to have a coming out party, when people found out—yes, I was a writer. And yes, a second coming out party when I admitted I believed in God—well sometimes, more often than not, but not very often. Ned Flanders in The Simpsons is the...

Olive Kitteridge aged 83 (or 84, I remember her telling ‘The Poet’, but memory is fallible is a theme here, so I’m in good company) is brash, outspoken, abrasive. All those adjectives we can associate with the orange-haired monster in the Whitehouse—those are more Olive’s words than mine—but Olive, a fictional creation of Elizabeth Strout is a human figure because she never stops questioning others or herself. To be human is always to be plural...

It gets harder and harder to make these weekly picks, because there's just so much good stuff on the site at the moment. After much deliberation, Story of the Week goes to the first part of Drew Gummerson's new series 'The Aquarium'. Splendid, rambunctious writing, amazing characters and some laugh-out-loud moments. In other words, exactly what you'd expect from this author. And it comes with a splendiferous Louis Armstrong clip: https://www...

I was shocked—well, that’s the wrong word, but I can’t think of the right one—that Deborah Orr was dead. She’s the same age as me, or would have been— Motherwell: A Girlhood was a message from beyond the grave. She died in 2019. She came from Motherwell. The title is a dead giveaway. And there’s a whole stack of her achievements listed on flyleaf with a picture of her, a haunting picture, in retrospect. Look at the cover image and, in contrast,...

I’m reading the last bit of Deborah Orr's , autobiography, Motherwell: A Girlhood . In many ways John Wilks, should read, According To The Dandelions : A Boyhood. I trade in the nostalgia game so recognise the junk and faux gold that some writers sell. I can sift through the rubbish (lots of it written by yours-never-truely). But poetry scares me a bit, to paraphrase Stephen Mulrine’s The Coming of the wee Malkies . ‘Haw missis, whit’ll ye dae...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8mtV4kTAPU ‘You’d be late for your own funeral’—I plan to be on holiday, somewhere nice when it takes place—anyway, here I was, struggling up Mountblow hill when the hearse and cortege passed. Flowers in the back that spelled out the word ‘DAD’. Jimmy was the father of seven kids, countless numbers of grandkids and three great-grand kids and I couldn’t even remember his second name. Me and names are a car crash...

Anyone walking along the riverside of the Limmat might have picked her out; a pretty girl of about twenty, whose maroon-looking lipstick accentuated her wan complexion. Her arm, bent at the elbow and carried at an awkward angle, might have given pause for thought; her fist, balled up into a permanent clench, was concealed between the buttons of her expensively cut overcoat. An attentive eye might even have noticed the small spattering of blood...