The Exclusives, by Rebecca Thornton

By the time the tangy tomato sauce nips at the back of my tongue, I’ve already worked out the headline that will bring Freya down.

~~here be a few spoilers; I’ll warn you when they’re coming~~

It’s a slightly weird experience, reading a book in uncorrected proof. There are usually a lot of forgotten quotation marks or left-out commas, which (you can be pretty sure, though not always) will be added in during the editing process; there’s often quite a lot of repetition, which you can think about likewise. Still, you don’t actually know what the book will look like, as a finished product. You can just hope. Most of the advance review copies I get are corrected and bound proofs, which means they’re essentially the finished book, which just happens to not be on sale yet. My copy of The Exclusives, though, is uncorrected, which means this review will be a sort of time capsule. I’m not reviewing the book as it is now; I’m reviewing it as it was in January. Take any criticisms, therefore, with the knowledge that the book may well have changed.

The “exclusives” of the title are Josephine Grey and Freya Seymour, two privileged girls at a prestigious (and fictional) English boarding school; the “exclusives” are also, by implication, boarding schools themselves, and the bizarre bubble that surrounds their inmates from reality. That bubble extends to the world outside of school: Josephine’s father works for the Prime Minister and gets her an interview with the PM for the school newspaper, while another character, late in the book, says that she’s sure her father will be able to ensure her place at Oxford. Unlikely as it seems that David Cameron would give an interview to a school newspaper, consider that my friend Ella, who went to an elite girls’ school in north London—not the same thing as Eton or Cheltenham Ladies’ College, but still—experienced regular talks by the likes of Imelda Staunton and Emma Thompson. This world exists.

The book doesn’t start in 1996, though—instead, we’re dropped into Josephine’s life in 2014, as she’s heading up an archaeological dig in Jordan. She’s successful in her profession, less so in her personal life: she’s maintaining a supposedly no-strings fling with a charming but irresponsible foreign correspondent. An email from Freya, however, throws everything out of balance: she’s found Josephine’s contact details, and she wants to talk about what happened eighteen years ago. We don’t yet know what that was—we won’t know for sure until the final twenty pages of the book—but whatever it was, Josephine absolutely does not want to revisit it. She’s forced back to England, though, by her mother’s illness: she’s thought to be dying, and Josephine is summoned to London to say her goodbyes, where she’ll have to face her past.

The novel is split-narrative, alternating its chapters between 1996 at Greenwood Hall and 2014 in London. Josephine narrates in both timelines, which at first seemed like a missed opportunity to integrate more perspectives, but which quickly came to seem like a very clever idea. It enables Josephine, and Thornton, to maintain complete control over what the reader knows, both about the past and about the present. The extent of that need for control tells us everything we need to know about Josephine: her strong will, her arrogance, her single-mindedness, her determination, her fear. The greatest terror of her life is that she will end up like her mother, a mentally ill housewife with no degree or accomplishments of her own, fighting off the voices in her head. The antidote to this fate, she is convinced, lies in winning a place at Oxford.

I have to say that, although linked scholarships were only abolished very recently, and may have been around as recently as 1996, I do not think that the Oxford admissions process has ever been conducted in quite the way Thornton describes it. When I applied, in the autumn of 2009, I did indeed have to sit an aptitude test (as all applicants for English literature, history, any foreign language, or biomedical science have to do) and attend an interview, but the idea that the interviewers might have gotten in touch with my school to say that my essay was “the best they have seen in years” is fanciful, at best. (Josephine is told by her headmistress that such was the opinion of the examining board.) Oxford tutorials depend on the ability of the tutors to manage and control the inevitable arrogance of their best students, which is not achieved by praising them before they’ve even matriculated. A tutor did once tell me about the excellent results of an applicant in the year below me (though she didn’t take up her offer, in the end), but I can’t imagine that she would ever have ensured that the applicant herself knew about that. And although we were never discouraged, we were also generally made to feel as though we could probably have done better, and perhaps would do so next week. It worked reasonably well as a corrective to callow youth.

Details aside, the major achievement of The Exclusives is the maintenance of suspense. Over nearly 300 pages, it’s hard to prevent your readers from guessing fully and completely what happened, but Thornton manages it, partly by providing two disasters. The first occurs on a night out in London; only Freya and Josephine experience it, and their differing responses to that trauma drive them apart when they return to school. The second disaster is precipitated, coldly and calculatingly, by Josephine alone, and is done as a sort of insurance plan against Freya telling anyone else about what happened.  That catastrophe is discovered and has repercussions in 1996, but the first one, the one that really sets everything else in motion, remains unaddressed, and festers, until 2014. When Freya and Josephine eventually meet—and, of course, they do, despite Josephine’s attempts to stonewall her former friend—the events of that night have to come out. In the end, it’s Freya who remembers for them both. Josephine has spent her entire adult life suppressing it: she has airbrushed it out of her experience entirely, as an example of imperfection, of weakness and vulnerability.

Now for the spoiler-y bit: I wonder sometimes whether I want too much right-thinking, too much political correctness, in the books that I read, or whether it’s okay to want fictional models of situations that happen in real life being dealt with healthily and appropriately. Disaster # 1, for instance, the disaster that starts the ball rolling, is a relatively uncommon experience. You are much less likely to be raped and beaten by two strangers in a nightclub than you are to experience the same abuse at the hands of someone you love and trust. Disaster # 2, on the other hand, is far more common: an inappropriate relationship between a teacher and a student is something that, I guarantee you, has happened at every boarding school in the country during some point in its history, whether that relationship has eventually been made public or not. The teacher in question is fired, but there doesn’t seem to be any uncertainty about coercion; Freya is presented as having been totally in control of herself the whole time. Maybe we’re meant to see this assertion as a coping mechanism, or as necessary self-delusion; I don’t know. I just find it difficult to take at face value, and not a particularly constructive interpretation of the events that we’re given, especially in an era when decades-old stories of coerced minors are finally coming to light. Likewise, I don’t think that it’s particularly constructive to perpetuate the myth that rape is mostly something that strangers do to you when you’ve put some E in your drink. Novels don’t have a duty to be constructive, I know. I still struggle with this.

WE’RE DONE WITH THE SPOILERS NOW, YOU CAN TAKE YOUR FINGERS OUT OF YOUR EARS

The Exclusives is like a nasty Malory Towers, or a grown-up version of the Chalet School, with the terrible striving at its heart exposed. It’s dark and cruel and in some places melodramatic, but it sure as hell makes you want to know what happened. When Josephine achieves closure and catharsis at the end, it’s a relief; maybe we, too, can finally come to terms with the mean and selfish things we’ve done.

Thanks very much to Emily Burns at Bonnier for the review copy. The Exclusives was published in the UK on 7 April.

Bookish and Not-So-Bookish Thoughts

Sunny joy in Regent’s Park on Saturday

This is a weekly thing I’ve just found that’s hosted by Christine on Bookishly Boisterous, and I really like it. I don’t write much here about my life, at least not in a casual yet consistent sort of way; you poor guys tend to either get 1,000+-word essays on Traumas Of Elle’s Past or straight book reviews. The idea of sharing a bit is weirdly appealing. Although, who knows, maybe I’m just feeling generous, what with all the new light in the air.

1. I’ve been working on collating a database of all my own books (at least those ones which are in the flat) for a while. I’m using software called PortaBase, which is not going to win any beauty contests but which is extremely good at doing what I want it to do. This weekend I got through a huge chunk of the remaining books. All that’s left now are the three shelves of books bought for my degree. Inconveniently, they’re the shelves closest to the wall and therefore hardest to get at.
2. The Chaos and I saw Lydia and Rob (formerly known, when this blog was Oxford-based, as Princi and Casanova) for dinner last week. Odd that, living in London, it isn’t easier to get together with one’s friends, but I hadn’t seen either of them for nearly a month. I suppose Lydia’s erratic shifts (she’s a police officer at the Met) don’t help. It felt like ye olden times, with Lydia making stir fry, us bringing a random bottle that didn’t quite go with the food (prosecco, so could have been worse), and a general feeling of laziness assisted by the sun streaming in through their enormous sitting room bay window.
3. Last weekend was gorgeous. Determined to do something London-y, I organised a picnic excursion to Regent’s Park on Saturday, where we sat on a sunny bank near the rose garden (where there were no roses as yet) and ate a big tomato and olive salad, sausages with pear chutney, apples, and some Creme Eggs that were 25 p at Tesco. (Such are the joys of the week after Easter. Seriously, what a wonderful thing.) I worked on competency questions while the Chaos dozed and offered advice. Sunday was similarly full of sun and food and reading and writing/reviewing, plus house admin that had been put off for weeks. It was just all so bloody nice.
4. I’ve been thinking about the systems I use to organise myself. At the moment, I use a to-do app on my phone called Clear, and my iCal to keep track of events I’m attending. I keep a regular notebook on my desk at work, and use that as a work diary, and I do personal journaling on an iPhone app called Chronicle. I’ve only been using phone apps for stuff like this since last fall, and some of the glamour is starting to wear off. I spent an hour last week noodling around the Paperchase website. ARGH.
5. I finally got my shit together and ordered some business cards from Moo. They’re beautiful and inexpensive – highly recommended. Mine are made of normal cheap card stock, but the backs are marbled: a quarter of them are dark blue, a quarter of them are pink, a quarter are light blue and a quarter are yellow. (I also took a deep breath and put “Writer” on them, under my name. Taking myself seriously is one step closer to being taken seriously by everyone else.)

Freya, by Anthony Quinn

“Did it ever occur to you that I might have different priorities? What about getting my first salaried job, or my first cover story on the magazine – aren’t they milestones?”

Anthony Quinn came to my attention last year with Curtain Call, which many book bloggers raved about. I still have only a limited idea of its plot, but I gathered that Quinn’s great strength in it was to evoke the 1930s London theatre scene without sacrificing any of the nuances of the historical setting to the murder-mystery plot (something that lots and lots of historically set works do. Lookin’ at you, Downton Abbey.)

His second novel, Freya, does much the same thing for the mid-century world of the highly educated and opportunistic. Beginning on VE Day, when Freya Wyley meets Nancy Holdaway in the beginning of a beautiful friendship, the novel tracks the two women through their Oxford years (or, in Freya’s case, one year; she’s sent down after failing to appear for Mods, her first-year exams) and into their adult years in London during the social upheavals of the 1960s. Robert Cosway, whom Freya and Nancy both meet at Oxford, is a third player in both their lives, while other friends and acquaintances from university crop up regularly too.

It feels a bit unfair to refer to Quinn’s novel as “good old-fashioned storytelling” (in part because prefacing anything with “good old-fashioned” is a great way to convince people it’s worthless, or that you’re a Little England weirdo). Nevertheless, that was the phrase that kept bumping around in my head as I was reading it. It’s not exactly what you’d call a pacy plot, although there are two subplots that could have made novels on their own: one is to do with the outing of a gay civil servant whom Freya was briefly in love with at university, the other to do with the death of a teenage model and It Girl during the London years, whom Freya has been profiling for a newspaper. The fact that Quinn doesn’t make his novel a domestic espionage thriller or another murder mystery is testament to what he’s trying to do instead: anatomize a particular slice of English society at a particular time in (relatively) recent history.  He’s also trying to write about female friendship. Freya and Nancy’s relationship isn’t always the most prevalent strand in the book, but it’s omnipresent; they define themselves through how they relate to one another. I read somewhere recently that books about “female friendship” are usually about how women hate one another. Freya isn’t. It wants to explore the fact that people construct ideas about themselves, how they choose friends who can reflect those ideas back to them, and how the deepest kind of friendship very often results in the recognition that your original self-image was skewed or flawed or incomplete.

Although the book is nominally about their friendship, the title of the book isn’t misleading: it’s really a novel about Freya. The Independent’s review compared it explicitly to William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, the protagonist of which is rather conveniently present (though peripheral) at many of the defining events of the twentieth century. Quinn doesn’t quite do that, but the first third of the book sees Freya chasing an elusive journalist, Jessica Vaux (possibly based on a Mitford sister?), to Nuremberg, where the world’s press have gathered to report the Nazi war crimes trials that are dragging on there. While there, she nearly misses Vaux altogether, but a chance encounter on the last night of the week leads to an exclusive, and she stays on, impulsively, for another three days (missing her exams altogether and consequently being sent down). It’s classic Freya: lucky enough to have had some connections, but also daring enough to make the leap, and arrogant enough to believe she’ll land on her feet.

Nancy, on the other hand, is a vaguer character, an aspiring novelist (and eventually a successful one) who tends to be amalgamated into little more than a series of traits: auburn hair, gentle voice. You could object to this, I suppose, on the grounds that she’s made into a sort of soft-focus “lady novelist”; some reviewers have. On the other hand, you could see that Quinn is approaching her characterisation this way because he’s writing from Freya’s point of view, and Freya is first and foremost concerned with her own appearance to others, her own success. She loves Nancy deeply and honestly, but she doesn’t often pay that much attention to her. When, late in the novel, she reads one of Nancy’s own books after a long estrangement, she’s taken aback by the sharpness, the perspicacity, in her friend’s prose. This is a woman with a gift for observation and analysis, one that Freya finds hard to reconcile with the gentle, encouraging friend that she knows.

There are other marvelous characters as well, including Nat Fane, an actor, playwright and impresario whose arrogance outstrips Freya’s and whose penchant for spanking is returned to several times throughout the course of the novel. Fane is fascinating because he could so easily tip into caricature; in many ways he genuinely is a caricature, albeit a self-created and self-maintained one. What Quinn captures, though, is the fundamental sincerity of self-creation, the deep investment that such a person has in others’ opinions. Fane may be supremely convinced of his own talent, but when he lands in London, his reputation as a “brilliant boy” doesn’t do him any favors. He finds his niche, but it’s not quite the one he expected to fill. There’s also Robert Cosway, whose charisma and coldness in pursuit of a story are also a match for Freya’s. The major crisis of the novel is precipitated by Robert’s betrayal of an old friend for a front-page scoop; Freya, whose judgment is as unyielding as her self-confidence, can no longer work with Robert or even see him socially, and the repercussions of her decision on her relationship with Nancy (who by this time has married Robert) are severe.

In the end, it’s the characters who really run the show. That major plot crisis is indeed significant, but only because we have come to know and care about the people to whom it unfolds. There is an incredible texture to Quinn’s world: colors, smells, architecture, music. Oxford squares and London streets are delineated with a casual precision that makes us feel we are really there, that we can see the golden stone of Banbury Road or the sooty brick of Islington. There is, too, a lovely resilience to the friendship of Freya and Nancy. Circumstances and principles may separate them temporarily, even for years, but by the end of the book, we know that their love for each other is the most important thing. The novel is crammed with incident, but the incidents aren’t as significant as the long, slow process of getting to know and trust another person. Other critics have seen it as a failure of plot; I prefer to think of it as a triumph of scene-setting, and of a subtle, masterful grasp of emotions.

Thanks very much to Joe Pickering at Jonathan Cape for the review copy. Freya was published in the UK on 3 March.

I am in blood stepp’d in so far…

I went to see the new film of Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, with Papa Bear last week. It’s not a play that I feel very personally about (although my brilliant little brother has played Macbeth, and has helped me to understand the text better through his performance). So I had few expectations, apart from hoping to be dazzled and provoked. Both of these things happened, and I’m still trying to figure out how and why I felt as I did about the whole film, so I thought I’d expand my remit a bit to talk about it here.

Negatives first: my major issue with this film was that the language seemed basically secondary. The cool thing about Shakespeare is that you can put all sorts of window dressing on it, as long as you don’t add dialogue, so that films of the plays can be visually amazing, with silent scenes and characters that create resonance or suggest motive. The downside of that is that the language can easily become less and less important, as the stuff you’re being shown sidelines the stuff you’re hearing. Fassbender as Macbeth delivered most of his lines in a sort of mumbling Scottish-tinged monotone, which I actually didn’t mind per se, but in a few places he seemed to have trouble with where the emphases should be. Marion Cotillard as Lady Macbeth was quite a lot better; she was inexplicable but definitely human (as opposed to a crazed gender-bending monster), which I’ve always considered a more effective approach to her character. She also got a backstory in the form of a silent prologue that showed her and Macbeth burying their baby, which made her line “I know how tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me” a lot easier to understand. The witches also made the monotone thing work; they all looked like terribly sad, average medieval Scottish women, auguries of the kind of pain and suffering that falls, in a war, disproportionately upon people who have nothing to do with the quarrel.

This version also draws out the play’s implications about children. In an excellent echo of Macduff’s wife and children, the witches appeared with two: a silent little girl and then later a baby. When Banquo is killed and his son Fleance runs (in a scene that isn’t staged in the play), it’s the witches’ silent little girl who appears to him and seems to direct him into thin air, where he vanishes.

Poor Lady M.

Fleance comes back in the last scene (a silent one, so also the film director’s interpolation). He takes Macbeth’s sword from the ground outside the city. It’s intercut with shots of Malcolm, now king, standing in his throne room, then starting to walk purposefully towards the doors. Fleance turns and starts walking away; we flit back to Malcolm, who’s moving faster. The next shot we see of Fleance, he’s sped up in response. They both break into a run. The last shot in the movie is Fleance running away from the camera into a blood-colored smoke: a stocky, freckly eight-year-old clutching a huge sword, the sound of his breathing jogging up and down. It ends the film not on the triumphant(-ish) note of the rightful king being crowned, but with the promise of further bloodshed. Even little boys aren’t exempt; it passes the violence down to the next generation, in precisely the same way that Banquo does when he lets Fleance hold his sword (in another scene that isn’t in the play). You can’t know that your children will live by the sword without also knowing that they may die upon it.

In the light of Shakespeare’s other historical plays, particularly Richard II, it’s also interesting for what it says about kingship. There’s no context or background for how Duncan (a cracking David Thewlis, projecting kindliness and weakness) got his crown. Macbeth takes it from him by murdering him, and there’s a bit at his coronation, the anointing, which made me think of Richard’s lines: “Not all the water in the rough rude sea/Can wash the balm off an anointed king.” (Nor the spot from Lady Macbeth’s hand, evidently.) But obviously that’s not true, because even when the supposed balance of nature is restored (with Malcom’s ascension), there’s Fleance to deal with, and the witches have prophesied that he’ll be king someday. I don’t know whether Scottish history proved them right or wrong, or whether this bit has no historical basis at all (knowing Shakespeare, it could be that). Is there even any point, this plot makes us ask, in trying to determine who the “rightful” king is?

Fassbender gettin’ his crazy on

Maybe Macbeth’s crime is not so much that he slew his sovereign as that he slew a guest. When you hosted someone, you were making a promise, not only to not kill them, but to actively protect them. So Lady Macbeth’s furious speech, “Was the hope drunk wherein you dressed yourself?”, about how he promised her he’d kill Duncan and promise-breakers are the worst, takes on a whole other sort of dramatic irony. In order to keep a private promise to his wife, he’s going to have to break a much more serious, socially binding promise to a man under his protection. It’s for the same reason that the Glencoe Massacre was so infamous: not just that the Campbells killed people, but that they killed people whom they were obligated to protect. They betrayed their trust fully.

For making me think hard about the play and its text and themes, I think the film was worth seeing. It’s curious, though, how much of Shakespeare’s language is simply elided by being able to direct your audience’s attention through a camera shot, or to force a comparison or parallel through colour or lighting. I’ve seen films of Shakespeare that don’t do this so much, and I’ve seen ones that do it a lot; this Macbeth is in the latter camp, and although that doesn’t make it a bad Macbeth, it does make it seem more like a reimagining, and less like an attempt to be faithful to the playtext.

Birthday Books!

I’ve read some bloody good books since writing about Knockemstiff, including James Salter’s portrait of a dissolving twentieth-century marriage, Light Years; Blood Dazzler, Patricia Smith’s extraordinary collection of poetry on Hurricane Katrina (some of it told from the hurricane’s point of view…), and Jesmyn Ward’s National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, also about the events leading up to the hurricane in the life of a fifteen-year-old pregnant girl living in poverty on the Gulf Coast. I would recommend every single one of these books without hesitation to nearly everyone–they are all That Good. But I’ve fallen down a bit on reviewing, because the past two weeks have been profoundly chaotic and busy, and I had a birthday! I got a LOT of books, and I figure the best way to wipe the slate clean is to do a book pile-post (everyone loves one of those!), and then pick up with reviews again.

From the top:

Imagine My Surprise: Unpublished Letters To the Daily Telegraph. Casanova and Princi gave me this, along with a card that had rhyming couplets and the word “twat” in it, which means they come pretty close to Winning At Birthdays. There is nothing more gloriously, incomprehensibly English than the rejected complaint letters from readers of the Telegraph. If you don’t understand what “Disgusted in Tunbridge Wells” means, then this book’s not for you; if you do, it’s a gem.

Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day. From the Duchess, this is a gorgeous edition of the Winifred Watson novel about a middle-aged spinster who thinks she’s landed a short-term governess job, only to find that she’s working for a nightclub singer instead of a bunch of undisciplined children. Their unlikely friendship, and the slow blossoming of Miss Pettigrew’s spirit, makes for a gently lovely novel.

Go Set A Watchman. Also from the Duchess; who DOESN’T know what this is about by now? A very anticipated read, although my expectations are cautious.

The Inheritors. From dearest Dubai-dwelling Loch Hess Monster, who has been trying to evangelize this book to me for about a year! A fictionalization of the meeting of Neanderthals with homo sapiens, it is what William Golding should be known for, instead of that choirboy horror show Lord of the Flies.

The Complete English Poems of John Donne. An early birthday present from Darcy–I haven’t got all of these in one volume, so this is handy and lovely all at once. Oh, Donne. Always and forever one of the gatekeepers to my heart.

Diary of Witold Gombrowicz. I came in at around two in the morning on the day of my actual birthday, because we’d had the office summer party the night before, and I tripped over this enormous Amazon package sitting on my front doorstep. I carried it upstairs, ripped it open, and found this: the 800-page diary of one of the major figures of twentieth-century Polish literature, none of whose works I have ever read. It was, of course, from Literary Uncle.

Le ton beau de Marot. An extraordinary tome by Douglas Hofstadter (he who brought you Godel, Escher, Bach), about translation and language systems. I’ve started it: he writes in meter, semi-intentionally. It will, without a doubt, be one of the most interesting things I ever read in my life.

And something I bought myself as a weird little treat:

Eloquent JavaScript. Yes, really. I took a programming class YEARS ago and was really interested by it, but I was the only girl and the instructor was discouraging and…you know the story. This was sold to me as being one of the most comprehensive, and comprehensible, guides to beginners’ programming on the market, and the first few pages haven’t disappointed–the author has a marvelous chatty style. I like it already.

So, a wonderful birthday all around (including a joint celebration with Papa Bear down the pub, ft. the Duchess, Bunter, Casanova, Princi, the Lawyer aka AdventureSinCake–many of our old favorites, and quite a few new ones too.) What to read next? Apart from the above mentioned, there is also The Shore by Sara Taylor, The Country of Ice Cream Star by Sandra Newman, The Holy and the Broken by Alan Light, and Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, on my shortlist of potential new reads. Someone help me make a decision…

 

Graduates In Wonderland, by Jessica Pan and Rachel Kapelke-Dale

I think if you can make plans that far in advance, you are officially in the adult club. My current life has the same expiration date as my student visa.

Sometimes a book is the literary equivalent of a superfood salad, a glass of white wine, and a warm bath: it just does exactly what you need it to do, and you don’t even feel bad about it. Sometimes that book comes to you by way of a good and trustworthy friend, which is even better. Red and I have been friends since the summer after our junior year of high school, when we met at a state-sponsored summer camp for nerds in Newport News. We’ve written letters and emails and Facebook messages, sent each other playlists and book recommendations, done shots and drunk tea, stayed up late and slept in late, looked at the moon, visited art galleries, disgraced ourselves, and redeemed ourselves. She hears all about my misadventures in Oxford and London, and I hear about her life with her fiance in Ohio. She’s a hard worker and a fierce heart.

Which means that when she sent me a surprise late birthmas (this is a thing) package with two books, I knew perfectly well that they’d be good. I started Graduates In Wonderland the very next morning.

One of the weird things about this stage in your life is that everyone does it differently, but there are enough common denominators for most other peoples’ experiences to be recognizable. That said, you do have to understand that Graduates In Wonderland is the sort of thing–the sort of story–that only exists because of privilege. The night before they graduate, Jessica Pan and Rachel Kapelke-Dale promise to send each other emails every week with honest accounts of their lives in the various foreign cities in which they end up living. Both women went to Brown, an Ivy League, and both have family situations that can provide them with at least some financial support whilst they pursue multiple masters’ degrees and general international adventuring. I know that I write this as the possessor of an Oxford degree, and therefore have limited scope to blather about privilege. I do spend a lot of time worrying about money, however, and what surprised me most about the emails that comprise the book is that very few of them mention any kind of panicking about money. At one point, Rachel gets hit by a car and the insurance pay-out is $10,000, which carries her through the first year of her masters’ in Paris. She doesn’t dwell very much on the fortuitousness of this, which struck me as a bit odd. Then again, because these were emails between friends, maybe that’s why; do friends really write to each other about their money fears? I’m not sure I tell my long-distance buddies about mine. But on the other other hand, these are supposed to be “no-holds-barred” emails, which makes it a little hard to believe that the girls can quit jobs without once mentioning to each other that they’re worried about how they’ll make rent. I’ve been unemployed and soon will be again, and let me tell you, I thought about almost nothing except how I was going to make rent. Maybe I’m the weird one.

If you kind of abandon the idea that this is non-fiction, however, Graduates In Wonderland is pretty charming. (Come on–no matter how “raw and honest” their emails to each other were, there’s been editing.) BUT BUT BUT. Come on now. It’s tremendous fun to read the travails of women your own age, who are also, like you, battling through misery and self-doubt one day, and taking shots with commitment-phobic boys in questionable bars the next. It reminds you that you’re not alone. It makes you hopeful that you’ll make it through. And it brings to the forefront of your mind the brilliance of your friends. After Rachel is unexpectedly and horribly dumped by a Frenchman named Olivier, Jess writes, with the absolute solidarity of a friend:

You want someone who is going to stick around and give you half a chance. Olivier is not this. At least you didn’t waste years on him…But honestly. I want to punch him in the face. I want to take a fish and slap it across his face, while yelling, “NON! NO MAS TOUCHE PAS!”

You are going to be okay. I promise.

If you visit me here, I’ll take you to the farthest place from Paris: St Kilda. It’s the closest thing to a beach in Melbourne–a strip of sand on a bay. The streets are lined with fish-and-chip shops, cyclists, and bakeries. We’ll lie in the sun, and I’ll make sure your pale skin is completely covered in SPF 50 sunblock. I’ll find a strapping Australian guy named Jono to rub it in for you.

That’s love, you guys.

Actually, in some places, this book almost hurts to read, because in among the ridiculous romance escapades and the exploring of new cities and the discoveries of your own competence, there are some really sad moments. Like when one of the girls asks how many times you can move from city to city without losing most of the people you knew in each one. That’s the rootlessness of your twenties. That’s one of the worst things about this life stage, too: the intensity of your friendships, the difficulty of starting them in the first place now that you’re no longer living within a couple hundred yards of everyone you know, and the bereftness, the sense of melancholy, when you realize that you’ll still end up losing most of them. It’s a tough place to be.

It’s also a great place to be. Rachel’s mother tells her, when she gets accepted to a masters’ program in Paris, “In ten years, you won’t be able to do this. So go.” I can’t think about this too hard because it frightens me and excites me and hurts my head and makes me useless, but there are so many things I do these days that I won’t be able to do in ten years. There are so many choices I could make that won’t be reasonable options when I’m thirty-two. It seems ungrateful not to bite off as much of life as is possible. Accept the invitation; apply for the job; reply to the text; flirt with the bartender (when applicable); be good to yourself. I don’t often need persuading of the fact, but I’m glad Graduates In Wonderland is here to remind me, when I need it.

I wrote this when I was sixteen and it’s held up okay

In my junior year of high school, we had to write a different sort of essay every month. The categories of essay–process, descriptive, narrative, and so on–were determined by our textbook, which was so profoundly uninteresting that I have forgotten its name. The theory was that eventually we would have a set of personal essays, one or two of which might be used for our college applications the next year. (US college applications require at least one personal essay, which generally prompts a lot of adolescent soul-searching/panic.) This was one I wrote in November; it is optimistically saved, in my computer, as “college essay 2” (I didn’t capitalize the titles of computer files back then. I think I thought it made me somehow, obscurely, cooler.)

In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since (The Great Gatsby)

I’m no F. Scott Fitzgerald (thank God). I’m no Nick Caraway either, but we do have something in common, Nick and I. He, of course, is well out of his “more vulnerable years” by the time he sets forth his father’s advice, and I have a feeling I’ve only just started in on mine. But both of us have listened to our fathers dispensing what paternal wisdom they would. Whether it is the best advice I have ever received remains in doubt; whether my father’s pronouncement even qualifies as advice, for that matter, is a question I will not attempt to answer. I do know that, like Nick Caraway, I have been “turning it over” ever since, and I may never stop.

At some point in everyone’s life, death makes a real and tangible appearance. It doesn’t necessarily happen the first time someone you know dies—dozens of great-aunts and second cousins were six feet under before I recognized death as a part of my world, the real, actual world—but make no mistake, it happens eventually. It happened to me the summer I turned sixteen, under circumstances that are irrelevant to the trajectory of this essay. Suffice to say that, at the time, I walked through the world as if everything had been turned one hundred and eighty degrees to the right. Such profound disorientation is as painful as it is sudden, and it does not go away, and there is no one—there is literally no one—to whom you can communicate all of this. Bits and pieces of it slip out, of course, but they constitute a mere twenty percent of the iceberg of grief and sorrow and rage and incomprehension that lies in your path, that you cannot get over, that you have to live on alone.

By this I am not asking for your sympathy; I am not asking for your pity. I am only trying to set up the story.

At the end of the summer my parents and I were talking about the death, which had defined the past three months of our lives. My father the atheist, who had had a couple of beers, was expounding upon his view of the afterlife. It sounded to me like something Emerson might say after partaking of magic mushrooms, and I told him so. He chuckled indulgently, which is what he does when I’m rude, then became very serious and leaned forward suddenly. “Eleanor Mary,” he said, “we live for other people. We do not live for ourselves.”

It has been nearly five months since he said this, and still I am trying to figure out what he meant by it.

To live for someone else.

There are many ways to take this. To live for someone else could mean to always put them first. To listen to them cry. To be, as a character from the excellent movie Waitress puts it, “whatever you need me to be.” But then what are you, except a repository for someone else’s needs and neuroses? What can you be when you leave yourself out of the equation? No. I am not convinced.

Other people; other people. Who do you live for? I wonder this sometimes. At my age it’s harder to tell. When you’re forty you can say, “I live for my wife, my husband, my daughter, my son. I live for my mother”; you can even say “I live for my dog,” if that’s what you’ve got. There’s nothing wrong with living for your dog. When you’re sixteen, what do you have? What belongs to you? Whom do you love? Who loves you?

Your parents, sure. The love of your parents is like a given in a geometry problem. It’s your base, your jumping-off point, but after the first few sentences, it doesn’t enter into your proof. You only use it as a place to start from.

You live for your friends, of course, if you have them. But your friends are young and selfish people, just like you, and they are fallible, just like you, and you will let each other down. It won’t be the end of the world when it happens, but it will happen.

Who are you living for? Who needs you here?

Somehow you know who needs you. I know who needs me. Family is a mathematical constant, friends are deeply flawed, but you prop each other up. You love each other. You live for each other.

If I die tomorrow, someone will suffer terribly. My death tomorrow would cause other people to go through days of such crushing grayness, such bleak internal landscapes, as no human being should be required to go through. The people who love me aren’t perfect, but I am good enough for them, and they are good enough for me, and in this way life goes on.

A few months after the death, a good friend and I were talking about it. We were in her car, it was late at night, and we couldn’t see each other’s faces. Finally she said, “You know one good thing now.”

“No,” I said. “What?”

“You know,” she said, “that you will never do this. You will never hurt anyone this way, because you know what it’s like. And I know that I will never do this to you, I will never hurt you this way, because this can’t happen twice.”

I am sixteen years old and selfish and I live to gratify my own wishes. This is all true. But if that were all, I wouldn’t make it, not for very long. I live for my mother, a part of whom would die if I did. I live for my father, despite—partly because of—his Emersonian declarations. I live for my brother, who is still young and utterly sincere in a way that hurts to witness. I live for my friends and their laughter and the darkening sky; I live for rural midnights on long dirt roads; I live for rooftops and rosemary and learning how to cook.

I live for the dead boy, because he cannot, anymore; and I live for myself, because, thank God, I can.

The year after I wrote this, I met these people. Then I went to uni and I met L’Auberge Anglaise. I am more grateful to all of you than I can say; you know who you are.

In 2014

I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. I don’t believe in the New Year starting in January, either; for me it has always started with a new academic year, in the autumn, and all of that post-Christmas guilt stuff is just an excuse for self-flagellation and meanness. What I do for New Year’s, instead, is to list what I’ve done over the past year. That seems more likely to produce, on the whole, happiness. And even bad memories are worth more than half-assed, panic-induced vows to improve my life.

So, in 2014, I have:

recorded a CD with Exeter College Choir

written my first review for Quadrapheme Magazine

danced at Burns Night

planned an alumni event at Freshfields on my own

met J.K. Rowling, and talked to her about her shoes

staffed Founder’s Day (hungover and on four hours of sleep)

endured sixteen consecutive days of fatigue, alcohol, singing, and jet lag

sung at the National Cathedral

made friends at a gay bar called Freddie’s in Crystal City, in the company of my darlings Theresa McCario, Jonathan Giles, Chelsea Meynig, and Ella Kirsh, and new darling Michael Divino

attended a keg party

found emergency medical care in lower Manhattan

skipped May morning for the first time

met A.S. Byatt

shaken the hand of the Queen of Spain

gone drinking with a platoon of Marines

become poetry editor at Quadrapheme Magazine

performed the second most ludicrous gig of my singing life so far

purchased an ostrich feather wrap and a tiara

sung my final evensong at Exeter College naked (except for the cassock)

attended a white tie ball

danced around a bonfire with Will Michaelmas Watt

written my first lesson plan

marked someone else’s coursework for the first time

adopted winged eyeliner

started a novel

milked a cow

become managing editor at Quadrapheme Magazine

composed precisely forty job applications and cover letters (I’ve just counted)

moved house

This is not actually my house, but it is my street.

gotten my first adult full-time job

learned how to use Twitter properly

vetted, purchased, installed and learned to use a new database

had a poem accepted at Boston Poetry

strategized, recruited for, and implemented a new after-school programme

stuffed 2,705 individual pieces of paper into ~540 envelopes

seen the Late Turner exhibit at Tate Britain

The Blue Riga, JMW Turner

sung harmony with my little brother on guitar

read 102 books

I don’t believe in predicting the future, either: not five years into the future, not one year, not even six months. Experience has taught me that such predictions take a particular delight in confounding you. But I can say that I fully expect 2015 to fill the shoes of its predecessor.

Blackberries

The lease on this house is up tomorrow. The Duchess, with her father, leaves around eight. Most of the house is burnished, shining, ready for inspection. The kitchen and the hallways need a quick going-over; I’ll cover it tomorrow morning. I head out shortly after she leaves, for a house viewing–I need a new place to stay for next year.

Halfway down Marston Road, something pokes at eye height out of the pavement-side hedge. Out of instinct and habit, I duck, swerve my head aside to miss it, carry on. I’m nearly past the thing altogether before I realize what it is: it’s a blackberry vine. There are blackberry vines at home, in Virginia. They will be ripening in our top field now. We used to go out and pick them on stifling August days, armored in long-sleeved clothing to fend off the thorns and the iridescent, buzzing junebugs, sweating and swearing and getting pricked, sticky with blood and juice, with the brittle dry grass scraping up to our thighs.

At the same moment as I recognize the vine, the hedge breaks, there’s a field beyond it, and I can smell newly mown grass. In the field in front of some apartment buildings, a bunch of kids are playing kickaround with what I grew up calling a soccer ball. It is a football here. I turn up Jack Straw’s Lane; a new song comes through my earbuds, and suddenly my chest fills and tightens with something: longing, sadness, hope, something else I don’t know the name for.

The viewing at the potential new house is very good: the house is big, there is a garden, the people who live there are friendly and pleasant. I want them to like me. They’re interviewing ten other people, they say. I don’t want to sound desperate, but I reiterate again that their house is my first choice. I ask them to let me know when they decide. They give me a mug of tea. They assure me that they will be in touch.

My legs ache in the night air. It feels as though I have been walking for a very long time.

On the way back, I keep noticing things. The large lawn and yellow lights in the welcoming windows of number 20, Jack Straw’s Lane again. There are halos around the streetlamps, like chemical fog. The hazy moon, slipping behind a rag of cloud. A little girl in salwar kameez, skipping ahead of her mother. When she is nearly a block ahead, the mother breaks into a run, not wanting to let her get too far away.

I want to put these things together. I am a meaning-maker. I need things to be thematically coherent. There must be a reason all of these separate observations make such a difference to me tonight. There must be a thread that connects. I cannot find one.

When I get back to the house on St Clement’s, it is dark. The kitchen light is off. I turn it on. I sit at the table. The kitchen is stark, the countertops bare, the cupboards empty. The fridge and freezer, defrosting, gape hungrily at me. I take my laptop. I keep the music on. No amount of coffee, no amount of crying/No amount of whiskey, no amount of wine…Nothing else will do/I’ve gotta have you.

I write. I write this. I write until I can see clearly. I write until I can breathe easily again. I write until the taste of blackberries leaves my mouth.

 

Travels with Choir In Search of America

I. home

Going through immigration and border control at Dulles (the worst airport to have ever existed in the entire history of the world). I use my American passport, which saves me about twenty minutes. The immigration official eyes my customs card. “You carrying anything?” I’ve declared the presents I’m bringing for my family–a college coaster from Founder’s Day for my father, a mint Aero bar for The Kid, and a jar of lemon curd for Mamacita. “No sir,” I say. “Just chocolate.” He smiles and taps my passport twice on the counter. “Good girl. Welcome home.”

II. tales of the city

After our first evensong, there are people I recognize in the congregation: my darling and long-unseen friends Jon, Red, and Chelsea, all of whom I met when I was still in high school. Red lives in Ohio, so seeing her is particularly unexpected, and we jump around and shriek a lot. Jon suggests that we go out. “Hell yes,” I say, “but I don’t know this area, so where should we go?” He says, thoughtfully, “I think we should go to a gay bar called Freddie’s in Crystal City.” So we do. There are cheeseburgers, our waitress is a beautiful transvestite with eyebrows of Platonic perfection, I get a cocktail with a flashing ice cube in it, and we all get drunk enough. Jon, who is going to do postgraduate work in musical performance this fall, sings karaoke (Aerosmith and Scott McKenzie), and just at the end of the night, I get drunk enough to sing some too. When I get down off the stage, a ghetto-fabulous man sitting at a nearby table offers his hand for a high five and says, “Darling, that was gorgeous.”

III. bringing down the house

The next night we go back, but we bring the Duchess. She and Red get on like a house afire. We meet a group of amazingly camp anesthesiologists, and somehow get sucked into a poker game which apparently runs on Freddie’s front porch every Monday. The players have names like Donny and Junior, and most of them seem to have been in Vietnam or Kuwait. The only other female in the joint is a sweet butch woman named Lani who has the most perfect country-western voice I’ve ever heard in real life. She plays Texas hold’em with a preserved scorpion in a jar next to her on the table. She says it’s her lucky charm. They invite us to come to a baseball game the next day. We say yes, out of midnight goodwill, knowing full well that in the morning we’ll agree not to turn up. They all think that the Duchess and I are dating. We choose not to correct them.

IV. i’m a stranger here myself

Philadelphia. The day has been one of unclean hair and hangover and boredom and discomfort, and now we’re at a party thrown for us by one of the churches we’ve just sung at. There’s plenty of wine but I’m too tired to talk to anyone, so I take a cab home on my own. Halfway down Rittenhouse Square, I discover I’ve lost my phone charger, so I ask the driver to take me to a pharmacy. There’s no one behind the counter. I’m leaning over it, trying to make out the writing on the various boxes of electronics, when a woman appears. Her name tag says SHANNIA. She says nothing, but her glare is very eloquent. “Hi,” I say. “Do you have any chargers for iPhone 5?” Her stare becomes indifferent. “No.” I point at an empty hook, from which swings a tag that reads IPHONE 5 CHARGER. “You do stock them, though?” She glances, barely, at the hook. “We sold it.” I apply my most pleasant smile, as though it’s lipstick. “There aren’t any more in the back?” The woman does not move a muscle. “No.” Recognizing the uselessness of any further attempts, I leave. The taxi driver must see the look on my face as I emerge, because he rolls down his window and says sympathetically, “No luck?” “Afraid not,” I say, trying mightily to keep cheerfulness in my voice. The driver makes a face, starts the car again, and says, drily but not unkindly, “Welcome to Philly.”

V. the innocents abroad

Leaving New York by way of Newark. Jersey’s reputation is well deserved if the security people are anything to go by. They are all women, and all are using a tone of voice best described as a bark. I take off my ring in case it sets off the metal detector, and put it on top of my bag. One of the women snarls at me, “Put that back on your finger.” She sounds like Marlon Brando playing Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. This tickles me. I comply. As I’m about to go through the detector, she barks again: “This a laptop?” She’s grabbed my backpack and is feeling the contours of something heavy and rectangular. Fuck you, I think, almost happily. I can do this too. I raise my voice. “No ma’am.” Flat tone, disinterested eyes. The “ma’am”, as intended, does not sound courteous. “What is it?” she snaps. “It’s a folder,” I say. The less detail, the better. Subject, verb, object, now fuck off. And it works. She puts my bag down, says nothing else, motions me forward with a jerk of her head. The guy on the other end of the metal detector winks. Good girl. Welcome home.