The Obsessive Diary

I’ll be honest with you. I’m pre-pub stressed. Alisa Kennedy Jones and I jumped on a zoom last night and I said, “I’m apologising in advance for how annoying I’m going to be between now and book launch.” She’s busting a gut to get everything happening at the right time and in the right order and I’m trying really hard to trust in god and tie up my camel. Tying up my camel, I’m good at. Trusting in god, not so much. I was chatting with PG earlier this week who also has a book coming out and he said he hates the pre pub months, which was reassuring to hear, him being so experienced. I want to bury my head and run away and move onto the next and wave a magic wand. Which is funny because I’m going to bet there are writers reading this who’d give their eye teeth to be in my position and can’t see what the fuss is about and why aren’t I just up to my neck in enjoying it? Which is what EC said when I moan-cried to her and of course she’s absolutely right. *continues crying and moaning.

Can’t remember Monday at all. Tuesday I went to Bruton to stay with Margaret who’s helping me with the cottage out in France. Another mountain out of a molehill situation when I needed hand-holding through a momentous IKEA order involving beds and linen and cutlery and lamps. A few micro naps later we went with B to dinner - by coincidence all of us wearing variations on green, white and pinstripes - to celebrate early Margaret’s birthday, and devoured plate after plate of dishes so small and delicious we became hysterical; like the meeting of the green-white-stripes coven intent on losing their s**t over strips of tender venison and beetroot hot with horseradish.

To London on Wednesday, a three hour drive that required coffee, and logistics of packing for a couple of days here before the train to Wales today - I have to hurry this and get up and go. Breakfast meeting with SM yesterday in Coal Drops Yard - my lord that woman’s brain is a wonder, I could swim in it forever. She’s a powerhouse.

Lunch with D & D & their son M just returned from Paris. So lovely, and things delivered from VO. These friendships we build. They are precious.

Went straight off to meet JD for a walk along the river - he’s dog sitting Pickles who could only see joy in her little silken head and know love in her soft, bitey mouth.

Home to my temporary bed in White City where my phone decided to freeze and I had to run across the road to the Apple Store in my pyjamas for a young person to press a few buttons and get it working again. Stress zoom with Alisa. De stress watch of more episodes of Detectorists. Sleep. I had better get my s**t together and get up. It’s Day 1 of Kit de Waal ‘s 6 month writing course and I’m off to Gladstone Library. The joy of sitting in class again. The relief of handing over responsibility. Teach me. I will learn.

Eleanor

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So he’s been arrested. I might have been the last person in the UK to hear this, my day being spent well away from ticker-tape streaming breaking news and anything resembling The State of Things bar the small and flighty references made by me and P as we walked in the woods, marvelling at moss.

I’ll start at the beginning.

It’s reading week and the farm has been peopled by a herd of Yoot, friends of B arriving by train and bus and car. In the run up I did a lot of shopping, three goes at the supermarket knowing I couldn’t carry it all at once. The freezer groaning, the fridge lit up, the larder toppling, my waking brain full of casseroles and soups. Were there vegetarians? Who doesn’t drink milk? None of this in my day business; I remember my mother catering for a summer house array of celiacs and Hep C’s, vegans and dyed in the wool carnivores with a deadly night shade avoidant thrown in and her outrage on hearing that someone else didn’t eat flour. Nut allergies hadn’t made their way into the 70’s and thankfully, and they didn’t this week either, just a quiet preference for tofu, and another retreating from dairy. These we can handle.

They’re messy and bright and young and grown up and at the beginning and also already begun. They eat a lot. They’re loving with each other. They get up late and go to bed when I am nearly at my full night’s sleep. I hear them larking about in my dreams. They study together, laptops open on their knees in the sitting room, the stress of an assignment due today put M on the floor with a blanket over her head. Broth was required and a gentle closing of the blue light. They work hard and take it seriously.

I find myself drifting quietly about among them, loading and unloading the dishwasher, putting lids on things and wiping surfaces, thinking about supper. Slowly, like animals peeking out, they’ve each found me in the kitchen for conversations that matter to them. I think of the horse whisperer and Robert Redford in the long grass. I listen and don’t say much. They are each flighty, in their own way. Aren’t we all.

Amongst this I’ve been to London for the launch of Catherine: a retelling of Wuthering Heights by my friend Essie Fox: TALKING THE GOTHIC , held at Goldsboro Books, which was fun in all the right places, and included an early drink with AW (one of my favourite ways to spend an hour) and a chance reconnect with Louise Fein whose latest Book of Forbidden Words will be out next week. We hadn’t seen each other since our debut days. Both Essie and Louise will be guests on Substack LIVE, keep your eyes out 👀 for schedule and links….

I was hosted by Lindsey Trout Hughes and the London Writers' Salon on Substack LIVE on Tuesday night - have I fully expressed the joy of talking to a curious and brilliant mind who’s read FALLOUT and loved it? Perhaps I haven’t. Perhaps the happiness is impossible to relate. This, when Lindsey holds up my book and is smiling and hugging it like a treasure of love, this is what it’s all about. For the work to be got, the intention understood, the words to land and the whole to be embraced with that objective joy that is nothing to do with glorifying the writer and everything to do with loving the living breath of a work of literature, this I can let land in me, too. This is how I feel about books I love. I stroke their covers like the neck of a horse come to stand beside me. I glory in them. (Thank you Lindsey.)

London Writers' Salon are running weekly prompts for free subscribers, and a competition for paying subscribers. I’m delighted to be this month’s guest judge on the theme of The Fence. Details on their Substack.

While riding J rang to say he’d got into UAL!!! 👏👏👏 and I couldn’t be more proud of that boy who is taking life by the lapels and saying, Come on then. Who is turning up. Who is being bold in the face of risk.

I finished a draft of the new piece of work I’ve been playing with for a year, and sent it off to AW before I changed my mind. It’s short. 32,000 words. A small book that asks one, very big question. I love it, as I should, and am enamoured by its clear intent to not be any bigger. I am a novella, it says to me again and again. Okay. I hear you.

P swung by to pick up her copy of Bright Dead Things by Ada Limón and we talked about the rarified air of poets and how lichen is part fungi part plant and how moss makes us want to be little people and headed off into the woods to prove it.

Chat with AS & SLB yesterday - they’re at Les A, such a joy to see them, the house, them in the house, know that most holy of places is being filled with brilliant life. We are making plans….

Last night was supper made from leftovers and Yoot overwhelm floor-lying with blanket over head, and life-giving broth to bring her round. I am just as vulnerable to this blowing up of things that on my deathbed I will not remember. I think this as waves of urgency and panic hit me in the run up to pub day. It matters hugely to me and simultaneously, in the vast and rolling scheme, it doesn’t matter at all. And then I went to bed, leaving them all too it, hearing laughter replace stress, and opened iPlayer with thoughts of a comforting half hour on the bobsleigh or curling or with Clare Balding’s hair and what should great me but Breaking News and an inch by inch description of the days events on repeat and That Photograph of him in the back of his car attempting to lie flat or is it hide or is it so knocked over by entering a police station that hadn’t been newly painted he couldn’t work out what the smell was until he discovered it was him.

I’m no royalist, but god love Charles’ statement. And I’m no believer in the state, but holy smoke this looks remarkably like holding to account. Not a single Yoot mentioned it all day so I wonder if they don’t look or maybe they don’t care and perhaps both of these are signals for a bright and burning future.

Welcome to the year of the Fire Horse.

Eleanor

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Thank you Angie Browne, Billy Bumbo, Lindsey Trout Hughes, Isabel Peralta, Kristin Austin, and many others for tuning into my live video with London Writers' Salon! Join me for my next live video in the app.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

On the tube yesterday it struck me, this splintering of reality, so many versions, one for every passenger moving along the platform. It wasn’t always that our politics divided us, there have been eras when a shared reality went all the way up the tree and only at the very edges did one person say the world is flat while another said it was round. Mostly we shared a lens. Mostly we saw things, in larger groups that is, from the same angle. I sat on a bench remembering how mice used to run about the tracks and the whistling underground wind brought a train screaming out of darkness and every person around me carried a reality in their head and I thought about statements that we could all agree on without getting into a fight.

We are humans. I thought that was a pretty safe bet. And then I couldn’t think of a single other that someone wouldn’t take issue with. I think that’s why I operate from there in focused intent when meeting anyone. It’s the only shared reality I can reliably take as read. (Apologies to any aliens reading this, please do let yourselves be known.)

I came up to London on Tuesday afternoon like a packhorse of rare things - a suitcase for three nights in the city, J’s camera bag with a bamboo steamer squeezed in it, his jacket stuffed sideways and my own leather rucksack from Venice that never fails to remind me of that Alice in Wonderland, Through The Looking Glass week of the biannual when the black box had opened and I’d lost my mind. I’d been planning on an early night but J rang as I got off the train. “Come to a life drawing class.” And so I did, crossing London to dump my stuff then straight back on the underground to Oxford Circus where we met for early sups and played for time till 7pm in his favourite Soho cafe, one of those rare, untouched places so very hard to find; the ghosts of Francis Bacon and The Colony Club in the ripped green leather banquets. A place where if you ask for a tea they deliver a mug of builders with no questions asked about milk or caffeine or do you have herbal? Where the very idea of gluten free or lactose intolerant would be thrown out on the dirty, rushing Soho pavement along with your ideas of feeling special.

Open deli sandwiches on display in the long, wide glass counter. A high board and a menu that’s never changed. A narrow gap for the proprietor to turn sideways through, in and out of the kitchen, plates of meat and two veg, customers come alone to eat before returning to their studios to paint masterpieces. A man beside us in baseball cap read a script, eyes down. Another, white hair in a booth across the room, was interrupted from his dinner by two young fans who knew he’d written / photographed / created greatness and wanted to tell him so. A man and a woman stood about pointing at the sepia images covering the walls and talking of how it used to be. This was the Soho of Quintin Crisp, one last vestige remaining.

And then we went Life Drawing.

A large, hot room in Covent Garden, chairs in an ellipse to the stage, easels set up behind them for a double row of students. £10 gets you a board to lean on, paper and pencils and two hours practicing looking. I was instantly fascinated by lines. I found I wanted to let my hand follow my eye without dropping my gaze to the page. I liked that I found lean in her back and weight in her seat. I noticed how the relentless practice of noticing that I do all the time as a writer, storing up and studying, came out in this other discipline. I want to go again. I want to make life drawing classes a habit. It was two hours of antidote to this shouting that says my reality is more true than yours. It was forty people in a room sharing the reality of a human form and producing their version without contesting the version of the person beside them. It was forty truths quite different yet quite happy to live side by side. We all belonged.

Wednesday began early with a breakfast meeting at the Ivy Club with SD. Always and ever fascinating. Spent a happy hour with the Tudors at NPG, got caught in the rain on my way to meet VG, another happy two hours discussing The State of the World and our antidotes (excellent costume jewellery and sparkling eighties fashion are hers. I applaud and salute and in all ways love her.)

To the tall cold house in London where I collected the last of the chattels from my mother’s estate. No, I didn’t want the paintings she left me, they were two of the scariest pieces of art I’ve ever seen and haunted my childhood - VG is convinced I should write an article about the things our parents leave us… I’m not sure I can bear to look - but here’s one of them:

The other was a dim portrait of two women, one behind the shoulder of the other as if following, both looking out with the clear message that they were behind me, don’t look. They hung on a turn of the stone stairs, and I would spend my life racing past them. Thanks, mum, but no thanks. I did however rescue Babar and Arthur. They are coming home with me.

Yesterday I had what looked like a blessed clear day, uncommon in this post-AC reality of mine where there are no checks on my enthusiasm for work. I thought I’d spend it editing - this new novella in process is shaping up - and I tried but a bone tiredness overtook me, as did admin. I realised last night I’m going to have to set up some clear parameters for when I’m on and off the clock. This brave new world will have no emails before 8am or after 6pm and none at the weekend. There will be life drawing. There will be pens down and eyes up and filters set to fine grain.

There will be this:

Eleanor

p.s. - I’ll be in conversation with this afternoon only on Substack LIVE discussing her new novel Who By Fire. Join us at 6pm GMT.

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p.p.s - Luke Deasy has come up with the brilliant idea of AskMyStack. It’s a tool for bringing your substack archive into the present, making it easy for readers to navigate their way into it and find out more about who you are and what you write about. Have a look at mine and tell me what you think. It’s in development, and Luke is keen to hear feedback. You can contact him directly or leave comments here.

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I read a post by Zuri Stevens , A Message From Black Women To White Women On The Epstein Files , and it made me think about grooming.

It was already on my mind (the personal is political) due to the ongoing scramble through the wastelands of a broken relationship, and bid for freedom and understanding. My son asked me the other day if I missed my ex, if a small and secret part of me wanted him back. Yes, and No respectively, the No got an embellishment. “He was always so good at this,” (universal hand signal for endless talking) but you’ve got to know someone by what they do, not what they say. The fact that he didn’t mean to hurt me makes it worse on all levels. It implies he’s not in control of himself nor willing to take responsibility for himself, and further, that the uncontrolled him is vicious. Call me old fashioned but isn’t that the, Men can’t help themselves plea?

Like so many others, he lumbers about convinced of his own niceness, all evidence to the contrary filed under, A woman made me do it.

Yesterday I pulled out a folder of the letters we exchanged over four months of seduction. Boy oh boy was he good at it. And what a fool I was to believe him. All the evidence I had at the time, screamed Don’t Do It. But he had me with, I’ve never felt this way before. The evidence now screams of grooming, not his, he was acting out in his usual way, but of the systemic grooming of women to believe the words of men in the face of their contrary actions.

In the early months of unpacking what had happened to me as a child, I spoke to a woman who worked in social services. Many times she’d been called as expert witness in court and she told me this. “It’s not just the victim who is groomed. The perpetrator grooms everyone in the household, everyone in that child’s environment. Global collusion, that child’s entire world, is necessary for the abuse to carry on unabated. Everyone’s got to be in on it, whether they know it consciously, or not.”

In the aftermath of my relationship I notice that grooming in action, the learned impulse to find excuses for him, to make it all right, to let him off the hook. In the unpacking of Epstein I notice that grooming (and this is where Zuri Stevens’ essay comes in), and in the careful reassembling of my childhood I notice it too. It’s impossible that the adults around me didn’t know, and yet consciously, they didn’t know. I remember picking through the evidence carefully while my mother was alive, aware that she loved me, presupposing devastation had I made her face it. Yet when my memoir came out and my cousin gently tapped around it she said, No, read it to me. I want to know. The loaded nature of that sentence echoes knowing all along, like the women at Epstein’s parties, like all the people who called themselves his friends, and all the people who saw and said nothing, knew and did nothing. Like Starmer saying sorry for giving Mandelson a job, Sorry I was duped, yeah, yeah (international hand signal for talking). Not good enough.

Grooming goes deep. Cowardice goes deeper.

So yes, where is the awakening to global grooming, the comfortable and violent status quo that We just have to keep them happy? How are men ever to grow up while we make it so easy to stay juvenile? There are some good, beautiful adult men out there, but not enough. It makes me press further into creating a world where we meet each other as humans first, and all other identifiable markers are secondary, no longer available as excuses to be used by themselves or others. We are humans, held to the same standards, equal under the sun. This is where I operate from, you and me, the same. Grooming is a trick. I tell myself, wake up.

Eleanor

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

Increasingly, there is poetry. From Andrea Gibson‘s every time i ever said i want to die, to Sherman Alexie‘s Black Box.

Yesterday I met with the man who chose a phone call while 4,000 miles distant as an apt way to end an eight year relationship. We hadn’t spoken since that moment. I needed time to calibrate. Our relationship had been so fuelled by rage and passion, such complicated and huge emotions, so much love, so I thought; I loved him. But I didn’t want the ending to be like that, my ending, he’d already had his and it had sent a howl reverberating from hotel bedroom to the streets of New York. (I’m returning in May and I wonder if I’ll still hear it.) I wanted mine to be quiet. Clean. A clean cut.

I was a mess the night before. I made myself watch videos of our past, zoomed in on snap shots of our summers together, his face; I had to rip the band aid off so that it wouldn’t be a shock. I had to ready myself. I knew full well how my body loved him, how my cells would jump at his arrival, how my chest would lean. I couldn’t risk a moment of forgetting. I’d forgotten too many times before.

My head said to my heart, Now, look, I know you loved him but you can’t have him anymore. It’s over. He’s no good for us. And my head took my heart’s hand and said, It’s going to be okay. There was so much hurt I wanted to shout about; the temptation to make a scene, try and get the thing I’d been longing for, his understanding, compassion, pain, love, his real self to meet me; the self I’d imagined he was or could be. But this was the real him, he who chose a phone call to end it. That was the real him.

There is something calming about reality. Something non-judgmental. Reality is allowed. And when we met in chairs too soft and too close together that I had to move and adjust before I could sit down, it was quick, and to the point. It was goodbye face to face, because eight years deserved that. And then it was over.

Black Box by Sherman Alexie :

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