Susan Green

When the idea of writing a “literary memoir” first sprang up (from whom? Memory shrugs, but it was someone in publishing) I replied to her or him or them: “That would be tedious. You’ve heard the bad joke about the old East Coast fisherman counting fish? ‘One fish, two fish, another fish, another fish, another fish…’ So, my literary memoir would go, ‘ I wrote a book, I wrote another book, I wrote another book…’ Dead boring. Who wants to read about someone sitting at a desk messing up blank sheets of paper?”

I bought A Book of Lives over a year ago, and it waited on the shelf until I had a few days of rainy weather, a slight cold and a grumpy disinclination to move off the couch. It wasn’t tedious, or boring, or really a memoir. More of a full-blown autobiography. The many lives of Margaret Atwood.
Margaret – or Peggy, as she was then; it’s her childhood name – was a free-range kid roaming the forests and lakes of Ontario with her siblings while her entomolgist father worked studying insect infestations, and her gloriously unfussy, athletic and outdoorsy mother made a home for them all in a tent or later, a basic cabin. In autumn, the family retreated to Toronto or Ottawa to avoid freezing, and she transformed into a home-loving young girl who enjoyed sewing, knitting and decorating cakes. As she grew older, she was an academic nerd, then a serious young poet and eventually the successful novelist and much-awarded (inter)national treasure she is now. Along the way she acquired lots of boyfriends, a husband (briefly), a life partner in poet and novelist Graeme Gibson and a daughter. There are many friends and colleagues; in the 1980’s she was active in promoting Canadian writers and was a part of a small press called Anansi. In fact, I have some of her early Anansi publications, a couple of poetry books and a study of Canadian literature called Survival. I was surprised to read that Survival was written to make money for the press, and it did. It sold over 100,000 copies and kept Anansi afloat for many years.
There are a few enemies – “Canadians are prone to be offended by the success of other Canadians” she writes – but very little settling of scores. Though she is harsh about Graeme Gibson’s ex-wife Shirley, rather endearingly she writes to her ‘Inner Advice Columnist’, whose advice is straightforward and bracing. On the question of having a child:

Just go for it. Let other people handle their own hang-ups. Do what you want and live with the consequences. If you are definite enough about your wishes, whatever form those might take, your partner will agree. As for the wife, she will simply have to accept reality, though from what you say she may have difficulty doing that. 

Margaret Atwood has had a very full life, and though there must have been a great deal of time at her desk, writing one book, another book, and another book, she seems to have fitted in an amazing amount off the page. The energy!

…romances, adventures with Graeme, family life, wonderful parents, great sibs, weeding the garden, knitting, birthday-party-staging, pie-making, bird conservation, arts support, human rights advocacy, fundraising and general busybodiness…

She’s one of the great novelists. A prophet?  The Handmaid’s Tale could happen right now in the US. And a witty, wise, warm and funny woman. It was a captivating way to cure my cold.

She finishes her Book of Lives with this:

…Dear Reader. On the one hand, I am here, having travelled with you for over eighty-six years, having shared with you so many strange happenings, incidents of malice, odd dreams, conversations, joyful moments, ghosts, stupid mistakes, and catastrophes. Yes, I am still with you, right here, on this very page. Though on the other hand…
My great-Aunt Abbey, who was completely blind in the final years of her life, took to her bed. One of my younger relatives went to visit her. “What are you thinking about, Aunt Abbey?” she asked.
“I am writing the story of my life,” said Aunt Abbey. “And when I have come to the end, I will close the book.”

Do I really need to read more popular psychology books? Apparently I do, because after seeing this interview in the Guardian, I went out and bought Being: Why It’s Harder to be Human than a Hamster or a Herring. Rachel E. Menzies and Ross G. Menzies, daughter and father, have written a useful addition to my shelf. Two sections in particular stood out.

The Inner Voice. Oh God. Mine is not always horrid, but there are times when it (or is it a she?) just does not shut up. On and on and on and on…commentating, narrating, scripting, stage directing, nagging. If I can divert it, and get it telling stories – especially the story I am working on – it can be very useful. But tiring. The Menzies  believe that it’s essential we change our relationship with the inner voice. They say we need to ‘react to the inner voice as if it were a separate entity to ourselves. Only then can we objectively see the damage that has been done.’

Only then can we judge the effects of the voice dispassionately, in the way that we would judge the same sentences if they were coming from another source, like a bully in the schoolyard. By adulthood, would we really be listening to another person if they’d called us fat and ugly through our youth, told us our mother had forgotten us every day at school pick-up and made up monsters in the dark? 

They also note that the inner voice ‘seems to magnify our sense of personal significance’. We can become overwhelmed by our own private world, and develop an inner realm – a little like a game – where only we are truly special, the main players, and other people are secondary characters. Which is isolating, and lonely.

The other section that I found interesting – worthy of much more thought, and perhaps even a game changer – was in the chapter called The Illusion of Freedom. It concerned anger. They write that humans get angry with each other because of ‘should-based appraisals’. She should have known better, he should have phoned back, they should not be racists or bad drivers or park in the disabled spot, etc etc etc.  They say that ‘if you believe they should have acted differently, presumably you believe they could have acted differently.’

Put plainly, if we accept that people are just playing out their hardware and software as they encounter each moment, given their current levels of blood sugar, hunger, fatigue, relevant hormones and other distributed causes across their cultural and evolutionary history, then anger makes no sense. Getting angry at other people is no more rational than getting angry at any other machine.

This is not a heavy book, but it’s definitely meaty; full of ideas to chew over. I don’t want to be a hamster or a herring, but yes, at times being human is hard and unrelenting work.

…the uncommonly astute author Rachel Cusk tore away another veil for me in her essay ‘Making Home’, describing our houses as a loci of tension and considered design, simultaneously looked at and lived in. She examines our psychological compulsion to make living spaces that reflect us back to ourselves and others – mirages of confected perfection or careless authenticity – and the kudos, pleasure or insecurities from these acts of making as the texts on which we inscribe our dreams and personal mythologies. Reading this, I recognised the subconscious bat squeaks of envy, anxiety and pride that I’ve been half-listening to for much of my grown-up life. Like Cusk, I am fascinated by the stage sets in which we enact ‘home’ ( so-called ‘real homes’, not those made by professional designers), and like her I think this is a subject worthy of examination and  appreciation.

I thought this book was going to be a history of British interiors, and therefore useful for research. Instead, it’s a generously illustrated, very enjoyable, extended sticky-beak into a whole lot of private British homes. Some are artistically dishevelled or even a little slovenly (unmade bed! clutter! leads and cords not tidied away!), some are beautifully curated and arranged, but all look as if interesting people live there. I grew up in a house with old furniture (a few antiques but mostly just old), the creative clutter of my artist father, lots of books, paintings, ornaments and objects, and a distinct lack of vinyl couches and Laminex benchtops. Some of my little friends thought our house was a bit weird, and I became rather ashamed of it. How I envied them, with their modern houses and modern stuff. I think Ruth Guilding could have had a great time snapping pictures at our place.

There are lots of lovely pictures, and an introduction featuring a trio of ‘great British tastemakers’. They are William Morris, founder of the Arts and Crafts movement; the artistic and literary Bloomsbury group; and another group Guilding calls ‘the Spitalsfield Fogeys’, after the people who rescued and restored decaying Georgian buildings in the London suburb of Spitalsfield in the 1970’s and ’80’s.

Charlie Porter begins this book in 1920, with Virginia Woolf writing to T.S. Eliot, confirming his invitation to stay at her home, Monk’s House, in rural Sussex.
The letter concludes: ‘Please bring no clothes: we live in a state of the greatest simplicity.’

‘Bring no clothes’, in this context, doesn’t mean there’s to be a nudist getaway; she’s saying that there’s no need for fancy or formal clothes, wear whatever you like. Essentially, ‘come as you are’. I hadn’t realised what a revolutionary attitude this was, what a contrast to the rigid sartorial expectations of ‘polite society’ (the middle- and upper-classes) which ‘cemented hierarchies of class, power and gender’ through clothing.  Though the women’s fashions of the 1920’s were a far cry from the corseted, trussed-up, restrictive dresses of the Edwardian era – when Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell grew up – there were still so many rules. You wore certain clothes in the house, and different clothes to go out. There were hats and gloves and stockings and shoes with heels. You changed out of your day clothes; you ‘dressed for dinner’ in more revealing dresses if you were a woman, and an evening suit if you were a  man. You were attired for your role. The Bloomsbury group, a ‘loose collective of artists, writers and thinkers’ were more interested in the person than the role, and that was a definite philosophy of fashion.

According to Porter, it was a philosophy that said,
We are no longer living by those rules. We refuse them, we reject them, we are pushing for something new. If we were to accept Woolf’s invitation, we could ‘bring no clothes’ to our own lives, breaking from preconceptions to forge new ways of being’ .

Porter examines first the deliberate clothing choices of sisters Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Looser, more comfortable dresses, often home-made and slapdash (Vanessa was quite fond of safety pins as fastenings); flowing fabrics, shawls; daring colours (Virginia had orange woollen stockings). I hadn’t known that George Duckworth, the step-brother who sexually abused the sisters, insisted on making Vanessa his society companion, clothing her in elegant evening gowns, buying her jewellery, fans and handkerchiefs and all the feminine extras he decided she needed. He prevented her from studying and making art; she was a plaything. In later years, she remembered one dress in particular, transparent black over white, with silver sequins.

‘…though I felt all the thrill of putting on such a frock, still I came to dread the sight of it, so miserable were the many evenings I spent covered in the filmy black and white and sparkling sequins.’ 

What a relief it must have been when the sisters escaped Duckworth. No more abuse, and no more corsets.

Porter also takes us through the wardrobes of Lady Ottoline Morrell, the economist John Maynard Keynes, artist Duncan Grant (who liked to wear as little as possible) and novelist E.M. Forster. I found Forster’s story very moving. A closeted gay man, he covered himself in the uniform of suit, shirt and tie for most of his life. ‘Trapped in tailoring,’ as Porter puts it, his clothing choices ‘tell us much about repressed queer lives in the first half of the 20th century’. It was only in his  late 30’s, while in Egypt during WWI, that he found sexual love with a young tram conductor. And there is photograph of him, taken from Forster’s album. Apparently, it is the first photograph where he is smiling. And his shirt is unbuttoned.
Near the end of his long life, Forster wrote:
…when I am  nearly 85 how annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality illegal. The subterfuges, the self-consciousness might have been avoided.

Porter is a queer man, too. He writes,
In the UK today, it’s easier for a lanky, soft, awkard queer human such as Forster to find a place for themselves. I am one. I was born in 1973, three years after Forster died. I remember the pain I felt as a young kid, of imagining my future life unrealized. It felt tight, like the bitter tightness in Forster’s words. It felt like my life was likely to be wasted.

I could write more, but instead I’ll encourage you to read ‘Bring No Clothes’. It’s intimate, warm, engaging and makes you think again about what you put on your body, and why.

Even though we have been visiting Adelaide for over 30 years to visit my husband’s folks, I’d never been to the State Library. The Museum, yes. The Art Gallery, yes. Last week, my husband took me to see the place where he’d spent many, many hours wagging school to finish his essays – the staggeringly marvellous Mortlock Chamber, in its own wing of the State Library. The only word for it is magical. Hogwarts comes to mind. It’s attached to the new library buildings, and now seems to house an eclectic collection of old fiction and non-fiction. I picked out a clutch of 1930’s crime novels; a few bays away, the shelves held histories and biographies from the 1910’s and ’20’s, all shabby and much read. There were visitors wandering about the place, like us, and also students using the carved wooden tables and chairs tucked into each bay for study. And, amazingly, the place was quiet. No phones, no loud conversations. It was hushed, as libraries used to be. Beautiful!

The State Library of South Australia is officially the Second Most Beautiful Library in the world.

The department’s ‘principal enemy’ was the United States, with Britain as a close second. …Department V…became known notoriously as the ‘wet affairs’ department for its proficiency in ‘liquidating’ targets.

The Defector is the story of a KGB Department V agent, Oleg Lyalin, who was sent to London in 1969 under the cover of a businessman specialising in the export and import of knitwear. He was in fact ‘one-part saboteur, one-part fashionista’, because his real role was to learn how to break the British people and their government through ‘the penetration and ultimate destruction of their central nervous system: their critical national infrastructure, ranging from their food supply warehouses to their electricity grids’.
His day-to-day job involved meetings with British textiles suppliers, managing his ‘agents’ (spies)…and socialising. He enjoyed going to pubs, bars, nightclubs and fine-dining restaurants; he was a big spender, a natty dresser and a dedicated womaniser.
When he finally defected, in 1971, he seemed not driven by ideology, or money, but rather by his messy private life. His estranged wife had begun to pose a serious threat to his career, telling  KGB colleagues that he was a cheat, a liar, untrustworthy and disloyal to both his family and to the USSR. The threat of a recall to Moscow and ‘severe administrative action’ loomed. So he jumped, taking his Russian lover along with him.

And thereby created a pivotal event in the Cold War. As a direct result of his defection, more than 100 Soviet spies were expelled from the UK – and the formerly close relationship between MI5 and the CIA was broken.
In the past, MI5 would have requested CIA assistance with Lyalin’s debriefing. But the British agency was finding the CIA’s head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, increasingly paranoid and obsessed with the hunting down of ‘moles’ within both intelligence organisations – so they decided to go it alone. Good decision. It turned out that Lyalin had information that would discredit the CIA’s prize defector, Anatoly Golistsyn, reveal the CIA’s misguided approach to other genuine defectors and eventually end Angleton’s career.

The whole story is riveting, incredible, creepy and just a little mad. I was left wondering what kind of a life it was for Lyalin and his partner, Irena Teplyakova in the UK. They were never to go back to the Soviet Union, never to see their children. False identities for life, and probably always wondering whether they would be taken out by the ‘wet affairs’ department…

The Defector is a little out of my time frame, but it involves many familiar 1950’s players, like the notorious British spy Kim Philby and the CIA’s James Jesus Angleton.  I keep telling myself that the NEXT book I write will require no research. Or minimal research. Or research that is really only fact checking after the first draft is done. It’s so easy to go chasing down multiple rabbit holes – and so enjoyable! – that I can put off the actual writing quite easily.

In meandering long hours spent with friends I often have the welcome feeling of having drunk to my heart’s content from a deep well. I associate such time with the replenishment that is possible in leisure, without effort or agenda. Reading Milner helped me recognise an interior experience, which shares something with the quality of such time spent with friends. I feel it when I can let my thoughts and feelings gather instead of trying to dig them up to subject them to the harsh glare of investigation, or chasing after them to know exactly what they were. What surfaces out of such a gathering is sometimes unexpected, at other times mundane. An intention can take shape, or I may just feel a bit more rested than before. In the privacy of one’s mind, as well as in the company of others, there may be some things that lend themselves to  scrutiny and purpose, but there are others best encountered at leisure. It isn’t possible to reach them by means of expedition or pursuit, much better to issue an invitation, extend a welcome, and let the guests gather.

Akshi Singh, born in Rajasthan and now living and working in London and Glasgow, has written this book as a response to and conversation with another book, another writer. Singh appears to be in her late twenties or early thirties; the other writer, Marion Milner, was born in 1900 and died in 1998. Milner was a British psychoanalyst, surprisingly (or not, given that she was a woman ) forgotten, even though she was widely published in her day.

I first encountered Marion Milner in 1988, through a surprise present from my dad. He was always on the alert for books he thought would interest me. Or perhaps, help me along my way to being happy and creative and fully alive. The book was A Life of One’s Own, a Virago reprint of the 1934 original. The author began with the realisation that she didn’t really like her life, and asking herself what she could do about it. But unlike today’s lifemaxxing, optimising self help gurus, she took a gentle and non-prescriptive approach, instead simply asking herself, how do I want to spend my free time? What do I really like to do?

It seemed to me an unusual question…of course you know what you like to do. Or do you? She ran an experiment on herself, noticing, paying attention, without a plan or agenda or purpose. Creating, painting, travelling, resting, playing, daydreaming, drifting…she became alert to ways of being that can be unexpectedly joyous and creative. After reading it, I remember I got curious about myself and discovered the weirdest paradox; when I’ve got genuinely free time, I often feel panicky and out of sorts, and can rush to fill it with something, anything, rather than sit with myself in emptiness and feel my way to what I want to do.

I’m so happy to see Milner’s writing, in this memoir, celebrated, re-examined and shown to be relevant and useful in 2026. Singh writes about herself candidly in a way that Milner never did (she was always elliptical and guarded about her private life and relationships). She talks about being a young woman from a traditional Indian family, about family ties and expectations, about personal losses and grief, struggles with relationships and sexuality, with sub-standard housing, Covid, domestic chores and the Byzantine UK  immigration procedures – but with Milner as a companion. Singh doesn’t shy away from the issue of privilege; Milner stresses the importance of the creative life, but Singh is alert to the fact that many woman are overwhelmed by the stresses of sexism, racism and poverty.

I’m going to re-read the Milner books I own – A Life of One’s Own, An Experiment in Leisure and Eternity’s Sunrise – and then re-read In Defence of Leisure.

The pen scratches across the page rebel hump rebel hump rebel hump*. What do these words mean, asks the pen. I don’t know, replies the wrist. These are the words forming and the writer, stationed at Dolina Charlotty, in a valley in northern Poland, will decide later. Charlotty, a name evoking the porcelain face of a doll, left in the grass by a child so that she might go off to pick wild berries. Not for very long, but long enough to be forgotten, and through the passing of time the abandoned doll becomes Charlotty in the rain, Charlotty in the snow, Charlotty pulled apart by a playful dog. Her porcelain head swathed in the shadows of beech trees growing higher through seasons of snow, of red then dead leaves. Seasons of sun fade the pink of her cheeks yet fail to subdue the impassive intensity of her marble eyes.

I never really got into Patti Smith. Back in the mid 1970’s, when my friends were into the Sex Pistols, I was more likely to be listening to Sam Cooke. So despite a strong memory of seeing Horses, Patti Smith’s breakout debut album, amongst the share house collection, I couldn’t really bring her music strongly to mind. It wasn’t part of my personal soundtrack, the ’70’s mixtape of my young adult years.

Therefore, my interest in Bread of Angels was limited, and when a friend gave it to me – ‘Borrow this, you’ll like it’ – I thought they were wrong. Reader, I was wrong. I loved this memoir. From the first paragraph (above), it’s intriguing and enthralling. I found myself transported to a late 1940’s American childhood that was nevertheless almost Dickensian in its poverty and hardship. But this is no misery memoir, it’s more like her very own ‘Song of Innocence and Experience’, as she renders those early years magical, rich and very strange as filtered through her wildly poetic sensibility.

The middle section of the book, which bounces through her early career, were less fascinating for me; I’ve read that these years are dealt with more fully in her other memoirs. Readers may or may not admire her refusal to compromise, to become a product instead of an artist but I was cheering her on. She left her band, her career, at its height to follow her heart. Her account of marriage to Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, the eccentric home they made together on the shores of a lake in Michigan, the life they shared, the creativity they encouraged in each other, was made more moving by his early death. Her progress through inconsolable grief into a later blooming creative phase seems magnificent. Art, love, life. Bravo Patti.

*Rebel hump? Misfit child that she was, Patti Smith imagined that she had ‘a miniature Quasimodo trapped inside an awkward child’s body’ – but she turned the disability or disfigurement – the hump of the hunchback – into a kind of secret strength.

Minoru Aose is a middle-aged architect, single, divorced, and with only monthly visits with his teenage daughter. When he’s asked to replicate his famous ‘Y residence’ for some new clients, he decides to visit it for the first time since he handed over the keys to the finished house. He’s puzzled, upset and saddened to find it’s empty apart from a single chair, which has been placed in a room facing the north light. It seems the family he designed it for never moved in. Why not? Were they unhappy with his design? Or did something happen to them?
Trying to answer these questions (and more), he goes on a journey of discovery. What initially seems like simple detective work ends as an inquiry into the nature of art, ambition, work and creativity, of home and families and love. When he finds the answers to his questions, he discovers he too is part of a complex and unexpected story.

Well, I tried not to give away too much by talking about the plot – but I’m not sure I managed to convey how brilliant this book is. I loved it! It’s lively, intriguing, enthralling, multi-layered, and I couldn’t put it down. I haven’t read a lot of Japanese literature but I recognise (and enjoy) the characteristic flavour of tradition blended with modernity. There’s a strong streak of neuroticism that seems uniquely Japanese, too. I can’t recommend this one highly enough.

Being a good person, or at least becoming a better person, became part of my Stoic journey because it was one of the only three things that were under my complete control. Forget about trying to change other people to become good. You can become a role model or instruct and persuade other people to be good, but it is ultimately not within your control as to whether someone is good or bad, or behaving well or poorly. As Marcus Aurelius advised: teach them, or learn to bear them.

Brigid Delaney’s book is subtitled How to be Stoic in Chaotic Times. Stoic philosophy has a long history going all the way back to ancient Rome and of course, as she points out, life was pretty chaotic then too. But we have our own particular challenges at this rather dark phase of 21st century life – social media, misinformation, the use of AI all spring to mind.  She set out to write a practical guide to applying Stoic philosophy to our lives, and I think she’s done it very well.

The ‘control test’, above all, is a very useful tool. It’s come down to us from the philosopher Epictetus who, nearly 2,000 years ago, asked ‘what can we directly control in our lives?’ Not much, it seems. Stoics would say that we control only our character, our reactions (and some of our actions though we cannot control outcomes) and the way we treat people. Three things! So don’t worry about the rest. I have been fretting a lot recently. Toxic politics, Gaza, the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the climate; the health worries of family members, some sticky issues with friends; weeds in the garden, stalled progress on my book, not enough exercise. Stoic advice would be: concentrate on what you can control.  Get weeding, writing, walking. Inform myself judiciously (no doom scrolling). I can also donate, volunteer, participate and try be a useful community member. I can agitate for change. But my worrying doesn’t fix or solve anything, and just makes me feel awful.
This was the right book at the right time for me.

How ludicrous and outlandish is astonishment at anything that happens in life!

The right book at the right time is a wonderful thing. In 1991 I decided to travel far, far away from Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia, to spread my wings and try to get over a broken heart. New skies, new people, new challenges. I thought that the end of March would be Spring in Quebec. It was, but not as we know it. There was still melting snow on the ground. Though to the folks of Montreal it was positively balmy, to me it was very, very cold. My friend David was a marvellous host, but he was an actor, and busy with his work so I did a lot of solo wandering around Montreal and Quebec City, and what with the cold, the sense of dislocation and loneliness plus heartache, I was occasionally pretty miserable. One day, in an English-language bookshop, I found a Penguin Classics edition of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations; I bought it and Marcus became a valued travelling companion and teacher. I liked to think that this man, all those centuries ago, was also simply a human being who struggled with himself too. Meditations isn’t a manifesto or a sermon, it’s just what he wrote in his private journal. Often just a few sentences on what he had learned along his way through life. There was nothing flashy, though it was often beautifully expressed. There is no ‘Secret’ (remember those best sellers full of promises?) to success, happiness, endless bliss. Who would have known that philosophy could be so sensible?