Those “long hours” of reading and research that Callil describes dominate my working life. I’m clinically incapable of passing a second-hand bookshop—or a charity shop with a single shelf of sad-looking, dog-eared paperbacks—without diving in for a quick scan of the spines. “How do you know what you’re looking for?” someone asked me recently. Certain, now-long-defunct imprints, those I’ve come to associate with a particular quality of writing, or an editor whose taste was second to none. An author’s name that doesn’t ring a bell. Or one that does. Elizabeth Mavor, for example, whose enchanting, eccentric fourth novel, A Green Equinox—the story of an antiquarian book dealer named Hero Kinoull, who first falls in love with her married lover’s wife, and then his mother—was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1973 but had been long out of print by the time I gleefully found a copy. I’d been looking for a while, especially as the handful for sale online were priced at three figures. (Incidentally, if your interest is piqued but your pockets aren’t deep, don’t despair. McNally Editions is re-issuing it later this year.)
Most of the time, my work feels more like that of a detective than an editor. Falling down endless online rabbit holes is an occupational hazard. I read old reviews in digitised newspaper archives, and trawl obituaries, looking for interesting titbits. Internet Archive—the non-profit digital library that houses millions of books—is an indispensable resource, not least because so many of the titles it holds can’t be easily found IRL. But none of this would work without access to various bricks-and-mortar collections, especially the London Library. You’ll find me in the stacks, rootling out books that—as revealed by the stampings inside—no one’s read since the 1980s, or earlier.
All of which makes me lucky, in one respect. Far too often, women who present with hard-to-diagnose illnesses are told that the symptoms are no big deal, that the problem is in their head. They spend years going from doctor to doctor, in a desperate search for someone, anyone, who’s willing to help. This has not been my experience. From the first, doctors took my condition seriously, sometimes more seriously than I did. They pushed me along to the nation’s greatest experts, at the finest medical institutions. My insurance paid large sums for tests and treatments; my family and friends were patient and supportive. All the while, I was able to keep doing what needed to be done: write a book, raise a child, teach my classes.
But none of this gets around a single, stubborn fact. “You are the only person known to have this exact mutation,” Ombrello explains. “I haven’t seen any reports in reference populations of this mutation, and I don’t have anyone that I’ve had referred to me or that I’ve seen in my patient cohort that has this mutation.” In other words, I am one of a kind, and therefore a medical curiosity. Doctors often blurt out that my situation is “fascinating” before catching themselves; they’re aware that nobody really wants to be fascinating in quite this way. Thanks to advances in genetic sequencing, though, researchers are increasingly able to identify one-offs like me.
When I was growing up, my family would occasionally buy canned or boxed chicken broth, and my mom would always say, “but it’s not as good as the real thing.” The real thing being, of course, homemade: that golden, translucent, endlessly versatile nectar with tiny circles of fat shimmering on its surface.
I was raised to love this liquid, the best versions of which ensure that chicken soup tastes nuanced and complex rather than just salty. I still, as often as possible, make giant batches of homemade stock in the biggest pot I have, then freeze it for future meals. I even wrote about the virtues of homemade chicken stock in my upcoming cookbook, The Don’t Panic Pantry Cookbook. But when I set about trying to explain, in the recipe’s headnote, why homemade stock was better than store-bought, I realized that I didn’t actually know. I wondered, How can two things that are supposed to be the same, taste and feel so wildly different?
Writing on the literary representation of women in A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf mused that "What one must do to bring her to life was to think poetically and prosaically at one and the same moment, thus keeping in touch with fact [...] but not losing sight of fiction either — that she is a vessel in which all sorts of spirits and forces are coursing and flashing perpetually."
After Sappho, a brilliant debut work from Selby Wynn Schwartz, takes Woolf at her instructive word. Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, the book is partly a love letter to Woolf and the female poet Sappho, partly a work of literary criticism and partly a work of speculative biography. It's innovatively narrated from a perspective that might be called the first person choral, levitating among multiple consciousnesses of women writers, painters and actors who channeled the spirit of Sappho in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Already a finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, as well as a co-host of The Poet Salon podcast, it’s hard to believe that Judas Goat is Gabrielle Bates’s debut collection. The two-score poems within display a sensitive and assured voice and a candid exploration of human relationships and the self via mythologies, philosophies, and vulnerable narratives. The title suggests the stakes of such an excavation: the ostensibly domesticated Judas goat guides other animals to their end yet remains free and safe—or relatively free and safe, with a reality that is far more complex. The metaphor asks a pressing question: at what price do we fit into a society that may value us only as a tool to achieve a desperate, dreadful outcome? How are we haunted by our past experiences, and how do they impact our actions, and sometimes painful inactions?
Most of us worry—maybe even obsess, if we’re being honest—about our future as we emerge from a global pandemic and continue to grapple with the threat of climate change. In Anchor, her third poetry collection, Rebecca Aronson explores these issues on both the personal and the universal level as she writes about the death of her parents; her own mortality; and, ultimately, expands her grief to include our dying planet.
While Taken touches on sensitive social fault lines, it is primarily a visceral evocation of just how hard it can be for women with ambition to succeed in a career in which they are destined to fail because of their gender. Still.