![]() ![]() I loved that show, at least until it got unbearably soppy, but I love this book a lot more and it would make a far better TV series. If you watch a lot of streaming TV you will recognize it from Younger, the show about an “old woman” of forty who tries to pass herself off as a groovy literary publishing assistant in her twenties. So she starts her story as a publishing assistant in New York, a familiar territory even if you have never been there. And although you would think someone like me would have nothing in common with her, in fact she conveys so wonderfully what it is like to be in a world which itself does not exist, the same fantasmagoria I and thousands, millions, of others have been experiencing for some time and suspect might be one of the main reasons why everything is so decisively ****** up. ![]() ![]() OK, it’s a memoir about a woman living her life today, right now, she is in her twenties and young and gorgeous, she should be having it all but it turns out her world is every bit as bizarre as the neo-Jurassic which seems to be enfolding us at an ever- increasing rate. This is even stranger when you realize what it is about. (Note however there is a hardback edition with a truly horrible cover, don’t bother buying that one! See below) It’s strange how some books seem to get a buzz right away, you don’t know where it comes from or how it has reached you but there it is, and my favourite New York literary magazine says to click if you want a special deal so you click and a very short time later in the Blue Mountains near Sydney (late ravaged with fire, flood, storm, power and phone outages – we struggle to survive as if in some archaic era) you open a parcel and there is this book, so beautifully produced in pale blue hardback, a sensational cover with raised embossing, you can’t stop touching it, title and author’s name look as if they have been stuck on with labelling tape and you open it and you CANNOT PUT IT DOWN. Yes, sure, names have been changed … places disguised … the usual drill. So unexpected, so immediate, so funny, so intelligent, so scary. I love the sense of unvarnished, or at least only once coated, reality that comes with an honest-to-goodness memoir, as far as that can ever really exist. I have issues around “truth”, pretence and ethics. I’ve written a lot about it in various posts on this blog. I’ve been trawling through the world of memoir for several years now, with degrees of determination. ![]()
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