“Time was out of joint. The past suddenly became impotent, it had nothing for us to draw on; in the all-encompassing—or so we’d believed—archive of humanity, we couldn’t find a key to open this door.”
That’s from Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer. Reading it, I was surprised to find so many parallels between the fallout of a nuclear disaster and our present situation: doubt, confusion, fighting an invisible enemy, navigating our feelings without any precedent. At one point, a man recalls how those around him were acting as if in a war film (“It turned out that we were all searching for some form of behaviour that we were already familiar with”), and I thought about the eerie atmosphere that occurred each time my neighbours stood outside to clap for those on the ‘frontline’.
For me, there’s always been a time for creating that is separate from the time for witnessing, observing, and absorbing. I’ve been a little more porous than usual in 2020 and have spent most of the year doing the latter—swimming instead of reading or writing, soaking up the English Channel, memorizing that specific thing the light does at 8:30 p.m. on the Brighton seafront on a clear summer day.
Like everyone else, I travelled very little—up and down the same route from my front door to the beach and back. With international travel curtailed, I saw more of England than I ever would have thought. In the pre-Covid days, I went to Bath and loved it, despite it being posh and rainy (it has an unjustifiable number of excellent bookstores). I also drove to Cornwall and found all the light and magic and beauty everyone promised.
At the beginning of the year, I made a commitment to read only women. I started with Tori Amos’ Resistance, which laid a solid foundation for a new decade of defiance, protest, and growth. I reviewed books by Kapka Kassabova and Magda Szabo for The Calvert Journal. I also had a wild time contributing to their forthcoming ‘100 Best Books from the New East’—it got me thinking for the first time in years about my early experiences with literature in translation. I reviewed Bluebeard’s First Wife for Words Without Borders, which became my gateway drug to a whole host of South Korean writing.
I hacked away at a couple of other longstanding projects: a memoir about meeting my father and a short story that has been sitting in my drafts since 2014 about a man called Jerome who only eats nectarines. I started no fewer than 15 new poems, but the words simply aren’t coming out. Vaccines have been invented and approved quicker than these poems. I submitted a couple of pieces to places that rejected them. I took photographs of my city in its lockdown emptiness.
In January, when coronavirus was little more than a footnote in European news, I went to San Francisco. I saw hummingbirds for the first time. I bought a secondhand copy of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights and spent an evening debating the use of the word ‘incantatory’ on the cover. While I was there, I thought a lot about Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters. When she died later this year, I put her book by my bedside and read a poem a night (“remember / you can have what you ask for, ask for / everything”).
My favourite book I read this year: The Outline Trilogy by Rachel Cusk. Yes, this is three books, sorry.
My second favourite book: The Years by Annie Ernaux, trans. Alison L. Strayer. So good I read it twice.
Other exceptionally good books:
Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Jennifer Croft
The Vegetarian by Han Kang, trans. Deborah Smith
Chernobyl Prayer by Svetlana Alexievich, trans. Anna Gunin & Arch Tait
The White Album by Joan Didion
A book I read in a beach cottage in Cornwall while drinking wine and listening to Lana Del Rey, which created a kind of immersive 4D experience:
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
Short story collections that I loved, and that made me fall back in love with the short story:
Imaginary Museums by Nicolette Polek
Bluebeard’s First Wife by Ha Seong-nan, trans. Janet Hong
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Books that were critically acclaimed but I just couldn’t get into:
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein
Books I revisited after starting therapy again:
Powers of Horror and Tales of Love by Julia Kristeva, trans. Leon S. Roudiez
The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich
Hannah Arendt’s letters (Schreib doch mal 'hard facts' über Dich and Wahrheit gibt es nur zu zweien)
A book that challenged and changed me:
The Feminist and the Sex Offender by Erica Meiners and Judith Levine
A book I’m re-reading that is already so dog-eared and sticky-noted and written-in that you’d think I was back in my first year of university:
Living a Feminist Life by Sara Ahmed
An autobiography that was quite frankly all over the place, but also so very clearly a labour of love and anger:
Resistance by Tori Amos
A poetry book that made me excited about poetry again (also, the only book I read by a man—I got stuck on a train for some 7 hours during a storm and ran out of reading material—it happens):
Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky
Books piled up next to my bed for reading over the holidays:
Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson
Letters from Tove by Tove Jansson, trans. Sarah Death (What. A. Name!)
Binary Star by Sarah Gerard
The Pear Field by Nana Ekvtimishvili, trans. Elizabeth Heighway
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I went to the cinema twice in a mask. The first time was to see Matthew Bourne's The Red Shoes with a pretty woman who minded only a little bit when I told her the ballet was pre-recorded. You had to raise your hand for a drink, at which point an usher would come to your seat. They had red or white and it came in a plastic pint cup. Drinking was more difficult—if I lowered my mask too often, I thought I might endanger the lives of the pensioners also watching this ballet, but long intervals between sips meant they were less like sips and more like gulps. I later settled for a Mubi subscription.
A film I loved that caused prolonged weeping in public:
Little Women (2019), dir. Greta Gerwig
Documentaries with stunning cinematography that transported me out of my lockdown living room and into other worlds:
The Pit (Die Grube, 2019), dir. Hristiana Raykova
Waiting for the Sea (2020), dir. George Itzhak
The best documentary I watched all year:
Shooting the Mafia (2019), dir. Kim Longinotto
A very good documentary about Brexit, gentrification, racism, and so much more:
The Street (2019), dir. Zed Nelson
A film that absolutely delighted me and is now vying for the coveted Favourite Christmas Movie title:
8 Women (8 femmes, 2002), dir. François Ozon
My real Favourite Christmas Movie:
Charlie Brown’s Christmas
Two perfect films:
Carol (2015), dir. Todd Haynes
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), dir. Céline Sciamma
Two coming-of-age films I thoroughly enjoyed, but I can’t tell if that’s because they’re great or because I’m just a sucker for this genre:
Ladybird (2017), dir. Greta Gerwig
Clueless (1995), dir. Amy Heckerling
A film that felt like watching a disappointing romance through a dirty window pane:
Ammonite (2020), dir. Francis Lee
Obligatory Agnès Varda film:
Salut les Cubains (1964)
My stepmother, whose opinion I value quite highly, called 8 Women ‘depraved’, which has lead me to believe that living in Britain for the last 4 years has done irrevocable damage to my sense of humour. I also discovered I disagree with The Guardian head critic Peter Bradshaw on mostly everything, and that he reviews a disproportionate number of lesbian films.
I started watching The Crown but got bored. I started watching I May Destroy You and was riveted, but am taking my sweet old time finishing it because it is so very heavy. I watched both seasons of Fleabag in rapid succession and cannot wait to comfort-watch it for the rest of my life.
—
The best talks and readings I attended (from home):
Neil Gaiman reading spooky stories on Halloween from a windy, creaky house on the Isle of Skye
A conversation between Philippe Sands and Samantha Power, where Power was the picture of eloquence (which hadn’t entirely come through in her book I read earlier this year—The Education of an Idealist)
Olga Tokarczuk and Antonia Lloyd-Jones talking about translation and anger and wisdom
Still the only podcast I actually listen to (seriously, unless you are the woman from the aforementioned movie date, please stop sending me your podcast recommendations):
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I saw considerably less art than in previous years, but fulfilled a decade-long dream of visiting Barbara Hepworth’s studio in St. Ives.
I baked only twice: a pumpkin pie for Halloween and Christmas cookies in December, so I dodged the Great Flour Shortage of 2020. I bought chargrilled artichokes for a self-isolating neighbour with expensive taste. This same woman feeds macadamia nuts to the squirrels. I have never been able to afford macadamia nuts and, with my two liberal arts degrees, likely never will. It’s ok, she endured months of ‘Cornflake Girl’ bellowing through her floorboards, so we’re even.
Albums I listened to so much that Spotify informed me I’m in the top 0.1% of listeners, which is either cool or creepy:
Salt and Piano Salt EP - Angie McMahon
Other albums I listened to a lot:
From the Choir Girl Hotel, Little Earthquakes, and Under the Pink - Tori Amos
The Sensual World and Hounds of Love - Kate Bush
Thanks for the Dance - Leonard Cohen
Scriabin: 12 Etudes… - Matthieu Idmtal
Grae - Moses Sumney
Innumerable secondhand CDs and records - Nat King Cole
I painted my rental flat (because f*ck it, it’s 2020) while listening to this playlist.
—
On a very bad day, I tried to cheer myself up by going into the garden to feel the sun on my face but opened the door to find a dead blackbird. On a very good day, I fell in love.
I tweeted about some of my childhood experiences of harmful immigration laws. Public vulnerability was scary, but the support and resonance was—well, there are no words. I also tweeted about a lot of more mundane things, like sea swimming, that statue of Mary Wollstonecraft, and my increasingly pretentious taste in wine.
The pandemic revealed new feelings, too. I learned about ‘anticipatory grief’ and the origin of the word ‘doldrums’. I also experienced a new type of heartache, watching (or, more accurately, listening on the phone) as bits of my Nan were eaten away by dementia. She loves children and blueberry picking and singing loudly at church, and makes the warmest wool socks. Like all the best grandmothers, she has cookie tins filled with buttons in the sewing room. A few years ago, after decades of being together, she and my grandfather got married on their lunch break without telling anyone what they were doing. My nan wore a good Sunday dress and packed tuna sandwiches. She laughs a lot when I retell this story but sometimes adds “whose wedding was that?”.
A poem about self-care that I come back to every year around this time: Questions to Ask Yourself Before Giving Up
An evening I give myself every year around this time: The recording of ‘A King’s Christmas’ lessons and carols service from 2013, the final year I was there in person
And finally, the best song to ring in the New Year: Fuck the Government, I Love You