You could say that Dickens lived like one of his own characters—always on, the Energizer Bunny of empathy and enjoyment. Good enough was never good enough. Wherever he was or whatever he was doing, life was histrionic, either a birthday party or a funeral. And, when you read the recollections of his contemporaries and the responses to his books from nineteenth-century readers, you can’t doubt his charisma or the impact his writing had. The twenty-four-year-old Henry James met Dickens in 1867, during Dickens’s second trip to America, and he remembered “how tremendously it had been laid upon young persons of our generation to feel Dickens, down to the soles of our shoes.”
But even the Bunny sooner or later runs out of room, hits a wall, or tumbles off the edge of the table, and Dickens had his crisis. It was in the cards.
You can copyright a character, if it’s yours; you cannot copyright the love of a character, and why should you want to?
“Anyway, a proper pandemic might be quite good for the environment,” says a character in Sarah Moss’s 2009 debut novel, Cold Earth. “Depopulation from the plague did wonders for medieval fauna and flora.” More than a decade later, The Fell—which was published in the UK in 2021—explores that “proper pandemic” scenario through the lives of five characters in central England’s Peak District during a COVID-19 lockdown.
These two works bookend the author’s oeuvre, embracing themes that resurface throughout both fiction and non-fiction: death and survival, fractured and functioning systems, homes and stopping-places, community and isolation, and history and narrative. These themes’ consistent appearance in her work magnifies the tangible links across and between narratives.
Amy Liptrot’s first book, The Outrun, chronicled her retreat from London and alcoholism to the islands around Orkney, where she had grown up on a cliffside farm. The book became a prizewinning bestseller, and her new essayistic memoir, The Instant, picks up where it left off, finding Liptrot in her mid-30s, sober, strong and single.
Intentionally or not, “I Was Better Last Night” is very quilt-like. Fierstein shares his life less in conventional chapters than in colorful patches: 59 of them, stitched together with photos and a plush index. The sum of this is warm and enveloping and indeed two-sided: One is a raw, cobwebby tale of anger, hurt, indignation and pain; flip it over and you get billowing ribbons of humor, gossip and fabulous, hot-pink success.
The Garden of Eden. My ancestors’ graves. A watermelon field in Central Texas where my father once slept.