Worms Best Reads of March 2024
Enya Sullivan
The Last Sane Woman by Hannah Regel
Hannah Regel’s ‘The Last Sane Woman’ will be out via Verso in June, and I had such a pleasure in being able to read it beforehand.
Even as an object, it is beautiful to hold, the front and back photo (by Zinna Mac-Eochaidh) is reminiscent of Ana Mendieta ‘Silueta’ series: two holes dug in the ground of an unkept, but domestic (with a clothes line hanging) garden that allude to a sort of burial, and doubling between the novel’s two protagonists Nicola Long and potter Donna.
Nicola Long is in some ways a classic working class millennial in the post-Blair age, struggling to make a living and find purpose after graduating from art school: her love life is a mess, she hasn’t made any work in ages, she meanders across the solitary London landscape alone, finds herself stuck in work she doesn’t relate to and is surrounded by successful, unkind people who she can’t help but compare herself to. Nicola finds herself visiting the Feminist Assembly, an archive of woman artists, where she becomes entranced by a series of letters (only the ‘sent’ correspondence, we never see the replies) by a woman potter named Donna. Donna operates in Thatcher’s London, unemployed, with a string of failing relationships and ongoing struggle to become a recognised artist and happy person. Nicola slowly forms a parasocial relationship with the archival ghost of Donna, who Nicola knows killed herself but waits to find out how and why as she tentatively reads on, unable to shake off the feeling that they are the same person.
When the odds are stacked against both characters, as a woman, as a working class woman, in a city and society that does not reward artists or women, it is hard to not despair at Donna’s fate and wonder what in turn will become of Nicola. The book is thoroughly poetic, melancholy and full of a deep and painful yearning to become whole. There are moments of beauty and humour however. Regel’s intelligent book is full of mirroring and the affective pull of mirroring: we the reader (reading a book of letters (letters within the letters)) form a relationship with both the ghosts of Nicola and Donna, pulled in by their relatability and deep feelings, conjuring up our own ghost within.
Caitlin McLoughlin
Sinkhole: Three Crimes by Rosanna McLaughlin
I was first drawn to Sinkhole: Three Crimes by the typeface made from fat, dripping tendrils of snot-green slime plastered across its cover – and because its author Rosanna McLaughlin and I nearly share the same last name. Published by Montez Press, Sinkhole is a fierce dystopian satire set in a not-far-off and uncomfortably plausible future where Britain has been swapped by near-permanent rainfall, dividing the nation into “floodzones” and “dryzones.” The former is populated by societies’ outcasts, its waterlogged land prone to spontaneous collapse, leaving great wet chasms that swallow people, buildings and roundabouts indiscriminately. The latter homes the middle and upper classes, Tory havens of gated communities modelled on quaint Cotswold-style villages and boasting olde-style pubs, butchers and greengrocers. Nationwide, Amazon inevitably reigns supreme and a very British air of passivity has set in. We bounce around a pantomime of painfully recognisable caricatures of British life – the repressed, down-trodden husband, the insufferable breakfast TV hosts, and the sunburnt expats who’ve relocated to a Goan beach town – as they try to make do in their various hellish realities.
McLaughlin is savagely observant and no one is safe. The section about Harry, queer confessional columnist turned ghost writer, is equally as searing in its dissection of our present day auto-fiction obsession, as it is the boss-bitch feminists and wellness gurus she now poses as. There’s this bit about two women who host a sex positive feminist podcast and they both have “the kind of deep rasping voice that is specific to a certain type of British private-school girl… that was catnip for those lower down the pecking order”, which had me howling (having fallen victim to this very strain of catnip when first introduced to private schoolers at the art foundation course I did back in Leeds).
As indicated by its title, three crimes emerge over the course of the book, but it’s through the interior worlds of each of these characters that McLaughlin levels her diagnosis of the modern, British psyche and the prognosis (predictably?) does not look good… like all good satire you don’t always know whether to laugh or cry. Either way, I can’t recommend this book enough.
P Eldridge
Syzygy, Beauty by T. Fleischmann
When I pick up Syzygy, Beauty by T. Fleischmann I place it in the hands of a friend. I’m not sure why, I can’t let myself be the first to read this, and so I let them flick to a page, selecting a short stanza, and they begin reading. I’m swept away, almost instantly, with the direct address the prose makes to a lover. I realise then that reading, when fantasising about falling in love, makes it easier for me to connect with a text; especially one as tender as this. There’s a passage here that holds me: “I want to be transparent. If people could see through me, they could not stop loving me, forgive me.” I wonder how much of this is true, can people love what is so easily transparent? Something vindictive in me says no, even if I want to live, in my writing, as close to the knives as I possibly can. Or, do people become endeared to you for your strange translucence? Do they walk through you with ease, and in that place, find comfort so they, themself, can become a mirage? The opposite that is proposed then is something more stoic, not hollow but filled in, which also gives me agitated pause. So then, what am I, sand leaking through cupped hands or a hole in some asphalt being filled in with new concrete? There’s something mutating here that T. Fleischmann addresses through art criticism and the vignettes of lovers. How the body is made a body of something much greater when in love, and when not it is something completely monstrous, burgeoning with desire, lust, unresolved echoes of want…
Arcadia Molinas
This Ragged Grace by Octavia Bright
I had been seeking this book out for a while. Ever since I went to see Octavia Bright in conversation with Rebecca May Johnson during last year’s summer, at the Burley Fisher Literary Festival, I knew I had to read this book.
This Ragged Grace is about Octavia Bright’s recovery from alcoholism and her father's descent into Alzheimers. It’s brilliantly written, weaving symbols across space and time (the sea, spirals, attention, biscuits) to stand for the metaphors at the heart of life, time, love and death. Bright has left a testament of a life lived, and so much wisdom for everyone still figuring out how to. As someone not familiar with the world and vocabulary of recovery, I learned that it’s not so much about control over the chaos but about learning how to be at peace with it. How to integrate the void, the fear and love, or compulsion towards it into your life, in a healthy way, one that confronts it like an old friend, not one that surrenders to its whims and fancies. There are many lessons for everyone, whether in recovery or not, in this book. In fact, because I was borrowing this book from Caitlin, I copied many of my favourite lines into my journal and I’m so grateful to be able to return to them so immediately when I desire the serenity in her words. Speaking of, Caitlin had a wonderful talk with Octavia for The Elements Issue of Worms and Summer’s conversation with her on The Worms Podcast is definitely one of my favourite episodes so far.
Love, is a form of chaos too. I found so many lessons inside those reflections, seeking the thrill of beginnings as a form of escape, "the pursuit of intensity alone, is a way of avoiding being really seen for who you are, faults, imperfections, and all". I found myself reflected in those words, as I currently seek my own company, and 'no' has become one of my favourite words. However Bright warned me, too, that "in my isolation I'd come to take myself too seriously." Like Christopher McCandless learned on that bus in the Alaskan wilderness, “happiness is only real when shared.” Bright arrives at a similar conclusion. But I also found reassurance and fortitude in my current period of isolation within the book. Currently, I’m taking a step back, I'm measuring myself up, seeing that "the things we seek refuge in can easily become traps that work against our emancipation". And I’ve been unpacking a lot of the things I’ve previously found “refuge” in. I am embarked on my own emancipation journey. I find sobriety to be part of it too curiously. What is my own relationship to obliteration? I’ve been thinking about that.
I cried a lot reading this book. It's heart-breaking. Yet so affirming. So elegantly written. I feel like I’m seeing the world with new eyes and questioning some of the origins of my decisions and thought patterns, finding more peace in their ebbs and flows too. What envy, “I wish I had written this book”.
