Claire Hennessy's Blog, page 8
September 28, 2017
September 21, 2017
September 20, 2017
Banshee #5 launch!
Some Banshee updates:
Issue #5 (autumn/winter 2017) is available to order now, or you can purchase a subscription.
The Dublin launch takes place in Books Upstairs (D’Olier Street), 6.30pm-8pm on Tuesday 26th September – all are welcome! Readings, wine, chats – the usual.
Submissions for issue #6 (spring/summer 2018) will be open October 1st-31st.
We accept short fiction (including flash), poetry and essays.
Some other things:
Recent pieces for the Irish Times include interviews with YA authors Sarah Carroll and Cat Clarke, as well as September’s children’s book reviews.
I’m reading at Dubray Grafton St as part of Culture Night (Friday 22nd September).
I’ll also be taking part in Banned Books Week 2017: Our right to read (Wednesday 27th September, in London).
Some stuff about people who aren’t me:
Upcoming books I’m excited about from Irish or we’re-claiming-them-as-such-now writers: One Star Awake , the debut novel from Andrew Meehan, and Hymn to the Reckless , Erin Fornoff’s first poetry collection.
And further into the future: Claire Allan’s debut thriller, after having published eight bestselling women’s fiction titles, is out next summer.
Here’s a gorgeous piece from Caroline Busher about her time as Reader-in-Residence in Wexford Library. Her second novel, The Girl Who Ate The Stars, is also out soon.
Finally, some non-bookish stuff I’ve loved recently:
BoJack Horseman season 4 (so many feelings)
an impossibly soft pair of leggings
this Sweet Valley High podcast
September 14, 2017
September 7, 2017
September 4, 2017
August 31, 2017
Books I’ve loved recently (Jennifer Weiner edition)
So I had this plan that I’d just note the books I loved and then move on, because it’s time-consuming to go into detail about all the books you’ve read and had thoughts about, especially if you’re doing that, or similar, in other capacities already (newspaper reviewing, manuscript critiques, assessing submissions, etc). I’d just say ‘yes this is awesome’ and glide onto the next thing.
And then at least three separate essays in Jennifer Weiner’s Hungry Heart had me sobbing.
To backtrack: I’d been aware of Jennifer Weiner for years, when internet-pals had praised her highly. But it was tricky finding her work on this side of the Atlantic – this was before I owned Kindle/s – and the one I did own, Certain Girls, was the sequel to her debut, Good In Bed, which I didn’t have, and she sort of slipped from my mind for a bit.
I knew the name, of course, and I think I was following her on Twitter from quite an early stage (I joined in early 2009), and I was aware and approving of bits and pieces she’d done and said (even before Franzengate et al).
And then I came across Then Came You, in trade paperback (note: when UK publishers bring out something in hardback, Ireland usually gets the trade paperback or ‘airport edition’, for reasons that have yet to become clear to me), and nabbed it, because it was about surrogacy and stepmothers and all kinds of weirdnesses that appealed to me.
I drank it up – it was so readable and compassionate and interesting, and an amazing exploration of economic class and privilege (or lack thereof) in the United States without ever getting preachy. Also, there was this amazing lesbian sex scene in it. (The brain remembers what the brain remembers, guys.)
A couple of years later I read All Fall Down, which absolutely blew me away in its authentic and painful depiction of suburban drug addiction. What I remember the most is how completely justified Allison seemed to be in escaping a life that, while outwardly shiny, was utterly exhausting and draining. I felt so much for her.
I was fortunate enough to read Weiner’s 2015 novel, Who Do You Love, as a e-galley (digital review copy), and adored its smart and thoughtful exploration of race, religious identity and chances missed/taken across the years. It was satisfying in many ways but it didn’t make me swoon.
The Next Big Thing, her semi-autobiographical novel about making a failed TV series, did. Completely and utterly. It’s got a sexy and satisfying romance woven in with so much good stuff about creativity, art, and business – and that fine line between compromising versus selling out.
It was gorgeous, and pleasing, so when I needed a dose – you know when you just need a dose of the good medicine, often the rereading of old favourites? – of readable, engrossing fiction, I read three of her backlist back-to-back: Fly Away Home, Best Friends Forever, and In Her Shoes. This was over a period of maybe four days. There are very few writers you can read like that – gobbling up unrelated titles one after another and still find them satisfying.
Which brings us to Hungry Heart, the memoir/essay collection by Weiner I’d been eyeing up since before it was published, but which is still not available in the UK/Ireland as an e-book. However, the release of the paperback meant that the hardback price went down – so, hello, hardback.
I knew some of the details, and others I’d presumed – Weiner has shared in articles that the recently-out lesbian mother in her debut was based on personal experience, and her relationship with her grandmother I’d guessed from another novel.
More surprising was the younger sister who is so very much Maggie in In Her Shoes, although it’s been so long since that book came out that I may have missed such reveals. And more heartbreaking were the parts about her father – who drifted in and out of her life after divorcing her mother before dying of an overdose too young. (The compassion and empathy she has when writing about addiction suddenly take on a whole new resonance, even though I suspect it is infinitely easier for her to forgive a fictional creation than her father.)
She’s smart without getting preachy about feminism, and pop culture, and how books by women are treated (and, she’s at pains to say, not that she’s denying the commercial/literary distinction, but she wants to draw attention to how genre books by male writers still draw more acclaim than those by female writers).
She writes about being fat in several pieces, and there is a tear-jerker of an essay about her daughter and what happens when she calls someone fat. And Weiner thinks: this is not okay. And I have to address this. But even as she’s thinking this, she is also hoping: but I hope my daughter is not. Is not fat. And that honesty – that ambiguity – is so important in her writing. Because she knows damn well it’s hard to be body-positive at a certain size and it gets harder the higher the size.
Weiner has written many heroines who are ‘plus-size’ and even if they’ve been heavier in the past, they ‘slim down’ to sizes that are still ‘plus-size’ – Weiner is a fit and active woman and her heroines reflect this. She is scathing of the advice given – ‘just eat less’ – while also sympathetic to those with complicated relationships with food (most women, but it’s only the overweight ones that are consistently made feel guilty about it). The book is much more than a body-positivity manifesto, but it’s an important and nuanced thread running through it.
Finally, there’s an essay about a miscarriage in her mid-40s that aches on the page. It’s not quite the loss of a child, she says, but it’s the loss of something . . . it’s part-relief and part-bereavement. It’s complicated and messy and painful (emotionally and physically) and very real.
There is always something very powerful about knowing something ‘really happened’, but particularly when you have a sense of the person already – the slivers of the self from articles and interviews and novels – it hits even harder.
To sum up: fabulous writer, for goodness’ sake do go read something of hers please.
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
[image error]
