Yu explains: "This book is really about people not seeing other people as having their own subjectivity. When you make someone the background, whether that's an Asian character, a female love interest, an older person... you take away some of their humanity."
“Actually, I couldn’t really hear the swifts,” the 94-year-old admits. Something to do with their pitch, and his failing ears. “My hearing,” Attenborough growls, using the breathy, mournful voice that often accompanies footage of an ageing alpha getting supplanted by a younger fitter animal, “is not what it was.”
North Dakota’s most famous restaurant critic has been eating at home lately. It’s not that there’s nowhere to go in and around Grand Forks, where she lives and writes. Her governor, Doug Burgum, has allowed restaurants and bars to stay open even though the state has had the third-highest death rate from Covid-19 over the past week.
It is not that Marilyn Hagerty is running out of steam at 94, either. She files three columns for the Grand Forks Herald each week, even though she has officially retired from the paper “two or three times,” as she puts it. She had already been retired for at least two decades when, in 2012, she wrote a column that chronicled the arrival of her town’s first Olive Garden.
When the house was complete I papered the walls with gift wrap and used table mats as rugs. I made my own dolls from clay and wire. As I strung their limbs together, a babysitting neighbour commented on my handiwork: who was going to live in my dolls’ house?
This is the story of those who are often underrepresented and understated in literature, the uncomplicated who simply don’t make for engaging subjects. And yet, it cannot be emphasised enough how vibrant, charming, adoring and witty this book is.
Your figure looks younger than it is.
A story I’ll dissect in days and weeks to come,
until I know by heart every syllable.