225. READ. LOOK. THINK.Rethinking a first novel, a misconception, give birth to yourself, a weird little freak, yellow bowls, perfect television.
READ.'I can be the father who goes away, and the mother who stays.' 'People romance about their children long before they are born; long before, and long after. They name them and rename them. They see them as their second chance: ‘a chance to get it right this time’, as if they were able to give birth to themselves.' 'One of my most eye-opening experiences as a working class person moving into educated and middle class spaces was the correction to my misconception that wealthy people are clever.' “Waking up in the morning, I was almost, like, I don’t know how to be profiled,” she said on the phone to me one afternoon. “There is no constitution there. I’m dissolute, or something. I was waiting for myself to come into focus enough.” “I don’t set out to make the audience like me,” he says. “Because my characters don’t know an audience is there.” Why your narrator should be a weird little freak. I finished last Woolf diary in its lovely new Granta edition. Devastating to see her become more hateful, critical and scattered towards the end and know her illness was taking the wheel. LOOK.Beautiful Melbourne style. Thinking how helpful these charming yellow bowls would be for food prep… Watched some great films over Christmas I felt I missed out on by not seeing in the cinema: PASSAGES (so good) AFTERSUN (Jesus Christ) SHIVA BABY (high tension) THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (such a charismatic lead). The latest season of SLOW HORSES is perfect television! THINK.“Some people like to run marathons. We like to do polyamory, complex relationship stuff. Sarah’s favorite activity for the two of us to do is couples therapy,” Nick says, smiling. She told me about one 14-year-old boy who, on the verge of tears, kept saying: “Women won’t love you if you’re poor – you have to be rich.” ‘As a general rule of thumb, the more Online you get about something, the more miserable that thing will make you.’ ''Profoundly personal as it is, diet acts as a sturdy bridge for the traffic among national identity, masculinity, and bodily purity.' Why right-wingers are so afraid of men eating vegetables. 'We are already living under a gender ideology: It is called the gender binary, and transgender people are hardly the only ones suffering from its crushing weight.' If quantitative easing was a “revolution without revolutionaries”, the spectacular online left formed an army of “revolutionaries without revolution”. ‘A common source of uninformed despair is when a too-brief effort doesn’t bring a desired result—one round of campaigning, one protest.’
Jess X READ.LOOK.THINK. is an email newsletter for writers and readers by London-based Australian author Jessica Stanley. Sent out every three or four weeks, each edition links to scores of essays, books, recipes, podcasts, interiors and more. Read A GREAT HOPE, my novel about a family (and love, and politics). Follow me on Instagram @dailydoseofjess.
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