Published in the Sunday Times
If you need to find me, it will be under a pile of books. I have TBR (to be read) piles for days, weeks, years. TBR piles everywhere – on my desk at work and especially in my home: in the closet under the stairs, the lounge, dining room, my bedroom and loads in the attic. My housemate grumbles that it’s a fire hazard. Mostly though, he adds his own books to the piles and buys more shelves.
Nothing gives me more pleasure than to crack open a new spine. I read in batches – about four books at a time. Depending on length and if they are holding my interest, I can finish reading most of them in about two weeks.
Patterns emerge. Right now, I am digging more non-fiction out of the piles with maybe one solid novel that has received great reviews. The novel I’ve just finished devouring is a debut called Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson. A book one calls simply delightful, set in a golden wash of Los Angeles, it’s about crotchety reclusive author Mimi (a Harper Lee-like character who has only written one award-winning novel decades ago and now has to write another to get out of debt), her eccentric but adorable nine-year-old son Frank, and the responsible and earnest Alice who is sent by the publishers to make sure Mimi does write the next opus. It’s a warm and friendly book, with characters you want to get to know.
The non-fiction books I seem drawn to are memoirs written by women. Some are life-affirming stories about how they overcame adversity. In From Whiskey to Water, Sam Cowen talks about how she is an alcoholic and how she has been sober for more than 14 years.
One of my favourites this year is It’s Okay To Laugh by Nora McInerny Purmort. It looks at first like a misery memoir but it’s fun, funny, real and yes, it is an awful story about how she meets the man of her dreams and they find out that he has incurable brain cancer.
Then there are the books about the author’s personal history – a slice of life that tells of a particular time. A standout is Margo Jefferson’s Negroland, in which she writes about the world she comes from – the black elite in Chicago.
A column in The Guardian referred to current memoirs by women as female confessionals, a form of navel gazing.
I heard recently that we are living in a post-truth era. Maybe there are so many of these memoirs written because we are seeking out truths that are hidden behind the soppy, happy Facebook photos or the shouting news headlines. Maybe it is escapist reading and, more than ever, we need to be inside a book, in another person’s world.
Follow Jennifer Platt @Jenniferdplatt
Book details
- Be Frank with Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson
EAN: 9781782399179
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- From Whiskey to Water by Sam Cowen
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EAN: 9781920601720
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- It’s Okay to Laugh by Nora McInerny Purmont
EAN: 9780349410128
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- Negroland by Margo Jefferson
EAN: 9781783783021
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