Mother's Day was last week in the UK, but in America they don't celebrate it until May. Unaware of this discrepancy, I accidentally made my housemates flip out when I mentioned it on Sunday evening.
I usually spend Mother's Day thinking about the umpteen, wildly varied ways my ma has shaped who I am (not least my love of the word umpteen) and what an earthworm I'd be without her. This year was no exception. Unfortunately, I didn't get my act together to write them down until now. At least my deadline-oriented mind (which is a more self-compassionate way of saying 'rampant procrastination habit') is something I inherited from her, so I think she'll understand.
This year was a little different anyway because - in a bold move by anyone's standards - my dad had his birthday party on Mother's Day. I was on the wrong continent, but they kept me in the loop via email.
The blood stained shirt was from when he got mugged at knifepoint (in 1980). Not a classic keepsake, you might say. But why let trauma get in the way of good party decor? Plus, it's an undeniably strong ice-breaker.
So the the lesson is ... Marie Kondo be damned. Everything you squirrel away really could come in handy, you just have to be prepared to play the long game. And have a fairly loose definition of 'handy'.
I note that she neglected to mention her slightly more sinister decor choices, but still. I think she's the most thoughtful, creative, and generous person I've ever met. Annoyingly, this also translates into the ability to make everyone else's gifts look like petrol station flowers. With the £3.99 sticker still on. And the one revealing that they'd been reduced from £6.99.
Exhibit A:
Top marks for consistency though: all six of us got matching carrier bags.
Moving right along, before my dad reaches through the computer and bops me on the nose, like the General in Dastardly & Muttley, for being such an ingrate...
If you're going to take a photo of a stranger because they look (ostensibly) like someone you know, here's the golden rule: make it look like you're taking a photo of your son. If you don't have a son, any willing acquaintance/surprisingly benevolent stranger will do. In the second photo, after she'd asked my brother to duck down a little lower, for the integrity of the shot, you can see that the man had clearly spotted us. This was anomalous - it usually works a treat. I think the near-empty restaurant may have given us away on this occasion.
Learn as many poems as you can by heart.
And have at least four good card games up your sleeve.
Never underestimate the power of a good breakfast. When I was little, my ma used to wake us up at 5:30 in the morning, to practice the violin before school. My siblings and I would then be rewarded with a hot breakfast – eggs (with buttery soldiers or fried), or porridge with a ribbon of honey. At the time, being the ungrateful wretches that we were, these early mornings seemed akin to child abuse, but the breakfast element was always heaven. I'm mortified to admit this now, but it truly didn't occur to us that she wasn't doing it because she just liked getting up early, or even that she must have been up even earlier, to prepare our breakfeasts (a coinage! Shakespeare, you can keep your 'majestic' and 'moonbeam'. I've got breakfeast to call my own - autocorrect can't hold me down forever!) Every twinkle of joy that I get now from having music in my life, I have her to thank for it.
There's no such thing as too high a denier. Or too much garlic. See also: red wine in bolognese, butter on toast, cheese in any situation.
A top tip for brightening up a packed lunch, or the packed lunches of your undeserving kin: cut your sandwiches into shapes using a cookie cutter. Peanut butter sandwiches for the fourth day in a row take on near magical properties when they look like hearts and stars. Musical notes look undeniably snazzy, but you don't get much sandwich left at the end of it. (Did I mention that I was an ungrateful wretch?)
Buy the same plimsolls in multiple colours. I do this still, and it honestly brightens up every morning when it’s time to choose.
In an ideal world you should have at least five bottles of fizz under your bed at any given time, just in case. My ma got so cross when my sister once asked if she could take a bottle of her ‘spare Prosecco’ to a party. ‘It's not SPARE!’ She fumed. 'I want to have them ready to go at any moment. For a special occasion! And you never know when a special occasion might spring upon you! Life can be beautiful that way.'
There is, however, such a thing as too much milk in tea, and you’ve no business going anyway near the kettle if you think otherwise.
An early morning tea party in bed is the best treat imaginable.
Rich tea biscuits (fingers, ideally) are non-negotiable.
If all your flowerpots get nicked, show them who's boss by painting flowers on the wall. I doubt the thieves came back to admire our (trompe l'oeil quality) handiwork, but by 'them' I really just mean the universe, which is arguably more important.
But if you're more partial to a bit of light avenging, allow me to provide a cautionary tale: it’s undeniably tricky to style out a situation in which you’ve put someone’s name on the Voodoo Doll that hangs over your kitchen table, and then they come round for dinner and see it, almost immediately. If this happens - as it did with my high school boyfriend - the best thing you can do is just hold your nerve. Meet their gaze, unswervingly, and offer nothing by way of apology or explanation. They’ll know what they did. Not long after this, the boyfriend in question moved to Kazakhstan, where he lives to this day. I’m not saying the two things are related, I’m simply reporting events as they occurred.
Do you want to create a verdant, magical garden, but your thumbs are on the mouldier side of green, and your flowerbeds are overrun with snails? No problem. Hang plastic fruit and flowers around with wild abandon, and - truly - nobody will be any the wiser. To this day, I can't believe how many people thought we had lemons, roses and bananas growing in balmy London, all year round. The secret? To complete the deception, you have to slip them in and amongst real foliage (the more pitifully sparse the better) and nubbly fruit trees, so you can say, with a mournful gesture, 'I wish they'd all turned out so well this year.' Clothes with capacious pockets are the best kind of clothes. End of story.
The best way to ensure a seat on the train is to bring a whole Stilton with you. Indeed, that will often free up most of the carriage.
Strive to be a good secret keeper, no matter how jammy the tale. In my family this is called being 'button ear'. This is a reference to when my ma assured someone of her top secret-keeping status with this declaration:
'I am but an ear!'
And she was right. I would trust her with anything, to the ends of the earth.
Not least because even after decades of wheedling, I still have no explanation for this photo:
Maybe by next year she'll have relented.
The Cameo
My guest this week is Olivia Sudjic.
What’s your job title/profession?
Writer. I have only recently started saying that instead of “I have written one novel”. Here’s the plug: It’s called SYMPATHY and it’s coming out in the US in April, the UK in May, then in Germany, Italy and Poland.
What would you love for people to know about your work?
I love what I do. BUT, I don’t live a writer’s “lifestyle”. No Gauloise cigarettes and literary cliques. It sounds disingenuous but I’m definitely not in it to get my name in print, in fact that part I’m finding unexpectedly difficult and exposing. I’m an outgoing person, but it’s more taxing than I thought. I’m feeling ambivalent about having to promote myself especially – it was in my US contract that I had to have a website etc. Unlike a film or a play, when writing a work of fiction, the thing exists only in YOUR head until it’s finished, and when it is, it’s just YOU on the line. That’s incredibly freeing at times – you don’t need to hire equipment, book locations or get people to turn up to auditions, you can just get going – but it has its downsides too. You need to make your own deadlines, you have to hold yourself accountable, you spend long periods of time alone making shit up with no external reference points, and at the end, you don’t really get to celebrate with a team. I imagine it’s like running a marathon and having no one there at the finish line. Bad reviews are bruising, sometimes unfair, sometimes stupendously miss the point, but online they live forever. Even good ones make you feel really weird, and being referred to in them by your surname (for someone who didn’t go to an all-boys public school) is like having an out of body experience. Don’t read them if you can avoid it. Money wise, once you’ve paid tax, student loan, an accountant, an agent, rent etc, there’s nothing left. What I’m trying to say here is: you have to really, really love the writing process itself to want to do it as a profession.
What might people be surprised to learn about your work?
When I started writing my first (so far only) novel, I hadn’t written fiction since I was eighteen when I wrote lame short stories. I didn’t do any expensive writing courses or creative writing MA with access to agents and publishers. These days it often seems that’s the only route into a book deal but it’s not.
What made you/helped you to choose what you do?
My agent, who I met by chance, and is the most amazing and supportive woman, and without whom I would never have quit my previous job and gotten going on the novel at all. This is the key to dealing with the downsides listed above: get thee a good agent.
What’s your perfect breakfast/lunch for a workday?
(What do you actually have for breakfast/lunch?)
I treat myself so right in this respect. It’s my biggest expenditure. I eat my perfect breakfast slash lunch pretty much everyday as I work in cafes, so I’m very indulgent with food and drink. I have to buy it to sit there. The cafe I love most in Peckham has just down so I’m mourning their banana bread for breakfast. In general, I like hearty soups and bagels, coffee and doughnuts. I’m easing off coffee though as I’m getting bad insomnia in the lead up to publication this Spring.
What’s your perfect time to wake up / go to bed?
(When do you actually wake up / go to bed?)
I’m a night owl. When I’m working I can go until six in the morning. The single best thing about being a self-employed writer is that most days you can wake up when you want. My rule in winter is not getting up until it’s light outside.
What’s your alarm sound?
Currently tortuous iPhone electronica, but I want to buy a radio alarm and wake up to Radio 4. It’s the one thing that can induce feelgood patriotism in me. That and Wimbledon.
What are your work hours like? Do you try to create a routine for yourself or is that impossible given the nature of your work?
I don’t have a fixed daily routine so much as seasons, with different routines to match. I operate semi like an arable farm. I don’t actually know about farming, so that may not be true, but there are roughly 3 month long chunks of time – one of those chunks will be tutoring, in which I try to earn and save up some money, in terms of writing I call this fallow period my “composting” time, and I don’t beat myself up for not writing anything because I’m mulling over ideas and making notes. I can’t immerse myself in writing fiction and make money doing side jobs at the same time, so I don’t try. Then I’ll have an insanely productive chunk, usually summer, when I wake up every day at five and write until midnight, eating food out of tins and seeing no one. Then there’s the period when I sell a book and have to promote it by writing articles, doing interviews, and generally having an anxiety attack on the daily. Each is a very different headspace.
Do you work with fixed goals in mind or take it day by day depending on what comes up?
With my debut novel, Sympathy, I mapped out the plot in advance to within an inch of its life. I mean that literally, I had big maps on the wall. Family trees for my characters. Diagrams. Pinboards. My room looked like somewhere Carrie might have lived in Homeland. This meant that when it came to actually writing it, which I did the bulk of over three months (my summer chunk!) I stuck very closely to my agenda, ticking off what had to happen in each section. This time around, with my second novel, I’m approaching it slightly differently, with more flexibility which I guess comes with increased confidence. There were points with the first when, if I’d stuck less rigidly to a schedule or to-do list, happy accidents would have happened in the writing of certain scenes. I want to make more room for those. Another pitfall of having a plot all planned out in advance is that you get bored of it, and keep inventing flourishes to keep yourself entertained as you go, forgetting that a reader won’t have spent months ruminating over this, and will find it hard to keep up with all the twists and turns you’ve added in to keep yourself guessing.
What inspires you?
Two writers: Maggie Nelson and Lydia Davis, and my agent, Emma Paterson.
What’s your favourite thing about your job?
Apart from lie-ins and being able to do it wherever I happen to be in the world at that moment (that makes me sound jet set, it’s usually London), there was a 24-hour period when I was writing ‘Sympathy’, in which I entered that deep state of concentration people call “flow”. I wrote a whole chapter in five hours, and it was the best thing I’ve ever written because it felt like I’d slipped out of the real world and was entirely living in the one I’d created. That feeling is like crack, I want to get it again, but I’m worried I might never feel it at quite the same intensity. As someone said to me recently, you never get to write a first novel again. You never get the same unselfconsciousness.
Least favourite?
Reviews (good and bad). Internet trolls. Financial insecurity.
What do you do to get through days when you just don’t feel like it?
Cry. Always helps. Go to the cinema on my own in the daytime. Eat peanut butter from the jar. Personal admin (PADMIN). Those days are frequent.
Do you have a go-to treat to get you out of a slump?
Anything with Matcha. So basic. Sorry.
What’s your favourite part of the day?
Hitting send. If a non working day, the golden hour.
Do you have any hobbies/passions outside of your work?
One of the best things about writing fiction is that no subject is off limits. For my last book I learnt lots about particle physics and tsunamis. For my next, I’m looking into ceramics and Kurdish history. I love going to museums, doing crosswords, and walking. The last one is especially conducive to writing. I’d never cycle for that reason. I wouldn’t be able to zone out or write down notes or people watch without risking life and limb.
What’s one piece of advice you would give to someone who wants to do what you do?
I recently went with my friend Ruth to a talk here in the UK that was supposed to have the novelists Eimear McBride and Ali Smith on a panel, moderated by Toby Lichtig. Only McBride and Lichtig made it as Ali Smith was detained by storm Doris. I was sad as she was the reason I’d come but I asked a question at the end to McBride, prompted by her saying that she is inevitably compared to Joyce in every review and article, and inevitably as his lesser or derivative version. I asked her “How do you write unselfconsciously when you are braced for that?” Her response was long and made all the hair on my arms stand on end, and I won’t be able to recreate it for your readers without rousing music and staring right at them in a really intense way like she did to me in a huge auditorium, but basically she said: Don’t write for critics living now. Write for yourself, and for people living in the future.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to yourself 5 years ago?
I’d tell myself to take more risks. I’m lucky and privileged. I shouldn’t have tried to play it so safe always. I’m such a Cautious Carol, and I’m also a Capricorn.
Olivia's debut novel will be published on 4th April by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (USA/Canada), ONE (UK), Kein & Aber (Germany), Minimum Fax (Italy) and Wydawnictwo Czarna Owca (Poland).
“Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic [is] the best fictional account I’ve read of the way the internet has shaped our inner lives. A literary thriller that confirms the arrival of a major new talent.”
—THE GUARDIAN Pre-order Sympathy on Amazon UK / Amazon US. Check out Olivia's website here.Find her on Instagram @oliviasudjic & @babynovelist.
Some Music
This week is my second attempt at a Spring-themed playlist. You may remember that I pulled a similar stunt a few weeks ago, giddy from two days of unexpected sunshine, and a riot of blossom in the tree across the street from my house. That afternoon was the first of three back-to-back blizzards in Boston.
But I will not be discouraged! So, I put together some songs that make me feel like this:
As opposed to the more probable reality:
You can listen to it on Spotify here.
A Poem
If You'll Just Go to Sleep
by Gabriela Mistral
The blood red rose
I gathered yesterday,
and the fire and cinnamon
of the carnation,
Bread baked with
anise seed and honey,
and a fish in a bowl
that makes a glow:
All this is yours,
baby born of woman,
if you'll just
got to sleep.
A rose, I say!
I say a carnation!
Fruit, I say!
And I say honey!
A fish that glitters!
And more, I say -
If you will only
sleep till day.
From Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral (Indiana University Press, 1957)
Translation by Langston Hughes.
Links!
I know I've shared this one before, but the luminous Camille O'Sullivan singing Look Mummy, No Hands is worth watching a hundred times over.
Spinning a Story of Mama - Carmen Agra Deedy's TedTalk about her Cuban mother is storytelling at it's very best.
The newest resident of Sesame Street is a 4 year old muppet called Julia.
She is the show's first character with autism.
My life with Oliver Sacks: ‘He was the most unusual person I had ever known’
A heart-rending excerpt from Bill Hayes' new memoir.
“I hope I get a good night’s sleep and then have a rush of thoughts, as I did this morning,” says O. “It’s very delightful when that happens — all of them rushing to the surface, as if they have been waiting for me to become conscious of them…”I help him get ready for bed — “de-sock” him, fill his water bottle, bring him his sleeping tablets, make sure he has something to read.I: “What else can I do for you?”O: “Exist.”
People in California are creating an underground network - an 'immigration resistance effort' - to hide undocumented immigrants from ICE raids. "I definitely won't let them in. That's our legal right. If they have a warrant, then they can come in. I can imagine that could be scary, but I feel the consequences of being passive in this moment is a little scary."
This Sarah Silverman video is a really important reminder that we vote with our money, every single day. "We're not seen as citizens, we're seen as consumers." I closed my Bank of America account, and put my money in a local credit union. The whole thing took less than two hours, and I definitely felt better for it.
22 Animal Memes That Will Make You Laugh Harder Than They Probably Should.
Does what it says on the tin really.
I found this video of Norwegian sailors singing a sea shanty as they sail into Bergen harbour unexpectedly moving. And by unexpectedly moving, I mean I cried on the bus, much to the palpable discomfort of the gentleman sitting next to me.
Kids Kicking Cancer provides free martial arts classes and uniforms, relaxation, meditation and empowerment training for children with cancer and life-threatening illnesses, and their siblings. The New England Grandmaster Joe Esposito and his wife, Sensei Cathy brought this program to New England. They also run their own dojo, and this quote from their website really cheered me up:
‘We have an outstanding reputation for developing quality martial artists who are also quality people.'
And that's it! See you next week!
Love,
Katya
The Katch-Up's header illustration is by the brilliant Tamsin Baker.