Kamila Shamsie

Kamila Shamsie: let’s have a year of publishing only women – a provocation

It is clear that there is a gender bias in publishing houses and the world of books. Well, enough. Why not try something radical? Make 2018 the Year of Publishing Women, in which no new titles should be by men

Kamila Shamsie
Friday 5 June 2015 12.45 BST

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everal years ago, Martin Amis chaired a literary festival panel on “The Crisis of American Fiction” with Richard Ford, Jay McInerney and Junot Díaz. I was in the audience, and halfway through the discussion leaned over to the person sitting next to me and said: “Clearly the crisis of American fiction is that there are no women in it.” It’s not just that there weren’t any women on the stage. In the entire discussion, which lasted nearly an hour, there was no mention of Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Annie Proulx, Anne Tyler, Donna Tartt, Jhumpa Lahiri or any other contemporary female writer. A single reference toEudora Welty was the only acknowledgment that women in the US have ever had anything to do with the world of letters. Díaz, near the end of the hour, made the point that the conversation had centred on white American males, but it was too little, too late.

I think of this panel when reading yet another article or survey about the gender imbalance that exists in publishing houses, in terms of reviews, top positions in publishing houses, literary prizes etc. The issue can’t of course be broken down into a story of fair-minded women versus bigoted men. Like any effective system of power – and patriarchy is, over time and space, the world’s most effective system of power – the means of keeping the power structure intact is complex. One area in which this complexity can be examined is via literary prizes, which carry increasing weight in a book’s chance of success.

As a snapshot, let’s look at the Man Booker prize over the last five years. Ever since the women’s prize for fiction – formerly the Orange, now the Baileys – was set up 20 years ago in response to an all–male Booker shortlist, the Booker has been the prize to which the most attention is paid in gender terms, and the question of the prize’s judges and gender came up last year when only three women were on a longlist of 13. In response, one of the judges Sarah Churchwellsaid: “We read what publishers submit to us … [If] publishers only submit a fraction of women, then that is a function of systemic institutional sexism in our culture.” So I asked the Booker administrators how many of the books submitted in the last five years have been written by women. The answer was, slightly under 40%. This isn’t an issue around the Booker alone. I’ve been uncomfortable with the imbalance between male and female writers in terms of the books that get submitted for prizes that I’m judging on a number of occasions.

In the five years in which slightly under 40% of the submitted books have been written by women, the percentage of women on the longlist has been slightly over 40%. The percentage of women on the shortlist has been 46%. The percentage of women who go on to win the prize has been exactly 40%. In this period, although four out of five of the chairs of the Booker juries have been men, there has been an almost even split of male and female jurors. The picture that starts to emerge from these statistics is one of judges who judge without gender bias but are hamstrung by publishers who submit with a strong tilt towards books by men. But, as is so often the case with statistics, there are other figures that complicate the story. The author Nicola Griffith recently published a study of prizewinning books on both sides of the Atlantic, broken down by the gender of their protagonists; it revealed that in the last 15 years, 12 of the Booker-winning novels have had male protagonists, two have had female protagonists, and one has had both male and female protagonists. The Booker does well compared with the Pulitzer across the Atlantic, which has had no female protagonist among its 15 winning books.

I could go on with the statistics and observations – the 64 male versus 36 female authors who make up the World Book Night picks of the last five years; the gendered decisions about how to package and describe male versus female authors; a recap of the Vida statistics that show how much more space male writers and reviewers receive in literary publications on either side of the Atlantic; the far greater propensity for male writers to pick other male writers when asked to recommend books. But at this point, I’m going to assume that the only people who really doubt that there is a gender bias going on are those who stick with the idea that men are better writers and better critics, and that when men recommend books by men it is fair literary judgment, while when women recommend books by women it is either a political position or woolly feminine judgment. To these people I have nothing to say except, go away and read some Toni Morrison.

Enough. Across the board, enough. Let’s agree that things have improved over the last 50 years, even over the last 20, and then let’s start to ask why. Was it simply the passage of time? Should we all sit around while the world continues on its slow upward trend towards equality? Or should we step outside that fictional narrative of progress and ask what actually helped to change literary culture in the UK? Two things come to mind: the literary presses of the 70s, of which Virago is the most notable; and the women’s prize for fiction. In part, what both the presses and the prize did was to create a space for women in a male-dominated world, giving voice and space to those who wouldn’t find them elsewhere.

I would argue that is time for everyone, male and female, to sign up to a concerted campaign to redress the inequality. Last year a number of readers, critics and at least one literary journal, the Critical Flame, signed up to a “Year of Reading Women” (for the Critical Flame it was female writers and writers of colour). Why not take it a step further? Why not have a Year of Publishing Women: 2018, the centenary of women over the age of 30 getting the vote in the UK, seems appropriate.

Of course, there will be many details to work out, but the basic premise of my “provocation” is that none of the new titles published in that year should be written by men. I’ve been considering literary fiction so far but other groups within fiction – and non-fiction – publishing could gain from signing up too. The knock-on effect of a Year of Publishing Women would be evident in review pages and blogs, in bookshop windows and front-of-store displays, in literature festival lineups, in prize submissions. We must learn from the suffragettes that it’s not always necessary or helpful to be polite about our campaigns. If some publishing houses refused to sign up, then it would be for the literary pages and booksellers and bloggers and festivals to say they wouldn’t be able to give space to the male writers who were being published that year. Many male writers would, I’m sure, back the campaign and refuse to submit their books for publication in the given year, while also taking an active part by reading, reviewing and recommending the books that were published.

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Taking on one form of exclusion while continuing to replicate others should be an unthinkable idea. Vida has recognised that power privilege on either side of the Atlantic is not merely about gender but also about race – they now have an annual women of colour count alongside their annual women count. That I’ve failed to dwell on race until now doesn’t mean I don’t recognise it as an even more lopsided and neglected matter than gender within publishing. And that’s by no means the only other area of exclusion. If we are to truly claim that we’re pushing back against inequality it’s essential that the build up to a 2018 Year of PublishingWomen should include debates and commitments to ensure that the YPW doesn’t end up looking like the year of publishing young, straight, white, middle-class metropolitan women.

What would it look like, this changed landscape of publishing in 2018? Actually, the real question is what would happen in 2019? Would we revert to status quo or would a year of a radically transformed publishing landscape change our expectations of what is normal and our preconceptions of what is unchangeable? I suggest we find out.

• This is an edited version of one of The National Conversation pieces published by the Writers’ Centre Norwich.

THE GUARDIAN

ELENA FERRANTE’S NEW BOOK: ART WINS

By Joan Acocella

 , SEPTEMBER 1, 2015

A few paragraphs into Elena Ferrante’s new novel, “The Story of the Lost Child,” the final volume of the writer’s so-called Neapolitan tetralogy—the first three volumes are “My Brilliant Friend,” “The Story of a New Name,” and “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay”—Lena, the narrator, says that now we’re coming to “the most painful part of the story.” Really? It’s going to get worse? When we last saw Lena, she was walking out on a decent husband and two daughters to run off with a man who we know is going to betray her. The little girls scream and weep and hang onto her skirt, begging her not to go. “I couldn’t bear it,” she writes. “I knelt down, I held them around the waist, I said: All right, I won’t go, you are my children, I’ll stay with you.” This calms them down. Then she goes to her bedroom and packs the suitcase she will take when, a few days later, she drops the girls off with a neighbor, says she’ll be back shortly, and leaves for the train station.

Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, unlike other long historical novels we might compare it with (“Buddenbrooks,” “Remembrance of Things Past”), does not go to a lot of trouble to span generations or social classes. Most of its characters come from a single cluster of working-poor families living in a noisy, hot slum on the outskirts of Naples between 1950 and 2010. Ferrante supplies a dramatis personae at the beginning of the first volume—the shoemaker’s family, the Cerullos, Fernando, Nunzia, Lila, and Rino; the mad widow’s family, the Cappuccios, Melina (the widow), Ada, and Antonio; the grocer’s family, the Carraccis, Don Achille, Maria, Stefano, Pinuccia, and Alfonso; the train conductor’s family, the Sarratores, Donato, Lidia, Nino, Marisa, et al.—and, apart from births and deaths, the cast hasn’t changed much by the fourth volume. All these people are fantastically enmeshed. They practically can’t walk to the corner without running into someone they’ve slept with or beaten up.

But no two characters are more bound together than Lila, the shoemaker’s daughter, and Lena, the porter’s daughter. Both were born in 1944; they meet at the age of six, when they are entering first grade. Lena is blond and plump and inclined to do as she’s told. Lila is dark and skinny and ferocious. “Her quickness of mind was like a hiss, a dart, a lethal bite.” Everyone’s afraid of Lila, and most of them are in love with her, too, but none more than Lena, and Lila loves Lena back, though “love” is too narrow a word for it. The two envy each other, compete with each other. They help and gravely harm each other. In “The Story of the Lost Child,” they get pregnant at the same time; they go to their doctor’s appointments together, and each holds the other’s hand during her pelvic examination. For much of that book, Lena’s family lives upstairs from Lila’s, and their children eat and sleep now at one apartment, now at the other. You could say (as Rachel Cusk more or less does, in her Times Book Review essay this week) that they are two halves of one complete woman, but actually each is complete in herself. And it is through their interaction that Ferrante says what she has to say about the world.

She has two subjects, basically. The first is women. This is the most thoroughgoing feminist novel I have ever read. (I will call the four books one novel. They are, though the first volume, at least, could be read without the others.) In the person of Lila, we have an embodiment of female beauty like something out of Titian. At the end of “My Brilliant Friend,” this girl, sixteen years old and due to get married, to Stefano, that afternoon, asks Lena to give her a bath. Lena speaks of her inner turmoil at being asked to rest her gaze

on the childish shoulders, on the breasts and stiffly cold nipples, on the narrow hips and the tense buttocks, on the black sex, on the long legs, and on the tender knees, on the curved ankles, on the elegant feet; and to act as if it’s nothing, when instead everything is there, present, in the poor dim room, amid the worn furniture, on the uneven, water-stained floor. … I washed her with slow, careful gestures, first letting her squat in the tub, then asking her to stand up: I still have in my ears the sound of the dripping water, and the impression that the copper of the tub had a consistency not different from Lila’s flesh, which was smooth, solid, calm. I had a confusion of feelings and thoughts: embrace her, weep with her, kiss her, pull her hair, laugh, pretend to sexual experience and instruct her in a learned voice, distancing her with words just at the moment of greatest closeness. But in the end there was only the hostile thought that I was washing her, from her hair to the soles of her feet, early in the morning, just so that Stefano could sully her in the course of the night. I imagined her naked as she was at that moment, entwined with her husband, in the bed in the new house, while the train clattered under their windows and his violent flesh entered her with a sharp blow, like the cork pushed by the palm into the neck of a wine bottle.

As Ferrante makes clear here, a woman’s sexual allure will not get her much. Lila never liked sex. (Her wedding night is a violent rape scene.) As for Lena, she does like sex, and, in a touching passage, she says to her old boyfriend Antonio—whose heart she broke for the sake of the no-good Nino she’s running away with at the end of “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay”—that it was he who awakened her to it: “He was the discovery of excitement, he was the pit of the stomach that grew warm, that opened up, that turned liquid, releasing a burning indolence.” But, as she goes on to tell him, nothing ever fulfilled that expectation. At the end of the book, Lena is alone, and Lila, no doubt, is, too.

Yet there is no repudiation of the trappings of femininity: the dolls, the bracelets, the buttons and bows. The book fairly teems with women’s things, women’s bodies, which, furthermore, are imagined as being in a state of constant flow, as if they were part of some piece of French écriture féminine. Lena again and again has visions that her mother, whom she mostly hates, has crawled inside her body and is kicking around inside there. Lila has something worse, a condition she calls “dissolving boundaries”: it seems to her that edges of things melt, and their innards squirt and slosh into each other. Do you remember, Lila asks Lena, that night on Ischia, when you all said how beautiful the sky was? To her, it wasn’t beautiful: “I smelled an odor of rotten eggs, eggs with a greenish-yellow yolk inside the white and inside the shell, a hard-boiled egg cracked open. I had in my mouth poisoned egg stars, their light had a white, gummy consistency, it stuck to your teeth, along with the gelatinous black of the sky, I crushed it with disgust, I tasted a crackling of grit. Am I clear? Am I making myself clear?”

As plenty of readers will have heard by now, “Elena Ferrante” is a pen name. Apart from the information in the jacket bio—that she is a woman and was born in Naples—we know nothing about the author. (There is an interview with her by Sandro and Sandra Ferri in the Spring, 2015, issue of The Paris Review, but it gives no further biographical details.) It seems to me unquestionable, though, that these books were written not just by a female but by one who has been pregnant. Lila says that, if she didn’t stay alert, the world would undergo a huge inundation: “The waters would break through, a flood would rise, carrying everything off in clots of menstrual blood, in cancerous polyps, in bits of yellowish fiber.” In fact, at this point in the novel waters might indeed be breaking. Lila and Lena are both heavily pregnant, and they are sitting in a rocking car in the middle of Naples, where they have taken refuge from an earthquake, the Irpinia earthquake of 1980. (The book tracks world events closely. We hear about the Red Brigades, Chernobyl, the World Trade Center.) All around them, gas mains are exploding, buildings are collapsing; a cemetery is breaking off the mainland and falling into the sea.

Here, Ferrante has used a catastrophic real-life event to exemplify—indeed, culminate—her sense of women’s undefended boundaries, but the matter comes up again and again, even in modest circumstances. At one point, Lena’s daughter Dede, now a young woman, who for years has avoided any physical contact with her—she’s another one who fears being invaded—breaks her rule and goes and sits in her mother’s lap. Lena describes the feeling of her daughter’s warm bottom, the “wide hips,” against her thighs. To me, that was almost as unsettling as the earthquake.

Much of the thrill of the four books lies just in this elastic back and forth between realism and hallucination. No one is a more careful realist than Ferrante. When Lena’s husband, in their kitchen, gets ready to punch her in the face, Ferrante takes time to tell us about the hum of the refrigerator and the drip of the faucet in the background. And her general faithfulness to reality encourages us to stay with her as she veers off into hallucination. Some scenes, just by their tone and pacing, and by what they omit as much as by what they include, seem to take place in slow motion or under water or on another planet. It’s not that things are askew. The very air is different. This, Ferrante seems to say, is what happens in the world of women, and though much of the book is devoted to women’s more frequently discussed problems—such as how they are supposed to go out to work and raise the kids at the same time, and, if they do have work, work they care about, how come this still seems to them secondary to their relationship with a man?—it is the exploration of the women’s mental underworld that makes the book so singular an achievement in feminist literature; indeed, in all literature.

Ferrante’s other subject is language. Insofar as the book is realist, the critical thing in it is the neighborhood: the poverty, the ignorance, the unremitting violence. The only way to gain any power or happiness is to get out, and the only way to do that is via schooling, the learning of words, and not the words your parents speak—that’s dialect—but standard Italian. Apart from femaleness, there is nothing in the book more important than this. From page to page, in passages of dialogue, Ferrante tells us (and then so does the excellent translator, Ann Goldstein, who is also the head of the copy department at The New Yorker) if someone is speaking standard Italian and the other is speaking dialect, so that we can understand what is going on between them, and then, if anyone switches, as they may do, what that means.

Basically, what the linguistic difference means is whether the person is going to remain in the neighborhood and—to put it in female terms, Ferrante’s terms—get pregnant every two years, and get beaten up by her husband if dinner is late, or whether she’s going to escape this. Both Lila and Lena understand the situation early on. When they are twelve and have the chance to go to middle school—where you can perfect your Italian and even learn Latin, and also write essays and read books—both of them are desperate to go. But first you must pass an exam, and taking the exam costs money, and Lila’s family is marginally poorer than Lena’s. Also, Lila’s father fails to see why a girl needs an education, as Lena’s father, for some reason, does not. So Lila is told that she can’t continue her schooling. This is the fork in the road for the two girls, and it is marked by the book’s first serious moral crime. Lila, with all her powers of seduction, suggests to Lena that they play hooky one morning and walk across the city to the harbor, to the sea, which they have never seen. Lena agrees, as she always does to Lila’s mad plans. But on the appointed morning, when they set out, Lila begins acting strange. She slows down; she keeps looking behind her, as if she’s afraid they’re being followed. Her hand starts to sweat. Suddenly, a storm breaks, and Lila insists that they go back. This baffles Lena—Lila is never afraid of anything—but they run back home, and Lena gets a beating. The next day, Lila inspects Lena’s bruises:

“All they did was beat you?”

“What should they have done?”

“They’re still sending you to study Latin?”

I looked at her in bewilderment.

Was it possible? She had taken me with her hoping that as a punishment my parents would not send me to middle school?

Yes, presumably, and then she repented. For the rest of the novel, that ambivalence never lets up. From middle school, Lena keeps on going, through university. She becomes a writer—of feminist novels! Along the way, Lila helps her. She encourages her, praises her. Once she gets married and has some money, she buys Lena’s schoolbooks, and not used ones but new ones. “My brilliant friend,” she calls her. She also mocks her and, for long periods, stops speaking to her. She knows that the more learning Lena has, the more this will separate them. But her feelings are also in accord with the old, primitivist formula whereby the less refined something is, the truer it is.

Lena works ceaselessly, in school and later. Her books make her famous. And sadly, in the dark of night, she too trusts the old formula. She feels she can never truly write well because she lacks Lila’s wild, prodigal spirit. Lila, she thinks, “possessed intelligence and didn’t put it to use but, rather, wasted it, like a great lady for whom all the riches in the world are merely a sign of vulgarity.” If, on occasion, Lena thinks she has written well, that’s because she has somehow captured Lila’s spirit, made “space for her in me.” (This is why, in “The Story of the Lost Child,” Lena has moved back into her natal slum. She feels that she needs to be near Lila in order to do her work.) When she’s not worried about whether she’s been able to absorb Lila into her books, she worries that Lila will turn out books of her own.

Of course, Lila can’t produce a book, but she does write little things now and then. In the second volume of the series, when she gets married, she gives Lena a tin box tied with a piece of string—her writings, she says. She doesn’t want her husband to find them. Neither must Lena ever read them. Lila is, of course, no sooner out of sight than Lena opens the box and begins poring over the eight notebooks it contains. They are poignant: Lila practicing Italian, penning descriptions of things (a leaf, a pot), recording what she thought of a movie she saw in the church hall. But halfway down a page, she will lose patience and fill the rest of the space with drawings: “twisted trees, humped, smoking mountains, grim faces.” For weeks, Lena studies the notebooks, “learning by heart the passages I liked, the ones that thrilled me, … the ones that humiliated me.” Finally, one night, she leaves the house with the box under her arm:

I stopped on the Solferino bridge to look at the lights filtered through a cold mist. I placed the box on the parapet, and pushed it slowly, a little at a time, until it fell into the river, as if it were her, Lila in person, plummeting, with her thoughts, words, the malice with which she struck back at anyone, the way she appropriated me, as she did every person or thing or event or thought that touched her.

This person that Lena loves more than anything in the world: she is trying to kill her. And in keeping with the book’s logic, she is doing it by killing her words.

In “The Story of the Lost Child,” something very terrible happens to Lila (see the book’s title), and one day, after laboring for years under her sorrow, she simply disappears. Her son, Rino, calls Lena, now living in Turin. Everything Lila owns, he says, is gone from the apartment. As Lena understands, this is not because Lila needed those things but because she wanted to erase herself. She even scissored herself out of the photos of herself with Rino. Lena, who had been stalled in her work, now starts to write again, to prevent Lila’s self-annihilation. To Lila’s oppressive disorder—the menstrual clots, the yellow gobbets, the things flying apart—she will oppose her own, once-despised instinct for order. Dispersal will meet containment; dialect, Italian. This is an old literary trick, or at least as old as Proust: to tell a story of pain and defeat and then, at the end, say that it will all be redeemed by art, by a book—indeed, the book you are reading. Lena will write for months and months, for as long as it takes, she says, to give Lila “a form whose boundaries won’t dissolve.” She will thus calm her friend, and herself—and, to reach beneath the metaphor, rescue life from grief, clarity from chaos, without denying the existence of grief and chaos. She pulls her chair up to her desk. “We’ll see who wins this time,” she says. Art wins. We win.

Joan Acocella has written for The New Yorker, reviewing dance and books, since 1992, and became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998.

THE NEW YORKER

Who Is Elena Ferrante?

By GIDEON LEWIS-KRAUS, MEGHAN O’ROURKE

and EMILY GOULDAUG. 22, 2014

The writer known by that name has never been photographed, interviewed in person or even made a public appearance, but a collection of fiercely candid novels has earned her (him?) recognition as one of the keenest observers of Italian society. On the eve of the publication of “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,” the much-anticipated third volume in the author’s Neapolitan series, three admirers celebrate this elusive talent.

The 100 best nonfiction books: No 22 – A Grief Observed by CS Lewis (1961)

This powerful study of loss asks: ‘Where is God?’, and explores the feeling of solitude and sense of betrayal that even non-believers will recognise

Robert McCrum
Monday 27 June 2016

“N

o one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.” From its famous opening line, A Grief Observed propelled its readers into a no-man’s-land of mourning and loss. It dramatises bereavement and ruthlessly confronts the desolate survivor with an insistent and overwhelming question: “Where is God?”

Lewis’s answer to this existential conundrum resonates through the rest of the book with a kind of tangible fury: “Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”

 

This unsentimental, even bracing, account of one man’s dialogue with despair is both compelling and consoling

Even a confused non-believer can appreciate the deep sense of betrayal here. In good times of happiness and security, you might have no sense of needing any consolation and might even assume that God will not be available when he is needed. For a believer, writes Lewis, bitterly, “the conclusion I dread is not ‘so there’s no God after all’, but ‘so this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.’”

Much of his text is quasi-theological; other parts have a self-help flavour that quickly morphs into lyricism: “Sorrow,” instructs Lewis, “turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop. There is something to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”

A Grief Observed is an unsettling book for a secular age, plunging the reader, as it does, into allusions to St Augustine, considerations of heaven and eternity, coupled with some intense, self-analytical discussions about separation, solitude and Christian suffering. Some of Lewis’s exclamations are raw and modern. “Cancer, and cancer, and cancer. My mother, my father, my wife. I wonder who is next in the queue.”

Once the reader has tuned his or her sensibility to Lewis’s wavelength, this unsentimental, even bracing, account of one man’s dialogue with despair becomes both compelling and consoling in several intriguing ways not necessarily associated with death. As Rowan Williams has written: “If the anguish of loss can be honestly lived in (not ‘through’), it must be with a clear recognition of the impossibility of possessing or absorbing anyone we love.”

Indeed, some of Lewis’s best passages recall the intensity of an earlier and very passionate essay, The Four Loves: “We have seen the faces of those we know best so variously, from so many angles, in so many lights, with so many expressions – waking, sleeping, laughing, crying, eating, talking, thinking – that all the impressions crowd into our memory together and cancel out in a mere blur.”

This series of nonfiction greats does not typically narrate the backstory to the classics it selects, but the circumstances of A Grief Observed are worth repeating. Throughout his life, “Jack” Lewis was a man tortured by the tragedies of love. He was born in Northern Ireland in 1898, enjoyed a quasi-public school education in England, and then served as an officer in the first world war, where he was quite badly wounded in action. For him, the horror of the trenches was just another kind of association with death. He had lost his mother as a small boy, aged 10. In Surprised by Joy, he says that, when his mother died, “grief was overwhelmed by terror” at the sight of her dead body.

Thereafter, in honour of a pact made on the battlefield with a fallen fellow soldier, he formed a highly unconventional relationship with Jane Moore, a woman 26 years older than him, whom he referred to as “mother”, and who eventually died of dementia in 1951.

When, in 1956, he abandoned his bachelor security for Joy Davidman, an American poet, he experienced a kind of conversion to the joys of feminine intimacy, and also acquired two stepsons through his marriage. This late flowering was cut short when Joy was diagnosed with cancer. Four years later, she was dead. Her death plunged Lewis into the crisis of faith he addresses in A Grief Observed. Perhaps he was more deeply wounded by his loss than he realised. Lewis died a week before his 65th birthday in November 1963.

The typescript of this fiftysomething page text [reference: Readers’ Edition, Faber, 2015] was submitted to Faber as the work of a pseudonymous author, Dimidius, by a literary agent, Curtis Brown, who declared he was neither at liberty to reveal the author’s name, nor much interested in further inquiries about it. The first person to read the text, TS Eliot, a Faber director, claimed to have “guessed the name of the author”, typically kept his hunch to himself, recommended immediate publication and requested a less contrived pseudonym. (Dimidius, in Latin, implies “cut in half”.) CS Lewis at once suggested an alternative, and A Grief Observed by NW Clerk was published in the autumn of 1961. Thanks to Eliot’s connections and support, this little book attracted a disproportionate attention for the work of an unknown. When Lewis died a couple of years later, early in 1964, his estate gave permission for the book to be republished under his own name, adding to its growing status as a contemporary classic.

A signature sentence

“The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like a drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs.”

Three to compare

CS Lewis: Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955)
Joan Didion: The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
Paul Kalanithi: When Breath Becomes Air (2015)

A Grief Observed is published by Faber (£7.99). 

THE GUARDIAN

THE 100 BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF ALL TIME

The 100 best nonfiction books of all time

001 The Sixth Extintion by Elizabeth Kolbert (2004)
002 The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion(2005)

003 No Logo by Noami Klein (1999)

004 Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes (1998) 

005 Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (1995)

006 A brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988)

007 The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe (1979)

008 Orientalism by Edward Said (1978)
009 Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977)
010  The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

011 North by Seamus Heaney (1975) 

012 Awekenings by Oliver Sacks (1973)

013 The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970)

014 Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom by Nick Cohn (1969)

015 The Double Helix by James D Watson (1968)

016 Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag (1966)

017 Ariel by Sylvia Plath (1965) 

018 The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963)

019 The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963)

020 Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)

021  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S Kuhn (1962)
022  A Grief Observed by CS Lewis (1961)

023 The Elements of Style by William Strunk and EB White (1959)
o24 The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith (1958)

025 The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life by Richard Hoggart (1957)

026 Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955)

027 The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art by Kenneth Clark (1956)

028 The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin (1953)

029 Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1952 / 53)

030 A Book of Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David (1950)

036 Black Boy by Richard Wright (1945)

Elena Ferrante Writes Fiction That Feels Autobiographical. But Who Is She?

BY MONA SIMPSON

October 10, 2014

Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions)

In the first novel of Elena Ferrante’s three-volume and still ongoing series, two young girls in an impoverished neighborhood of postwar Naples own in common their most treasured possession: an American book. The little Italian girls read Little Women and extract a dream of success. The girls in Little Women are poor too, and the most bookish one of them ends up supporting the family and making a name for herself as a writer. “In that last year of elementary school, wealth became our obsession. We talked about it the way characters in novels talk about searching for treasure. Then, I don’t know why, things changed and we began to link school to wealth. We thought that if we studied hard we would be able to write books and that the books would make us rich. Wealth was still the glitter of gold coins stored in countless chests, but to get there all you had to do was go to school and write a book.”

Holly Willoughby /This much I know / ‘I’m definitely the person you see’

Holly Willoughby.
Photograph by Dean Chalkley for the Observer

Holly Willoughby: ‘I’m definitely the person you see’

This much I know

The TV presenter, 35, on being shy at school, motherhood and her ‘sexist’ Celebrity Juice nickname

‘You can’t do that many hours of live telly 

and be somebody different’

Holly Willoughby

Megan Conner
Saturday 25 June 2016 14.00 BST

I was an imaginative kid. My sister needed entertaining, whereas I was the one under the table playing with a bit of fluff on the carpet. I was the sort of child who would spend time rolling up balls of all different kinds of fluff and that would be my little family.

My friends were amazed that I became a TV presenter. I was not a big talker at school – I never liked people seeing my braces, so I walked around with my sleeves pulled over my hands and my hands over my mouth in case anybody saw me smiling. In a group of people I knew you couldn’t shut me up, but it took quite a long time until I was comfortable enough to speak openly.

I’ve been really crap at my job. In the beginning I was terrible, although I enjoyed doing it, which was kind of more upsetting. I spoke in a posh telephone voice, and I was so unnatural: I fixated on remembering lines rather than just speaking. It took me two years working away from the camera in a TV studio until I went back to presenting.

Being a mum can be utterly overwhelming. When I had my first son, Harry [seven], I felt like everybody had kept a massive secret from me. I kept saying, “Why has nobody told me this?” But even with Belle and Chester [her other children, five and one], there has been so much stuff I’ve got wrong; things that have bitten me on the bum. Every child is completely different.

I can’t stand the assumption that I’m blonde and a bit stupid. In my younger days it was always such an easy option, an easy target, it used to drive me potty. Being known as Holly Willoughbooby now is just a bit of silliness – it’s for a comedy show [Celebrity Juice]. I don’t know that I’d give people an option to be sexist – it does not sit well with me.

I’d do childbirth again tomorrow. I loved all my labours. With Chester, I remember picking him out of the birthing pool, putting him on me and it was the most euphoric feeling. Each time I’ve done it it’s like I’ve realised why I was put on this planet.

TV presenters tend to be who they are on screen. Leigh Francis is very different to Keith Lemon because that’s a character. But Phil [Schofield], Ant and Dec, Fearne [Cotton], Dermot [O’Leary], Davina – you can’t do that many hours of live telly and be somebody different. I’m definitely the person you see.

It took me a long time to realise I was in love with my husband [TV producer Dan Baldwin]. We knew each other for eight years and laughed together a lot – we had a very intense friendship. But there was one specific night – we were cheersing our glasses, and it just hit me over the head. I was falling in love with him. It’s weird, because he says the same – he remembers that moment.

Your happy-ever-after is just appreciating a good thing. I’m a huge Disney fan – I called my daughter Belle, for God’s sake. But for me life is all about enjoying what you have. That’s not putting up with or having low expectations. It’s just being happy, and not constantly seeking.

THE GUARDIAN

THIS MUCH I KNOW

Richard Dreyfuss / ‘When I die I want the chance to hit God in the face’ 
Miriam Margolyes / ‘I adore being Jewish but I’m not a believer in God’
Carlos Santana /  ‘War is not the answer’

Carlos Santana  / ‘You can get high on what’s within you’

Georgia May Jagger / ‘With modelling, sometimes you’re punky, other times girly and sweet’

Tom Jones  / I might have become a miner like my father 

Tom Jones / ‘Fame allows you to release things that were already in you. It’s like drink in that respect’

Donald Trump / This much I know / I think I like Prince Harry

Donovan / ‘The songs try to say important things with lightness’

Ann Widdecombe / "We're far too obsessed with sex"

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge / 'Pleasure is a weapon'

Kathleen Hanna / ‘I'm a punk rock stripper with sexual abuse counsellor training’

Courtney Barnett / ‘When I go into a house I have to look in all the cupboards’

Erdem Moralioğlu / ‘I’ve always been fascinated by the way women look’

Kim Cattrall / ‘For me, sex starts in the brain’
Kim Wilde / ‘I felt caged in by Kids in America’

Emma Donoghue / ‘I’ve ended up having a family as well as being a lesbian’
David Bailey / Les is more. Except for sex

David Bailey / Cockneys don´t cry

Val Kilmer / "I think heaven is a state of mind. As hell is."

Dita von Teese / The young Marilyn Monroe was a pretty girl in a sea of pretty girls

Priscilla Presley/ 'My fear is that people will forget about Elvis'