Hello all,
I hope everyone is safe and well. Here are some things I’ve read over the past few weeks that I wanted to share with you. I’ve had more time recently to catch up on great things that I’d missed. There’s a couple of articles, a novel, an autobiography and a weed memoir. Hope you enjoy these great writers as much as I did.
How To Tell Your Husband You’re A Witch
by Lisa Richardson
This article is from April 2020, which I know now seems like a lifetime ago, but it was Halloween a few days ago, so why not? Lisa Richardson writes for Longreads about witchiness in a time of pandemic, being a skull collector, plant magic and how to trust and problem solve from within. It questions if our power can lie much closer to home.
2.) The Other Americans by Laila Lalami
I bought Laila Lalami’s novel and the end of 2019 and whilst self isolating this week it has been good company. Late one spring night, Driss Guerraoui, a Moroccan immigrant living in California, is walking across a darkened intersection when he is killed by a speeding car. The repercussions of his death bring together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui's daughter Nora, a jazz composer who returns to the small town in the Mojave she thought she'd left for good; his widow, Maryam, who still pines after her life in the old country; Efraín, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, an old friend of Nora's and an Iraq War veteran; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son's secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself.
The novel is a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story that exposes secrets, lies and a legacy of violence.
3. Baking Through A Plague
article in: Guernica mag
This is an excerpt from Alia Volz’s book that came out earlier this year: Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco. It’s about her memories of her parents’ underground marijuana brownie business in San Francisco, California, at the onset of the AIDS epidemic. Fifteen years before the first effective treatments were available on the market, weed was used as a palliative remedy for many symptoms, particularly nausea and appetite loss. It looks like it’s going to be a super funny and heartfelt memoir from the daughter of a larger-than-life woman who ran Sticky Fingers Brownies, an underground bakery that distributed thousands of weed brownies per month. I have just ordered the book and can’t wait to munch my way through it.
4. Hungry by Grace Dent
My eternal love of Masterchef means I have been extremely excited about this. It’s sharp, cutting and sports a dry sense of humour, but Dent’s writing is most exquisite when talking about grief or the joys of Cadbury’s Fruit ‘n’ Nut. Most of all, it comes across as brutally honest, which is want you want from a critic. There was an extract in The Guardian here that should give you (forgive me) a flavour.
5.What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?
article by Rhaina Cohen in the atlantic.
A great Long Read on committed friendships and what a world of platonic partnership looks like. Could placing friendship at the centre of our lives transform society and ourselves for better?
Take care everyone,
Love Ben xx
ONE OTHER THING!
Each time I do one of these, I'll highlight something that might be of interest. This week, I wanted to draw you to an episode of Scriptnotes I caught up on. It was all about conflict- why it’s bad in real life but essential in screenwriting. I didn’t hear it the first time around (it’s a rebroadcast) but it’s great. They look at 6 common forms of conflict in storytelling and give advice on how to sustain it throughout your story.