June has been the month of the most conscious reading I’ve done for a very long time. This probably doesn’t require a lot of explanation. It’s become very clear to me that, although I attempted to recommend diverse books in my professional life before now, I must make the decentralisation of whiteness a central tenet of my bookselling practice. To do that, I must also make it a central tenet of my reading practice—not to mention which, stories by Black authors (and authors of colour more generally) must be read for their own sake. And we—bloggers, booksellers and readers—need to encourage the industry to publish more of them, making sure they’re not all centered on racism (because… you know… everyone’s life and narrative is bigger than that). The more representation there is in the book world, the healthier and more creative it is.
best coming-of-age story: Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall. This reminded me so strongly of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, centering as it does on young Selina Boyce, the daughter of Barbadian immigrants in New York, and her attempts to break free of the familial and societal expectations that bind and devalue her. It’s a huge shame that it’s now out of print; my copy is an old Virago edition. Bring it back, Virago!
loudest wakeup call: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander. Hardly the most fun read, but without a doubt, this has laid the foundation for much of my self-education this month. Alexander’s thesis is that mass incarceration has created a tacit racial caste system that functions much as Jim Crow laws used to, but without public acknowledgment. Drawing examples from recent political and legislative history, Alexander’s argument is convincing, thorough, and extremely alarming.
best random acquisition: The Torture Letters: Reckoning With Police Violence, by Laurence Ralph. The U Chicago Press offers a free ebook every month, which I’m signed up to; usually I don’t read them, but this one seemed extremely apt. Ralph conducted an oral history/anthropological survey of people—mostly African-American men—who have experienced torture at the hands of the Chicago PD over the course of forty years. It’s a tough read, and sometimes repetitive (he structures most of the book as a series of open letters), but it’s illuminating about the struggles that people in a particular region have been engaging in for years, without any national media coverage. (And it’s made quite clear that Chicago can’t be the only place in the Union where this occurs.)
most outside my reading habits: Managing Up, by Mary Abbajay. A weird one: this is essentially a business/self-help tome about how to work with different types of managers. I’m interested in career development, but I tend to be quite resistant to books of this nature, especially ones that demand behavioural adaptation from the person already in a position of less (or no) power. Still, it certainly provided food for thought. Abbajay does distinguish between a manager who just doesn’t communicate the same way you do, and a manager who’s actively abusive or dangerous (she has no time for the latter and encourages people whose bosses are abusive to leave asap, thank goodness).
greatest potential (not bad as it is, but…) : Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract: the Story of a Tangled Inheritance, by Richard Atkinson. Atkinson’s attempt to trace his family back through several centuries of British history is fascinating, if overlong and occasionally bogged down in details of eighteenth-century scams. Still, the thing that’s most interesting about it is the fact that many of his ancestors were slaveowners, holding significant estates in Jamaica. The timing of this book intrigues; had it been published even a month later, I wonder if Atkinson’s publishers would have asked him to address this shameful legacy more directly. Instead, though he does engage with it, it’s on a fairly superficial level, the general attitude being that this was not a great thing, but without dwelling much on the details. Still, what it does do is drive home how many perfectly average middle-class families in Britain today have benefited from the slave trade. It’s not just peers and merchant princes who need to take a good hard look at their own houses.
most illuminating: Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire, by Akala. There’s been a surge in purchases of nonfiction by Black authors about contemporary racism, and it can be a little tricky, I think, to navigate the options. If you pick just one of these books to read, make it Natives. Akala is a poet, singer and lecturer; his guide through British racist history, especially the legacy of empire, is both accessible and revelatory. I truly didn’t expect to learn much I didn’t already know, and found myself humbled instead. There’s a reason Natives is already a contemporary classic.
best London novel: The Lonely Londoners, by Sam Selvon. A brilliant, funny, poignant novel chronicling the experiences of the first wave of West Indian immigrants post-WWII, focalized mostly through the eyes of generous but world-weary Moses Aloetta. Other characters include the romantic Sir Galahad and the roguish Nigerian survivor, Cap. The writing is beautiful, a melange of dialect and so-called Standard English that captures the rhythms of thought and time passing. There’s a particular ten-page section describing summer in London that made me miss the freedom of hanging out in parks more than anything else in this shitty pandemic season yet.
most darkly comedic: A Rage in Harlem, by Chester Himes. Himes’s first detective novel is so funny and so dark that it reminds me of the Coen Brothers (he’s also often compared to Chandler). Featuring a mendicant cross-dressing nun, the theft of some gold ore that may or may not exist, and the detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger (who appear in smaller parts here than in subsequent entries in the series), A Rage in Harlem invites us both to mock and to celebrate the innocence of its protagonist, clumsy Jackson, who can’t believe his woman Imabelle could do him wrong even when presented with the most suggestive evidence otherwise. It was made into a movie with Forest Whitaker, Robin Givens and Danny Glover, which I’d love to see—particularly the hearse chase scene. (You heard me.)
best reimagining: Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys. Rhys’s famed “prequel” to Jane Eyre retells the story of Bertha Rochester in her own words (including the fact that “Bertha” is a name assigned to her by her husband; she is born Antoinette). Dealing persuasively and furiously with inequities of skin colour, gender, sexual expression and money, Wide Sargasso Sea is a short but very deep text; the fact that I never studied it in an educational institution is extraordinary to me, given the challenge it poses to concepts like elite storytelling, narrative closure, and teleology. It’s also incredibly beautifully written, its register slipping between a kind of Joycean tracing of the movements of consciousness and a more constructed, linear storytelling mode. (This slippage occurs not only when Antoinette narrates, but also in Rochester’s sections—the effect of the Caribbean on his soul is not itself corrosive, though his reactions of fear, rejection, and adherence to known hierarchies certainly are.) It’s a gem of a book, one to reread.
least-known (to me) history: The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, by Yasmin Khan. The Great Partition served as my entry point into the history of British colonialism in South-east Asia, for which I’m glad, though I’d like to see (or be made aware of—if you know any, recommend me some!) more books about the experience of first-generation Indian and Pakistani immigrants to the UK. My primary takeaway from Khan’s book is that the Hindu/Muslim divide and subsequent violent religious nationalism was not a natural one; it was identified and stoked by British colonial officials, who could not conceive of the rivalries that did exist but were divided along different lines. Instead, by imposing their own expectations of faith-based conflict upon residents of the subcontinent, colonial officials created a self-fulfilling prophecy: fear and tensions between religious communities contributed to, essentially, an arms race, which exploded bloodily in the summer of 1947. I also learned that the Radcliffe line, which created both West Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), was drawn by a Briton who had never been to the regions in question, was not a cartographer or politically aware, and had spent about ten days in India, in total. The staggering arrogance of the project needs no further elaboration.
most likely to be a modern classic: Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, by Reni Eddo-Lodge. This book made history by becoming the first number 1 nonfiction book in the UK by a Black author. I listened to it on Audible and thought it was an excellent addition to the canon of nonfiction on contemporary racial issues, but although there’s huge value in Eddo-Lodge’s explicit focus on raising the consciousness of white people (racism, after all, is so often viewed as a “BAME problem” whereas it is in fact quite clearly a white-person problem), I found myself preferring Natives on the basis of its depth of historical research. Both, I think, clearly have broad commercial appeal, which is an important thing, and if Eddo-Lodge’s book gets more white people (especially in the publishing industry) to evaluate their own racism and complicity in racist structures, it’ll have done what it set out to do.
most terrifyingly prescient: Parable of the Talents, by Octavia E. Butler. Butler was a prophet; of this I am quite convinced. The first book in her Earthseed series, Parable of the Sower, was out of print earlier this month, so I ordered the second, which is comprehensible on its own. Butler describes an America ravaged by economic hardship and religious fundamentalism, electing a hard-line right-wing fundamentalist soi-disant “Christian” named Andrew Jarrett Steele, who promises to make America great again. Steele’s supporters attack the self-sufficient community that our protagonist, Lauren Olamina, has created in an effort to propagate her own religion, Earthseed, which teaches that God is change and that humanity’s destiny is to leave Earth and populate the stars. For anyone who loved The Handmaid’s Tale, this is the too-close-to-reality dystopia you should be reading; written by a Black American author twenty-five years ago, it also engages closely with racism and cultural imperialism in a way that Atwood’s novel tended to elide. Profoundly disturbing—I’ve been thinking about it for a fortnight—and incredibly moving.
best psychological profile: The Arsonist, by Chloe Hooper. I love literary true crime, and manage to find about one book a year that really answers to that description. The Arsonist is about the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia in 2009, which killed 173 people and left many more homeless. A suspect was quickly arrested on suspicion of lighting the fires: Brendan Sokaluk, whose defense team struggled to represent him because he is both autistic and intellectually disabled, and frequently seemed not to understand what was happening to him. Hooper examines what happened the day the fires started, the major players in the arson investigation, and Sokaluk’s already difficult life (he’d had trouble at work, and lived in a house his parents had bought for him, where he could be regularly checked in on), as well as what happened after he was arrested. The result is an in-depth piece of investigative journalism, dealing with mental health stigma and the evisceration of industry in Victoria as well as the social and environmental consequences of the fires. It’s perfect for fans of Kirk Wallace Johnson’s The Feather Thief or Susan Orleans’s The Library Book.
most entirely unexpected: Go Tell It On the Mountain, by James Baldwin. It seems to me as though a lot of narratives around queer self-acceptance and religion establish those two things as being completely incompatible. And I can see why: religious fundamentalism is frequently characterized by its cruelty towards, and rejection of, queerness. Yet Baldwin’s typically gorgeous novel embraces both things: his young protagonist, John, fears his stepfather’s harsh and disapproving (and heteronormative) God, but the penultimate scene in the book is the beautiful, transcendent vision of the divine that John finally receives, and in his dialogue with an older boy at the very end, we are given to understand that although John may appear to turn his back on the church by embracing his queerness, the truth of that revelation—that he is a child of God and much loved—will never cease to be. In addition to John’s perspective, we hear from his mother, stepfather, and aunt in a central section that completely opens up the reader’s perspective on these characters. I’d read one Baldwin before (Giovanni’s Room) and, as previously, was utterly blown away by the quality of his thought and writing. Which one next?!
most political use of humour: Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, which reminds me strongly of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in the way it mobilizes magical realism and dark comedy to criticize political actors. It tells the story of Aburiria, governed by a corrupt and self-aggrandizing dictator known only as the Ruler, who decides to build a new Tower of Babel to reach the heavens. A large cast of devout Christians, government ministers, police officers and businessmen is anchored by Kamiti, a beggar who initially adopts the role of a witch doctor as a joke but finds himself inextricably entwined with the fate of the nation, and Nyawira, the political radical with whom he falls in love. Hilarious, compelling, and a clear argument for Thiong’o as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates (out 6 Feb): I mentioned this a little in the earlier post because I’d actually finished it by the time I wrote that. Initially something of a challenge to hook into (it starts, shall we say, very much in medias res), it becomes more navigable as it goes on, and reveals itself to be the story of Hiram Walker, a slave on a Virginia plantation whose father is Howell, the white owner. Raised as a body man to his own (feckless) white half-brother Maynard, Hiram’s life is one not just of oppression, but of suppression: to survive as a house slave, particularly one so close to the family, he must occupy an intensely lonely and narrow social stratum, where he can fully trust neither his white family (who could sell him at any time) nor his slave one (who might develop resentment of his relatively high status). When Maynard drowns, Hiram is made over to Maynard’s fiancée, Corrine, and discovers that she has been freeing slaves and running a training school for Underground Railroad agents on her immense plantation, fighting slavery from within its own dark heart. She wants him because of a power he possesses, one his African grandmother, Santi Bess, is said to have used to free nearly a hundred slaves. Here is where I struggled a little with Coates’s conception: a supernatural liberating power that relies on harnessing traumatic memory is a brilliantly resonant idea; trauma plays such an insidious and undeniable role in the lives of descendants of enslaved people now that the idea of channeling it towards liberation is irresistible. But in the process, does it diminish or cheapen the efforts made by real Underground conductors, like Harriet Tubman, who appears in The Water Dancer as a supreme wielder of this power? Maybe: after all, enslaved people were not freed by magic. Or maybe not; maybe the metaphor holds and our conceptions of Tubman’s skill, courage and dignity are enriched by the suggestion that she was touched or chosen by something greater. I’m still not sure, though precisely because it raises these questions, I think The Water Dancer deserves to do very well.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia, by Sophy Roberts (out 6 Feb): Roberts is a travel writer whose work has been published in the FT and in Condé Nast Traveler; this is her first book, and takes the form of a quest. On her travels, she has met a world-class pianist in, all of places, the Mongolian steppe, but this musician lacks an instrument equal to her powers. Roberts determines to find her one, and to do so by looking in Siberia, generally known as a land of unforgiving conditions, prison camps, black bread, greasy soup, exile, and misery. But—partly indeed because of the Tsarist, and later the Soviet, exile system—it also contains a surprising amount of culture, left over from times when highly educated and accomplished men and women were sent to the steppe for life. There are many pianos in Siberia. There are concert halls; there are opera houses; there is a ballet company. There are pianos brought for virtuosi to play and abandoned after one or two performances; there are pianos shipped overland by the determined wives of commissars and high-ranking Decembrist exiles; there are pianos in sitting rooms and music schools, played by children and old people and students and housewives. Siberia, it turns out, is intensely musical. There is great charm in Roberts’s descriptions of the landscape, the people, and the history. I personally tend to struggle with books of this nature because their composition seems so patently artificial: there’s a note right at the start of the text to inform us that Roberts has conflated and combined details of three long research trips to make her narrative, and while I understand why a writer might do that, something about it makes me automatically wary of all the detail that comes after. She also hasn’t quite managed to integrate herself into the text in a way that feels…how shall I put this? Generous? It’s hard to describe, but every time Roberts mentions her own reactions to something, you get the sense that the piano hunt is a proxy; what she wants, really, is an excuse to find Siberia. But there is never any acknowledgment of this, even though leads on pianos sometimes disappear for pages at a time. Hard to sum up, then, this book, though it’s also hard not to fall under its spell.
The Good Hawk, by Joseph Elliott (out 6 Feb. Mild spoilers follow): Elliott’s debut novel for children stars a protagonist with a condition that goes unnamed in her world, but which is pretty clearly Down’s syndrome. In an alt-Scotland, Agatha is a Hawk: her job is to guard the sea wall that keeps her clan isolated and safe on the Isle of Skye. When she makes an honest, but dreadful, mistake, it’s held up as proof of her unfitness for work, and she’s stripped of her duties. Meanwhile, Jaime has a different problem: he’s been assigned a job as an Angler, a deep-sea fisherman, but is scared of the water. He’s also about to be married off to a girl from the neighboring island, Raasay, which is a fate worse than it usually is in children’s books because Skye people have never married; it’s not part of their culture or society. Jaime’s wedding is political—it’s meant to cement an alliance—but also deeply antithetical to everything his tribe has ever taught him, which is just one of the ways in which Elliott intelligently deals with tropes. (How many times have we seen a reluctant-young-bride figure in YA fantasy, as opposed to a reluctant young groom? How many times have we ever seen a boy being made to do things with his body that he doesn’t want to?) Agatha and Jaime—plus Jaime’s new wife, a Raasay girl named Lileas—must pull together when a betrayal sees their entire village abducted by alt-Vikings.
Swimming in the Dark, by Tomasz Jedrowski (out 6 Feb): Initially giving the impression of some kind of Aciman/Greenwell love child, Swimming in the Dark doesn’t actually dispel that characterization so much as deepen it. Though I haven’t read Aciman, I don’t think he’s best known for being tremendously political; Jedrowski, on the other hand, is at least as interested in the effect of state repression on the growth and development of two men’s minds as he is in its effect on their romance. Indeed, he makes it clear that the two things are sort of the same. Ludwik and Janusz meet at a camp for university students, meant to teach intellectuals about the joys of toiling on the land—for this is Poland in the 1980s, half a decade away from Lech Wałeşa and Solidarność. They’re irresistibly drawn to each other, Ludwik with a kind of halting nervousness, Janusz with something more like gracious acceptance, and at the end of the camp, they go on a walking holiday together. They become lovers almost immediately, with a sense of utter naturalness and simplicity. Upon their return to Warsaw, they maintain their relationship, but in secret; in communist Poland, homosexuality is up there with sympathy towards the decadent West as the sort of leaning that can get you into serious trouble. Ludwik, who early in the novel acquires a banned copy of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, is deeply frustrated by this repression. Janusz, by contrast, seems to see it as a necessary evil, the price a gay communist must pay for the satisfactions and rewards of being part of the state. The tension between these mutually exclusive attitudes will eventually render their relationship, and Ludwik’s continued habitation in Poland, impossible: the novel is focalized through his eyes and in retrospect, from the life he leads in New York in the late ’80s, watching news coverage of the revolution in his home country. We are meant, of course, to sympathize more with Ludwik, whose integrity will not be compromised, but Jedrowski is a good enough writer to gesture at the ways in which Janusz may not have made such a bad choice; he has almost certainly survived, his marriage to the fun-loving daughter of a high-ranking Party official both a protection and perhaps a thing enjoyable enough in itself.
Long Bright River, by Liz Moore: A genuinely exceptional crime novel, reminiscent of Dennis Lehane and Attica Locke, set in the drug- and prostitution-addled Philadelphia neighbourhood of Kensington. Our detective protagonist, Mickey, grew up in the area and has seen friends, cousins, neighbours, and her own parents and sister, fall prey to opiate addiction; keeping her patch safe is her biggest priority. Keeping her sister, Kacey, safe is equally important to her, but Kacey is a sex worker and a heroin addict, and Mickey is permanently worried about her. When it becomes clear that a serial killer is targeting Kensington’s sex workers, Mickey has to find the murderer and protect Kacey, even if it means going against orders. Her relationship with her former partner, Truman, is exquisitely drawn, as is her history with her ex-husband; the story of their marriage is an intelligent reinforcement of Moore’s exploration of how structural power is used against women, especially vulnerable ones. Not to be missed.
Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid: I was meant to love this, according to the people I know at its publisher (Bloomsbury), and it almost feels churlish not to have done so. It is a forthright and quite uncompromising look at the shifting dynamics between a liberal white woman who desperately wants to be liked, and the slightly younger black nanny of her children; Reid’s major success is to create an atmosphere where all of the characters are both irritating and sympathetic, where everyone—even those that are more irritating than others, like the white boyfriend who has a history of fetishizing black people—makes at least one valid point about the emotional dishonesty and manipulative behaviour of the other characters. Where it’s not particularly subtle is in the illustration of nanny Emira’s friendship circle, which seems to consist primarily of Sassy Black Girl Friends. Ultimately uneven, but thought-provoking.
Braised Pork, by An Yu: Gorgeous cover, no? Despite the red flecks, it’s not especially gory; more than anything, it reminded me of Murakami, which is a comparison I generally dislike but which does occasionally seem applicable. In Braised Pork, a young woman finds her husband dead in the bath, the only clue to his demise being a scrap of paper upon which he has drawn a fish with the head of a man. His widow sets out to find the source of the strange drawing, and finds herself re-examining her own childhood in the process, including her father’s abandonment of their family. For me, the clearly magical realist elements of the novel (the un-dreams she has where she’s swimming deeper and deeper into a black lake in search of the fish man; a long sequence in a remote Tibetan village where an elder has been carving the image for decades) sat uneasily alongside the more prosaic family drama. Like Murakami, Yu’s novel often feels meandering and purposeless, though there no doubt is a purpose. Not my cup of tea, but might well be for someone else.
The Street, by Ann Petry: Slated for republication by Virago Modern Classics, this was originally published in 1946 and was the first novel by a black woman to sell more than a million copies in America. Like much of what I’ve read from Virago recently, there is a fantastic sense of contemporaneity to it; the story of Lutie Johnson, who tries to keep herself and her son safe and their integrity intact, but who must contend with sexism, racism, and the devastating grind of poverty, is told with a fury so passionate and fresh that I wouldn’t have been surprised to find the ink still wet on the page. Petry’s work is clearly a frontrunner for a literary tradition that went on to encompass Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, and Tayari Jones. Frequently skirting melodrama but always redeemed by Petry’s absolutely clear, burning vision, it’s a gripping page-turner as well as a portrait of a woman trying to maintain sanity within a system that has been specifically designed to destroy her.
Agency, by William Gibson: It must be odd to be William Gibson. Society, and technology, has more or less arrived at a point that he wrote about as futuristic during his early career; he’s now indelibly known as a science fiction writer, but Agency—though it has all of the trappings of a techno-thriller and is, certainly, science fictional—is less world-of-tomorrow sf than world-of-three-minutes-from-now satire. It concerns the development of an autonomous AI system, originally created as a form of virtual handler for covert military operations, now stolen by a Silicon Valley firm and marketed as a PA called Eunice. There’s time travel (sort of, in a manner of speaking), and high-speed motorcycle chases, and a remote-control drone shaped like a radiator, and a lot of quick, slangy banter. It’s terrific fun and reasonably clever along with it, though I think Gibson’s ending is optimistic.
Threshold, by Rob Doyle: Nothing—no friend’s impassioned recommendation, no innate desire, no travel article—has ever, ever made me want to drop acid and go to a three-day rave at a Berlin nightclub. This book did. Doyle seems to have written a type of autofiction, one in which all he does for at least a decade and a half is travel around Europe, writing in a desultory fashion and taking a lot of drugs. As a human being, narrator-Doyle is faintly insufferable—he’s not good to women and remarkably solipsistic—but of course the relationship of narrator-Doyle to author-Doyle is indirect. Rachel Kushner writes, on the front cover, that she “
The Mercies, by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (6 Feb): I’m ever wary of covers like this one—it’s generally a dead giveaway that the publishers are attempting to ride the Essex Serpent wave, though sometimes (see The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock) it pays off. Millwood Hargrave’s first novel for adults (she’s a successful children’s/YA author) is based on the true story of a freak storm that killed forty men off the coast of a Norwegian island in 1617, and the subsequent imprisonment and trials for witchcraft that the women of the island suffered. Its relevance to the modern day is, perhaps, a tiny bit on the nose (yes, men dislike powerful women! Yes, religious mania is a figleaf for controlling sadists!) I was, however, moved by Millwood Hargrave’s description of the physical effects of grief and depression, and by her sensitive portrayal of the central (lesbian) romance. A wonderful historical yarn to curl up with on cold nights.
Rest and Be Thankful, by Emma Glass (19 March): Curious, this: Glass’s depiction of a NICU nurse who is overworked, desperately sleep-deprived, and already prone to chronic anxiety and depression is extremely affecting, but also feels very one-note. There is nothing in the book other than the protagonist Laura’s increasing inability to keep herself together, her physical deterioration (red, cracked hands and greasy hair) mirroring her mental and emotional decline. Her boyfriend, who leaves her, is clearly a dickhead, but one also struggles to blame him for wanting more out of his relationship than the miserable zombie he’s currently living with. Hints that Laura is struggling with a deeper trauma hidden in her past go some way towards clarifying her state of mind, but the final-page revelation feels slightly unearned. Perhaps if I read it a second time I would get more out of it.
My Dark Vanessa, by Kate Elizabeth Russell (31 March): I put off reading this (the hype! The overt Nabokov, specifically Lolita, intertext! The teacher/student romance thing!) I was, eventually, blown away by it. Russell gets everything so right: the way that English teacher Jacob Strane grooms fifteen-year-old Vanessa, making her feel special and clever, playing on her emotional intelligence to push her into wanting to be “cool” and “mature”, and therefore not reacting negatively when he at last touches her. The way that Vanessa, seventeen years later, struggles with revelations that Strane did this to other students; the way that, as she tells her therapist, she doesn’t see herself as a victim; the way that she has to tell it to herself as a love story—because if it isn’t, how can she bear it? I recognized so much of myself in Vanessa’s reactions and longings that it scared me: if the right (wrong) person had come along when I was fifteen, I was nearly as vulnerable as she was. A lot of girls are. Russell deals with an incredibly difficult, complex subject with the nuance and shading that it deserves, while never being unclear about the dreadful effect Strane has had on Vanessa’s life. Believe the hype.
