The Breath Between Waves by Charlotte Anne Hamilton

Whether the forthcoming book works as well as listening to Ellis drawlingly evoke the LA of his youth, while musing indirectly on sexual violence and trauma post-MeToo, I don’t know yet. But the most hypnotic literary experience I had this year was listening to Bret Easton Ellis’s serialisation of his novel (or memoir?) in progress, The Shards (Swift Press). Sam Johnson-Schlee’s beautiful, deeply researched Living Rooms (Peninsula Press) had me thinking about objects and fabrics in new ways. Julie Myerson’s Nonfiction was an exquisitely painful and moving exploration of parenting a child with addiction. Rebecca May Johnson’s Small Fires (Pushkin Press) was a serious delight. Nuar Alsadir’s Animal Joy (Fitzcarraldo Editions), on psychoanalysis and clown school, gave me a lot of joy, as did Jamieson Webster’s fascinating essays in Disorganisation and Sex (Divided).

This year I read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (Penguin) for the first time its steady, intricate unfolding is extraordinary. Finally, BEYOND THE THRESHOLD (dpr-barcelona), Zaida Muxi Martinez’s history of the women whose contributions to architecture and urban planning have been suppressed, reminds us that other ways of imagining society have always existed, but we have chosen not to listen. Caroline Walker’s monograph JANET (Anomie), with an essay from critic Hettie Judah, is a visual exploration of this theme, depicting the artist’s mother at her invisible work in the home. The public conversation about unpaid and poorly paid carework has faltered post-Covid, but both Edouard Louis’s A WOMAN’S BATTLES AND TRANSFORMATIONS (Penguin Random House), his account of his mother’s life under poverty and patriarchy, and Lynne Tillman’s MOTHERCARE (Soft Skull), about caring for her elderly mother while navigating the American healthcare system, should serve to remind, as does feminist theorist Nancy Fraser in CANNIBAL CAPITALISM (Verso), that capitalism remains a guzzler of care, and this is an unsustainable position.

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The Breath Between Waves by Charlotte Anne Hamilton