Three Books
I cannot tell you how taken I am by Theresa Kishkan’s The Art of Looking Back. I have read an advanced galley, but you can pre-order online or at your favourite indie. Honest, vulnerable, insightful, poetic, authentic, meditative, are all words popping into my head as I prepare to win you over to this book. It’s also uncomfortable in parts as it asks questions in a consideration of a life well-lived but not without inner turmoil. How do we look back on who we were as young women? What kind of generosity and grace might we offer our younger selves?
If you’ve always wondered about women depicted in paintings (and you know I have, beginning with my first book All the God-Sized Fruit), and the effect of the male gaze on women, this book gives you another view. As a young woman, Kishkan posed as an artist’s model. “I see him taking me in,” she says, then asks, “Was I taken in? I was.” Years later she looks back with wisdom and clarity and examines her relationship with the artist, with the paintings of her, and with her own self, now and then. She says, “I am trying to find out who I was in the light of that gaze, and before it, what foundation held me in place in the whirling years…”
We have been on similar paths of interest at times, perhaps, though we’ve never met. Interested in art, probably reading the same books back in the day — Ways of Seeing by John Berger was such a big one. So it’s interesting to see where we converge and where we diverge. We’ve both written in various genres, are of similar age. I felt reading this book that looks back so keenly, so delicately, to be cathartic. It helps to dwell for a while, before asking, what next?
And one other note — that this book is timely in that we are now in a moment when women’s bodies, depictions of women, are being stolen, gender biases are baked into AI etc etc. So this careful and thoughtful navigation through the feelings and facts of framing and resolution, looking and being seen, complicity and agency, remorse and reclaiming, could not be more important to consider.
Next, I’d just like to quickly mention two books at the very top of my TBR pile: Peter Darbyshire’s The Wonder Lands War (Book 4 in the Cross series but which can be read as a standalone). The first sentence: “I found Alice again by getting killed in a Paris library by a strange angel.”
If you haven’t read Has the World Ended Yet? I highly recommend. And then, give the Cross series a try!
Next up is Definitely Thriving by Kerry Clare of Pickle Me This fame. A huge supporter of books and book stores and authors, and generally a delight of a human being — this is the novel that currently everyone is talking about! I’ve been closing my eyes at all the reviews passing by on my feed so that I can have the joy of being freshly dazzled by it. You should too!
The first two sentences: “A nun’s cell: this is what Clemence had been expecting. She’d signed the lease on the basis of blurry photos with resolution so low it was hard to make out the details.”
You’ll be hearing more about these books from me, but I think one small thing we can do in this world is talk about the books we love, that we’re reading, that we want to read.
As a writer, one of the beautiful parts of this existence is that other writers become friends, and are very often unmet friends. Sometimes you even get to meet those writers whose books you admire. You get to cheer them on and they cheer you on. The way the world is right now this feels like a pretty amazing and wild gift! I’m here for it.
