Susan Green

…in order to understand how brains get to be different, we need to pay attention to what is going (on) in the world outside those brains. We now know that our brains can change throughout our lives as a result of the different experiences we have, the different attitudes we encounter, the different lives we lead. There is definitely some kind of biological script behind the production of a human brain, but the social stage on which it appears has a powerful part to play in shaping its owner’s successes (and failures).

The ‘Lost Girls’ are the many girls and women who have lived with the burden of feeling wrong, different, out of step, excluded; who have struggled with school, employment and relationships, who have found socialising an impenetrable puzzle and crumbled under the demands of daily life. With a diagnosis of autism, they may have obtained appropriate assistance…and their experiences would have informed what form that assistance should take. As we are now discovering with so many aspects of physical and psychological health, science has assumed that the default human is male. There’s so much to get cross about here!

In this engaging book, Gina Rippon, who is an Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging, introduces us first to the history of autism research. For many decades, ever since the condition was first investigated in the early 20th century, it was understood that autism was a primarily male condition. The prevalence, measured in different countries and over time, seemed always to come out at around 4:1 males to females. Some scientists suggested that autism was the result of an ‘extreme male brain’, or that being female provided some kind of protective effect, theorising that females had a inbuilt evolutionary advantage; that their brains were ‘hardwired for empathy’ in the words of prominent scientist Simon Baron-Cohen.

Either way, girls and women were missing from the picture of autism. In a telling statistic, Gina Rippon tells us that when she first started looking at autism research, she found that 70% of the studies were of males only. That’s why the subtitle of her book is How Science Failed Autistic Women and the New Research That’s Changing the Story.

After looking into what she calls autism’s ‘male spotlight problem’, she explores the ways in which female voices slowly came to be heard, and the question began to be asked; are females ‘less autistic’, or are they ‘differently autistic’?
As an example, highly focused and obsessive interests are a marker of autism diagnoses. Things like trains, weather patterns, number plates, makes of planes or mathematical calculations are suggested on the diagnostic tests. But autistic girls rarely have a passion  for these things. It was an Australian-based researcher, Tony Attwood, who looked more closely at autistic girls. The topics of fascination might be boy bands or Barbies or stuffed toys, but it is the level of focus – the acquisition of an encyclopedic knowledge – that is the same. Just because Barbies and boy bands are ‘girly’, these girls were overlooked.

Another example: it is around puberty and the change from primary to secondary school that many autistic girls begin to struggle. They have developed skills and strategies to fit in – masking, camoflaging, self-monitoring, observing and learning from their peers – but these exhausting tools don’t work so well in the complex social world of adolescence. Depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder and eating disorders tend to be diagnosed at this time rather than autism. I was fascinated to read that sensory issues tend to be more common among autistic females and this may feed into the development of problems with eating and food. Strong averse reactions to the smell, appearance, colour and texture of food, plus tendencies to rigidity in eating patterns, can give the appearance of anorexia, but the issue is not body image and the standard approaches miss the mark.

There’s so much more in this book, and I don’t think I can do justice to The Lost Girls of Autism in a short review. If you have any interest in neurodivergence, it’s a must-read.

We must find the flaws that have allowed us to lose sight of these lost girls, we must challenge the fuzzy and imprecise diagnoses, and we must confront the gender stereotypes that are distorting our quest for answers… Maybe we can (gently) deconstruct the elaborate camoflages that have allowed autistic girls to…’hide in plain sight’. We must listen to these lost girls so that autism researchers, autism therapists, autism advocates and the wider general population will have a clearer idea of what we should be looking for, what we need to explain, so that we can better understand the autistic world.
From the other side of the looking glass, by understanding female autism, we could learn about…the human race’s overpowering desire to belong’.

Since in Ashdod everybody always ended up on the beach, in order to maintain my friendships I felt I needed to make an occasional appearance there. I’d the wait on the sand… for everyone to return from their swims, glistening with water and joy. Oh, how I yearned to join in…
Despite my sense of acceptance by my new friends, I still wouldn’t disclose my scars, so intense was my fear of disappointing, and witnessing that disappointment. And I feared pity. This anxiety hasn’t faded over the years. No matter what I’ve achieved since, how much  love has come my way or how many books on feminism I’ve read, I still feel ashamed about my scars as if they’re some sin I’ve committed. I’ve just learned to cover up this anxiety with giant smiles the way I cover my body.

Lee Koffman spent her early years in Russia. Her congenital heart defect needed multiple surgeries, and even though her parents paid not to have the surgeon known as ‘the butcher’ operate, nevertheless little Lee was left with massive scarring on her chest. At least she survived. And she was well.
Until she was hit by a bus, nearly lost her leg and ended up with yet more severe scarring.  Soviet medicine was strictly utilitarian; no cosmetic surgery. As a little kid, the scars didn’t bother her so much, but as a teenager, moving to Israel (and later, Australia) she encountered a hot climate, beach culture and the cult of the ‘body beautiful’. Hiding her scars became an obsession.

Awareness of these imperfections continued into adulthood, through her success in academia and as a writer, through relationships, a couple of marriages and motherhood. This book is part memoir and part investigation into the ways our appearance – or Body Surface, as Kofman calls it – shape us and the ways in which other people regard us. She talks to people with scarring from accidents and burns, people born with dwarfism, albinism and other congenital health issues, obese people, people who are into extreme body modification. She looks into the world of fetishists; people (almost always men) she calls ‘Wabi Sabi lovers’ who are only turned on by very large women, or amputees, or women with scars; and the world of high fashion, where the ‘new rules of beauty’ see models with conditions such as albinism and ‘cat-eye’ syndrome, as well as amputations, on the catwalk and in magazines. At the end of the book, she turns back to herself, and talks about how she’s emerged as both resilient AND messed-up on account of her scars.

And how shall I end my story? I used to fantasise that writing this book would become my Ultimate Healing Act. Yet now that I’ve finished it, I still haven’t found an epiphany or a grand redemption. Mine, then, isn’t the popular ‘I’ve been through hardships and now I resolved them all’ narrative…

Imperfect was our library book group selection for this month. Some – me included –  found it interesting enough to to want to finish and discuss; it opened our eyes to the disastrous shortcomings of the Soviet medical system, youth culture in Israel and the desires of sexual fetishists out there seeking all kinds of ‘imperfect’ bodies.
A few of us had sympathy or compassion for Lee Kofman, but others thought she was narcissistic, shallow and irritating and so gave up on the book.
And one member couldn’t even bring himself to start reading. So, all in all, a successful choice!

This may sound paradoxical, but I believe that until we stop saying that beauty, or appearance really, is ‘skin-deep’, until we concede how much it matters, we cannot make it matter less. To change private lives and public attitudes, the conversation about Body Surface must first be honest, move beyond cliches and politeness, make space for any genuine feelings – be these joie de vivre or frustration and grief. And yet in another paradox, the lower our expectations might be to always love and always accept our appearance as it is, the better chance I think we stand of healing the psychic wounds Body Surface may generate.

It’s England in the early 20th century; the Willowes, an upper-class family, live on their country estate, Lady Place. Laura Willowes, or Lolly as her family call her, is her father’s beloved youngest child and only daughter. Possessing a ‘temperamental indifference to the need of getting married’ she remains at home as his companion after he is widowed. But when he dies, she is whisked away to live with her brother Henry, sister-in-law Caroline and two nieces.

Lolly was a gentle creature, and the little girls loved her; she would soon fit into her new home… London would be a pleasant change for her. She would meet nice people, and in London she would have a better chance of marrying. Lolly was twenty-eight. She would have to make haste if she was going to find a husband before she was thirty. Poor Lolly! Black was not becoming to her. She looked sallow, and her pale grey eyes were paler and more surprising than ever underneath that very unbecoming black mushroom hat. Mourning was never satisfactory if one bought it in a country own.

Seemingly without any choice in the matter, she is moulded by Caroline and Henry into the typical Edwardian maiden aunt. Time passes. The girls grow up. When WWI intervenes, she volunteers but there is no drama or excitement for Lolly – ‘Four times a week she went to a depot and did up parcels. She did them up so well that no one thought of offering her a change of work’. After the war, her stifled, restricted way of life continues. Somehow she retains a sliver of vivid individuality, symbolised by her ‘extravagant’ (according to her sister-in-law) habit of buying huge bunches of cut flowers for her little room. It is these flowers that lead her to a momentous decision. In a greengrocer-cum-florist, she sees a bunch of chrysanthemums which change her life.

She looked at the large mop-headed chrysanthemums. Their curled petals were a deep garnet colour within and tawny yellow without. As the light fell on their sleek flesh, the garnet colour glowed, the tawny yellow paled as if washed with silver. She longed for the moment when she might stroke her hand over their mop heads.
‘I think I will take them all,’ she said.
‘They’re lovely blooms,’ said the man.
He was pleased. He did not expect such a good customer at this late hour.
When he brought her the change from her pound note and the chrysanthemums pinned up in sheets of white paper, he brought also several sprays of beech leaves. These, he explained, were thrown in with the purchase. Laura took them in her arms. The great fans of orange tracery seemed even more beautiful to her than the chrysanthemums, for they had been given to her, they were a surprise. She sniffed. They smelt of woods, of dark rustling woods like the wood to whose edge she came so often in the country of her autumn imagination. She stood very still to make quite sure of her sensations. Then: ‘Where do they come from?’

And that is how Lolly decides to reject her family and her conventional role in it, her brother’s patriarchal control of her  (and her money) and London life to go to live in the village of Great Mop. But no spoiler here, except to say that the satirical social novel of the earlier chapters takes a sharp turn, or rather, twist.

It’s always a treat to discover a new book by a new writer. And Lolly Willowes is delicious. Sly, subversive, it seems to be about one thing – the liberation of an English spinster –  and then it turns out to tell a different story altogether. When it was published in 1926, Lolly Willowes was popular in the UK, France and even in the US where it was the very first Book of the Month Club selection. The author wrote a handful of other novels, poetry, and short stories which were published in the New Yorker. She’s a marvellous writer. Yet she seems to be mostly forgotten today.

…Flora’s panniers opened in readiness for the haul of pollen and nectar she would surely be able to take back to the hive from this marvellous place. She climbed up and positioned herself over one of the creamy white florets, and the contact of the feet on the flower’s virginal petal made them both tremble. Flora held it softly then sank her tongue into its depths. The exquisite taste sparkled through her mind and body like sun on water, and she drank until each floret was empty.
Behind her, the green-fleshed flowers waited their turn. As Flora combed the minute gold pollen beads of the neroli into her panniers, she felt their patient desire. When she looked again, their green lips had parted to show a glimpse of inner red, and their white fringing had a more festive look…
Despite herself, Flora’s own scent pulsed more strongly from her body. So strong was their desire for her that they actually moved towards her, their inner petals moistening under her gaze, She hovered, mesmerised by their lust.
‘Come to me instead,’ crooned a high voice. Flora turned to see a big black Minerva spider sitting in her hazy cobweb. ‘What a sweet servant. Come, let me hold you.’

Who knew that the life of a forager bee could be so sexy, and so dramatic? As soon as she emerges into the hive, it’s clear that Flora 717 is a mutant bee. She’s oversized, strong, dark, hairy and ugly –  and would have been instantly destroyed if not for the intervention of one of the Queen’s inner circle, the powerful Sister Sage. Initially,  Flora works as a sanitation bee, the lowest of the low, cleansing the hive and obeying the precepts ‘accept, obey and serve’. But before long, she’s promoted to nursery attendant, feeding the newborn bees – and it’s there that she encounters an irresistible temptation. She is moved on to foraging outside the hive (usually an end-of-life role for worker bees), and there faces terrible dangers. There are wasps, spiders, pesticides, sterile monocultures, winter cold and of course, beekeepers. I don’t want to give anything away, so I won’t. But it’s enough to say that her courage and rebellious nature enable her to change the future of her hive forever.

Laline Paull’s The Bees was a book group selection, and for once it was that rarity, a novel we all enjoyed. Really, it had everything. Suspense, danger, mystery, sex and violence plus a feisty heroine in Flora 717. Our group picked up echoes of any number of dystopian novels (but with honey), as well as Cinderella, Watership Down and Game of Thrones. There are evil lady bees, madly entitled drones, plots and jealousies, friendships and even love. Utterly engaging, exciting and unexpectedly moving, it’s one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read so far this year.

And I will never look at a little forager bee in the same way. 

STILL had taught me that it was possible to make something every day, and if every day was not necessarily artful, nevertheless art of some kind would eventually arise out of that dailiness.

Mary-Jo Hoffman was an aerospace engineer. After she left her work to raise her young children near St Paul, Minnesota, she became an artist too; she began a daily practice of photographing a natural object on a white background (she tried black, briefly, but it didn’t work for her). She usually found her subjects on her daily walks in the woods near her home.  A leaf, a stone, a feather, a twig. As time went on, and her walks produced the same material, year upon year, season after season, she began to elaborate, making patterns and designs. She put light pebbles on top of dark stones, arranged twigs and sprigs into shapes, seeds into repeating patterns. They are amazing! She called her project STILL, and uploaded her photographs to a blog. Eventually Hoffman published this book, STILL: The Art of Noticing, which contains only a fraction of her 4,000+ images.

The first found object images are, indeed, ‘still’ in the simplicity and it-ness of each thing. The thing with placing something – be it a dead bird or a handful of acorn caps –  ‘naturally’ (oh, using that word I am wading into contested waters!) on a neutral background is that it seems kind of scientific, detached, spot-lit. It says, here I am, unadorned. It’s artful, in the way a botanical illustration is artful. It seems to be about the plant, but it’s about the observer, too.

The further she strayed from that initial simplicity, the less satisfying I found the images. I don’t mean I didn’t enjoy looking at them; I did. They were ingenious and clever, sometimes  funny, always lovely. It’s just personal taste. Another person might have the opposite reaction.

One more thing about this beautiful, beautiful book. I hate being such a downer, such a doom-laded misery-guts, but – though I look at these works of observation and art, and genuinely feel the uplift, joy and loveliness of the natural world, that world right now is changing.  Into a different world, with less diversity, with fewer plants and animals and birds and insects (I guess the stones and rocks and pebbles will endure). The artist is of course under no obligation to make any explicit point about this. She doesn’t have to ‘address’ climate change.

Or…new thought! Perhaps she is, because here I am, thinking about this.

(Writer and designer Kenya Hara)… described the intricate awareness people had of nature’s subtle changes during the aristocratic Heian period, the golden age of Japanese culture from 794 to 1185 CE.
Japan had adopted, then modified, the Chinese calendar, which divided the year not into four seasons but into twenty-four, which were further subdivided inot seventy-two characteristic annual patterns, or microseasons. “A Japanese person was considered cultivated,” explained Hara, “when he or she gained a deep awareness of the beauty…found in these seasonal changes, which were divided into five-day cycles.”
Reading this was like finding out I had a secret sibling living some parallel life and another country. It redefined everything. I wanted to fly somewhere and be reunited with this beloved, long-lost, completely familiar idea.

There are several essays in STILL, where Hoffman explains her process. There’s also a fascinating discussion of the concept of seasons tied to particular ecosystems, habitats and human home-places – as in Native American seasons, and the astonishing 72 Japanese seasons, some of which last only a few days.  Sadly, her house and studio burned down last year, and so her project is on hold for now.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…so this is my attempt at STILL.

I’ve always been a noticer. I look down when I walk and often return with some little memento in my pocket. As part of my current decluttering project, I’ve put a few shoeboxes of shells, pebbles, stones, feathers, seed pods, animal skulls and bones and a even a clutch of dried-up dead skinks out into the garden. Natural objects, all. I do notice other things on my walks, too. Cigarette butts from the high-school smokers who take the shortcut through the wildflower reserve. Bottle caps, ring-pulls, chip wrappers, Chupa-Chup sticks, drink cans, bottles, tissues, full dog-poo bags (yuk)… Most of us call this stuff litter, rubbish, and think it’s ugly. Usually I do too.

However there was one time when, severely insomniac, I was in a calm, exhausted but half-mad state. I had needed to go to Melbourne, and found myself, waiting for the train home, standing on the platform at Footscray looking down at the rails. Don’t worry! No thoughts of jumping. I was simply entranced by the shapes and colours and textures on the track. Rainbow shards of glass and plastic and paper, shiny metal, glittering foil… So beautiful! Dazzling! Amazing! I couldn’t have been more enraptured even if I was stoned, and I remained in a trance until my train arrived and broke the spell. Stand behind the yellow line!
Melatonin turned out to be the answer.

It’s so tempting to leave this out; it would be much easier to skip it over as a repetitious, almost boring part of the story. For the love of god, what now, I can almost hear you say. But I have to include this part, just as I did all the other parts. Without it, it might seem that recovery from a mental illness is a straight line from unwell to well, as long as you do all the things you’re supposed to. And that just isn’t necessarily true. I was doing all the things. All of them. I was attending AA daily. I was exercising…taking medication, doing meditation, getting therapy. And to top it all off, I had a granddaughter… It still seems inconceivable to me that I could have been hit by this bus once again, with all the good things that were happening in my life.

Like a lot of the Australian public, my family got hooked on the TV juggernaut that was Masterchef – but we came to the party one year late, and never saw the first season.
We enjoyed the show for a few years, and then we didn’t. This year was the first full season we’ve watched for more than a decade.
We became hooked again this year. Probably me more than my husband, but then I am the greedier of the two. I can watch cooking shows with the sound off; just to see all that chopping and mixing is indescribably soothing.  And I have only just had an aha! moment, where the beauty and efficacy of actually following recipes has been revealed to me.
So, this year, when Masterchef 17 finished, we watched Masterchef 1.

It was very different to the 2025 version. More basic dishes. And very basic kit – domestic ovens, few appliances, no blast chiller until near the end. Silly rules, like having to pick 20 ingredients from the pantry in 2 minutes. Ridiculous and stressful team challenges, like having to race around Hong Kong trying to buy a suckling pig, or catch your own fish to cook a seafood lunch. It was horrible watching the losing team voting out the worst-performing member.  Imagine the slew of law suits if they tried that one now.

Julie Goodwin, the eventual winner, was a 38-year-old IT consultant. She came across as down-to-earth, honest and forthright. She loved to cook for her family – ‘her boys’ – and her dream was to start a little restaurant that served homely food that made people feel loved. She could get flustered and nervous and burst into tears; she was a supremely messy cook, and at times her lack of organisation did her in. But she cooked good, tasty, delicious food. I think some of the other contestants, particularly the men, tended to write her off as a just a mum and essentially a home cook –  but she was a sponge, soaking up experiences and learning all the time.

I probably wouldn’t have borrowed Your Time Starts Now if I we hadn’t spent those nights on the couch watching invention tests and team challenges and the contestants manically trying to reproduce, for example, a towering croquembouche. The book wasn’t quite what I was expecting. And that’s good, isn’t it? I quite like to be wrong. Perhaps I had also expected her to be the generous, happy person she appeared to be on the show. Perhaps I was hoping for a bit of tell-all about the other contestants, especially the ones I didn’t like. Instead, the story threading through Your Time Starts Now is about mental illness. Sexual abuse, and years of unrelenting perfectionism and positivity led to overwhelm, anxiety, depression, addiction. The demons that had stalked Julie for much of her life finally landed her in a suicidal state. It was only the kindness of two strangers (and a dog) who noticed a woman standing near a cliff, obviously in some kind of trouble, that saved her. They stayed with her, talking, until she was able to phone her husband. Shortly after, she was admitted to a private psychiatric hospital. It was the first of several admissions.

That she chose this way to open up about her mental health struggles is, I think, admirable. Because it’s easy to think that with success, money, a rewarding career, public recognition, a happy marriage, three healthy children, a person will automatically be happy. Hell, they just should be happy. And if not, why not?

If you’re always comparing down – there are people who are so much worse off than me, financially, health-wise, in terms of their human rights – you can feel you have no right to complain about anything at all. This leads to an inability to ask for help without feeling enormous guilt. And that’s where I found myself. Comparing down, and feeling ashamed of feeling anything other than tickety-boo 100 percent of the time.

We’re still so stupidly prejudiced about mental illness! And I find it even more admirable that she resisted writing an ‘inspirational’ upward trajectory to triumph, and detailed the ups and downs, the struggles, the tedium, the frustration, the hard work and the eternal vigilance of her recovery.

Ah! Monty Don…
There’s the lanky frame, the floppy linen shirts, the straw hats. The long and slightly melancholy face, which is transfigured at times with a gentle toothy smile and unforced enthusiasm when he loves something. There’s an often bewildered  politeness when he doesn’t. His cultivated (joke!) English voice is gentle and not too poncy as he talks us through the gardens of the world. Then there’s Longmeadow, his gorgeous garden in Hereford, and the long marriage to his lovely Sarah, and the beautiful dogs…

I bagged The Road to Le Thonolet at the Library book sale. No coloured pictures, just a few grainy black-and-whites in a little paperback. A garden journey, yes, which was wonderful. Grand chateau gardens and even grander palace gardens; artists’ gardens; potagers and monastery vegetable gardens; a cubist garden, a vertical garden, lush gardens and dry ones. Perhaps the most illuminating thing about the book is his explanation of the difference between the French and English approaches. First, there is in France an ‘inherent and learnt respect for, and adherence to, prescribed form… The essentials of rhythm, balance, geometric symmetry and harmony are still seen as the starting points for any garden design and not just because they make for beautiful gardens but also because they are in harmony with the essential ingredients of an ordered, harmonious culture and society.’ And second, the French love of intellectual concepts.

I learned a lot, but perhaps what I enjoyed even more was the personal aspect of this book, the memoir within a garden tour. It was good to get to know the very young Monty, let loose in France, living on the cheap, walking and hitching, looking, learning and experiencing. There’s a drift of images and memories, often little inconsequential things that have remained in his mind – like a perfect omelette, a swim in an icy pool ‘whose black depths suddenly seemed fathomless, the thigh-burning steepness of a walk, a bottle of Orangina (would that be Fanta?) after he slid down a snowy mountainside, the taste of  mineral water from a hillside spring. He writes:

There is an innocence in this, a sense of a pure past that is now unreclaimable and I suspect, increasingly hunts you down with the ache of loss as the years pass…

Gurus differ widely from each other in a variety of ways, but most claim the possession of special spiritual insight  based on personal revelation. Gurus promise their followers new ways of self-development, new ways to salvation. Since there are no schools for gurus, and no recognised qualifications for becoming one, they are, like politicians, originally self-selected. Anyone can become a guru if he or she has the hubris to claim special spiritual gifts. Both recent and earlier history demonstrate that many gurus are, or become, unscrupulous wielders of power who exploit their followers in a variety of ways. Yet there are also gurus whose holiness, lack of personal ambition, and integrity are beyond question. Jesus, Muhammad and the Buddha were gurus who are still venerated and whose teachings have changed the lives of millions of people.

I have a guru story.
It was more than 30 years ago. A group of friends and acquaintances was suddenly entranced by a spiritual teacher who ran immersive three-day seminars. It was like a fast-spreading virus; first this one, and then a couple more, and soon it seemed as if a whole circle of friends were raving about this person and their work. So much so that it seemed to them urgent and essential that the people they cared about should sign up as well.  So under intense pressure I went along to several introductory sessions.
My memory is that this teacher spoke well and persuasively and at length, assuring listeners that they held the secret to a better, happier, more fulfilled life. They answered questions, they spoke passionately, they shared their own personal story and foretold  growth and spiritual development for participants.
I didn’t sign up.

Was this person charismatic? Were they a guru?
They must have been, with so many men and women willing to surrender themselves, to accept unquestioningly another person’s ideas, rules and instructions – and to pay a lot of money. My friends and acquaintances went on to form small groups and workshops where they compulsively discussed their progress. No outsiders allowed. The dynamics of the work was secret. I felt excluded and found myself perplexed and unhappy; obviously, I was totally screwed up and needed to engage in this kind of drastic self-repair…but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. There was something in me that mistrusted that certainty. Perhaps it was my dear old Dad’s maxim, that you should never trust anyone who believes their own PR.

It was an intense, strange few months. But the fever passed, and eventually the whole thing petered out. Luckily it was all quite harmless, and might even have helped some of the believers. Reading Anthony Storr’s book brought that episode quite vividly back to me.

Storr starts with Jim Jones and David Koresh. A refresher: Jim Jones was the cult leader who ordered the 1978 suicide and/or murder – via poisoned Kool-Aid –  of over 900 people including 260 children in Jonestown, Guyana. And in 1993, at Koresh’s order, 86 people, including 22 children, were either shot or burned to death at Ranch Apocalypse, in Waco, Texas. It’s with these two monsters that Storr starts his book.

Both men inspired fanatical worship, yet they were physically cruel, imposing vicious punishments on cult members who displeased them. They were sexually exploitative of men, women and (in Koresh’s case) children. They undermined their disciples’ family bonds, imposed seemingly arbitrary rules and orders and sought to control every aspect of their follower’s lives. As Storr shows, they were paranoid, obsessional, ‘hovered on the brink of insanity for a considerable part of their lives, and…ended up as demonstrably psychotic’.

Storr’s next two guru stories are less dramatic, less tragic, but still dark.  Gurdjieff and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, both self-proclaimed gurus, had – at least in the beginning – something of value to teach to some of their adherents, but their absolute certainty that they ‘knew’ led to grossly inflated egos. They controlled and exploited their adherents, demanding what amounted to worship and unquestioning obedience to even the most ludicrous demands or instructions. Gurdjieff’s elaborate bogus cosmology and techniques for ‘awakening’ seem devised by an accomplished con man; Rajneesh became authoritarian, greedy and corrupt, and the unravelling of his organization was spectacular and bizarre.

I was surprised at the next group of gurus. They’re not confidence tricksters, not mad or cruel. Rudolf Steiner was a humble-seeming man whose ‘idiosyncratic and incredible’ theory of spiritual science is still influential today (at least in education and farming). Yet, as Storr writes, this ‘mild, gentle, good, kindly man had, at some level of his personality, an unshakeable conviction that he ‘knew’. It was this utter certainty, so characteristic of gurus, which brought him followers, and made it possible for his disciples to…embrace his teaching as a philosophy of life.’

Certainty is hugely seductive, and certainty is offered by all successful leaders: it is an important part of their charisma.

Other figures discussed in the book include Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Ignatius of Loyola (the founder of the Jesuits) and Jesus. Storr, as a distinguished psychiatrist, writes of gurus in terms of mental illnesses such a schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and personality disorders like narcissism. As for the disciples and followers? He theorizes that our human ability to ‘go on learning is adaptive, but remaining teachable into adult life demands the retention of some characteristics of childhood, amongst which is a tendency to overestimate the teacher.’  He also refers to the psychoanalytic explanation, that the person who submits to a guru is searching for a father, a figure who will protect and guide. A figure who has the answers.

I could write on and on, but it’s enough to say that this is a fascinating, absorbing book, well worth searching out, and its usefulness and interest not confined to spiritual con artists, cranks and madmen. Watching the parade of political strong-men on the daily news, I’m wishing Storr was still alive. There’s another book there.

This is wot it is like when we go back on the school trane. There are lots of new bugs and all there maters blub they hav every reason if they know what they were going to. For us old lags however it is just another stretch same as any other and no remision for good conduc. We kno what it with be like at the other end Headmaster beaming skool bus ratle off leaving trail of tuck boxes peason smugling in a box of flat 50 cigs fotherington-tomas left in the lugage rack and new bugs stand as if amazed…
Who knows what adventures in work and pla the next term will bring forth? And who cares, eh?

And now for something completely different, as the Pythons used to say. After finishing a couple of Ann Lamott books, and in the middle of reading Antony Storr’s Feet of Clay: A Study of Gurus which is both fascinating and very disturbing, I needed some cheering bedtime reading.

How To Be Topp had me still reading after midnight, and laughing out loud. As it always has. I picked up this 1954 hardback first edition for $1 at the library book sale, but I’ve had my older brother’s paperback in my bookshelf since I was a kid. In the 1960’s, jokes and lines from How To Be Topp entered the Green family private language. I haven’t read it for years; I’d forgotten how familiar and how funny it is.

Nigel Molesworth, the narrator of this guide, is a boarder at St Custard’s, a minor English prep school. In his introduction, written whilst in hiding (‘all the headmasters in britain are after me with their GATS and COSHES etc’), he explains that he wants ‘to give my felow suferers the fruits of my xperience.’

As you would expect, there are chapters on How to be Topp in Latin, English, French, Spanish, Rusian, Advanced Maths, Music and Games, including the Molesworth Self-Educator and Molesworth Bogus Report. He also includes advice on How to Cope with Grown-Ups, as well as a description of the standard public school types; Cads, Oiks, Goody-Goodies, Bullies and Snekes. To finish, there’s an essential guide to Christmas with bonus Molesworth Self-Adjusting Thank-You Letter

The illustrations by Ronald Searle (of St Trinian’s fame) are perfect. Nostalgic bliss.

I am stockpiling antibiotics for the apocalypse, even as I await the blossoming of paperwhites on the windowsill in the kitchen. The news of late has captured the fever dream of modern life: everything exploding, burning, being shot, or crashing to the ground all around us, while growing older has provided me with a measure of perspective and equilibrium, and a lovely long-term romance. Towns and cities, ice fields, democracy, people – all disappear, while we rejoice and thrive in the spring and the sweetness of old friendships. Families are tricky. There is so much going on that flattens us, that is huge, scary or simply appalling. We’re doomed, stunned, exhausted, and overcaffeinated.
And yet, outside my window, yellow roses bloom, and little kids horse around, making a joyous racket.

Last time we visited Beechworth, we went to the honey shop and browsed the jars of single varietal honey. I chose Snow Gum (delicious; I’d had it before), and as an experiment, Buckwheat, which sounded kind of toasty and wholesome.
I asked the woman at the counter what it tasted like. A slight hesitation.
‘Great with blue cheese,’ she said, and then another woman chimed in with,
‘Divisive.’ When we got home and tried it, it tasted very  much like horse manure smells. Which brings me around neatly to Ann Lamott and Almost Everything.

I’m not suggesting this book is horseshit. Just divisive. I know for a certainty that some of my friends and family would find her mixture of memoir, platitudes, parables, anecdotes and God-and-Jesus intolerably middle-brow. Or simply intolerable.

So, yes, there is God, and Jesus in both of these books, but it’s pretty restrained. Not fundamentalist, not dogmatic, preachy or churchy. Not even especially Christian. You could substitute Buddha for much of what she’s saying, and it wouldn’t change the essential meaning. We all need to give and receive kindness and forgiveness. A little humility goes a long way. Listening is good, as is not  leaping quickly to judge others.
You can find this stuff served up on the spirituality and/or self-help shelves of bookshops everywhere, but there are two things that make Lamott different. One is the humour – she’s smart, funny, snarky and genuinely laugh-out-loud funny – and the other is the ruthless self-exposure, also known as ‘honesty’.

Now…honesty. Along with its twin, ‘authenticity’, it’s a much used and abused term. Is the real Ann Lamott on the page? How could I know? But her willingness to roll over and expose her ugly, broken, petty, vain, despairing, craving and pitiful underside in her books seems pretty honest to me. At her lowest, she was famous, celebrated, successful, the author of the beloved writing classic Bird by Bird, broke, cripplingly anxious,  drunk every day and had developed an eating disorder. Not pretty. But, she says, ‘Almost every facet of my meager maturation and spiritual understanding has sprung from hurt, loss and disaster’. She got sober and found faith, in tandem.

Lamott turned 70 last year, and published her 20th book. I’ve read maybe 5 or 6 of them, and when I try to think about them, they all blend together. I wonder if her lifetime ‘theme and variations’ – as in a piece of music –  is simply ‘living with paradox’. You know – we’re ugly and beautiful; life is meaningless and meaningful; other people are both intolerable and wonderful. I can write, right this minute, echoing Lamott, that the news is dire with Neo-Nazis, cop-killing pseudo-legal nutjobs, children and babies starving in Gaza. I’ve hurt my neck, one of our friends is dying of cancer  – actually, we’re all going to die. And outside my window, the japonica is in flower and little birds are building nests.

Almost everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, scared and yet designed for joy.