Some songs to read this to (my reading playlist of 2023) -
or maybe what i’m listening to right now -
I was thinking about doing some sort of round up of 2023 but I couldn’t for the life of me remember what’s happened this year. I couldn’t pin down any specifics anyway. Just a general feeling. Ennui? I’ve got the worst memory. I think it’s a PTSD thing. There are things that stick in my mind from before the surreal and life altering day of April the 9th 2015 (*daddy dead day).
Oh - triple seven - five nine one six seven three one
Dad’s phone number. I just had to double check to make sure that this isn’t my own phone number because it rolls so naturally off my tongue. It bounces around my brain like a kid who needs to remember it JUST IN CASE I get lost on holiday.
I had to scroll through my phone photo stream to see what happened this year. The tiny icons on my phone summing up a very sad year (interspersed with a lot of joy and the majority of it just a neutral doing of the day) in a sea of el bras mosaic tiles on my screen. And babies. Protests. Meals. More babies, growing so quickly. Half finished projects. Inspo screenshots. Nice shadows on the walls of my bedroom. Outfits. Drunk friends. More shoots. And lots and lots of pages from books I read.
I take pictures of the pages in books that make me look up from the book in a - thinking - way, not a - bored - way. The kind of staring into space while deeply in your thoughts that you don’t even notice you’ve been locked in a very intense eye contact with the commuter opposite you on the tube for (what feels like) Morden to Mill Hill East. I don’t underline the words. That feels sacrilegious. Maybe I take these pictures in a subconscious hope that these wise, profound, relatable words will seep into my brain and make it nice, juicy and full and wise. I never do anything with those photos. They just live in my photo stream to remind me of something I felt at the time of reading - nestled in amongst the photos of the sunset skies of that month and recipes I wanted to cook but never did.
So here - I’ve compiled a list of the books of 2023 (i’m definitely forgetting some good ones because I have a habit of giving them away). Please be sure that this will not be an analysis of them in any literary sense but how they made me feel about my own life and what was happening at the time. A kind of autobiographical reading list. It’s usually music and playlists that sensorially summon me to a time and place but going back through these books has been incredibly evocative of the year just gone. Get ready for some oversharing and sad girl book recommendations.
1 _ Nothing but my Body by Tilly Lawless
I spent the first dark days of 2023 quite depressed wrapped up in Connie’s bed reading Tilly Lawless’ first novel Nothing But My Body - a fictional story set over 8 days from the perspective of a full service sex worker. Tilly herself is a FSSW and based much of the book on experiences of hers stating ‘it’s not a memoir, but it has enough of my life in it that I think that those of you who wanted me to write one will be appeased …. It’s also not a traditional novel in any sense; the structure is inspired by Mrs Dalloway & it’s not plot based but rather about the fluctuations of mental health, the interplay between our external & internal worlds & the rhythm & pace of the writing in mimicking those.’
After publishing she said she didn’t like the book feeling like it was a sensationalist. She wrote what she thought people would want to read and what would sell rather than what would creatively fulfill her. Apparently it brought her neither money nor pleasure. I guess this is maybe a warning to us, or a gentle reminder, to not try and monetise all our hobbies. Should we come into 2024 with an intention of keeping some things sacred, ritualistic, purely for pleasure and release? I hope the next thing she writes gives her some creative satisfaction and she writes more soon. I adore her writing - I always have ever since I was shown her instagram a few years ago. A binge-able account of pictures of her ( a intriguing woman with a distinctive mole - wearing pleasers and denim mini skirts and no make up, there is something classic about her face, maybe not of this time? Kind of like someone you used to know at school maybe, someone you were obsessed with, and probably fancied but didnt’t know it yet). She posts pictures with miniature auto-fictional stories about love and sex and swimming and Australia.
My experience reading it was a bit distressing but also quite comforting. I had just had a big New Years Eve confrontation with an ex ‘lover’ (can you say that without sounding like a twat or is it quite french and chic?) We had ended things a few weeks before and I was feeling a little bit heart broken. I was also in the aftermath of an abortion. And there were some ego driven situations that arose post-abortion that made things a bit stressful, no very stressful for me. I won’t go into it here but basically the moral of the story is always listen to your mum.
There is a scene that sticks with me in ‘Nothing But My Body’ where she is in the bath and she’s writing about a break up, or someone she is painfully in love with, while also being in the body of someone dealing with addiction. I can’t put my finger on what it was that so resonated with me but I didn’t stop thinking about it for months. The bathroom - the bloody site of my abortion - the bath - where I spent many nights staring into the cold January night sky by candlelight - and the feeling of heartbreak - I felt like me and Tilly (or the character in her book) were kind of in it together. She writes so beautifully about the body and being embodied, being queer, being a sex worker, being a mentally ill person and all the beauty that comes with it. I would definitely recommend it.
2 _ Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk.
I read this on the beach in Mexico (not too shabby) to distract myself from the pain of big break up #2 (very very shabby, disgustingly shabby actually). This was the last book I read of my holibobs, I can’t seem to remember the others. I think I spent the majority of the holiday staring into the water and gazing at the sea of fun, sexy, young, tanned holidaying Americans while I was looking and feeling like a milky miserable teenager. Bless my mum for taking her depressed and broke middle child halfway across the world for a vitamin D and serotonin boost.
Tokarczuk kept me distracted from the woes of my broken heart and hooked on the eccentric protagonist Janina and her mission to find her two dogs. Even though it’s set in a snowy rural Polish village and I was sitting on a 35 degree beach sunbathing - I gobbled it up hungrily. Murders, astrology, a mad old woman and always a meal shared by the fireside. Maybe a good book for this cold bleak January weather?
Mexican death rituals really inspired me.
3 _ Under the Glass Bell & Delta of Venus by Anais Nin
In an attempt to make myself feel a bit sexier I spent a while digging into Anais Nin’s work - I’d read Henry and June the year before and had gotten suitably old school turned on. Read them if you want to feel a bit cheeky on the tube. It’s so impressive the amount of work she produced in her lifetime. Under a Glass Bell was the first book that garnered attention from in the literary world (a book of short stories was far more palatable than her Erotica which was branded as smut). The short story that I loved most was called ‘The Mouse’ and I've found an online link to it.
https://shortstoryproject.com/stories/the-mouse/
Under the Glass Bell is a surreal and mad montage of poetic scenes and stories of late term abortions, diary keeping and life in Paris. But please do dig into her erotica too! If you’re feeling lazy there’s an adaptation of Little Birds with Juno Temple which is only worth watching for Yumna Marwan - a Lebanese actor who I think might be one of the sexiest women on the telly - I didn’t like the adaptation though.
4 _ The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
This was a book that made me desperately want to get a huge hound and give up all late night social activities. The Friend is a story about a woman who loses a lifelong friend to suicide and ends up adopting his huge sad faced grieving Great Dane. Lots of musings on grief and art and love. Quite a beautiful representation of the bleak stretching of time you experience after a loved one commits suicide. The complex feelings and the doubts of who they were really and what could have been. The most beautiful part of the book is the relationship between the protagonist and the gentle beast. At the time I got a tattoo of a butterfly with Con to mark the transformation of time and relationships. Death, rebirth and maybe a hopeful time. March 2023.
5 _ What Artists Wear by Charlie Porter
A nice one! Not a sad one (although most of the artists in this book were probably all depressed or a bit mad at some point in their lives). A book all about the power of clothing. What it makes us feel. How we use it to push ideas, to challenge society, to feel safe, to feel excited. For anyone who’s ever been made to feel like they are shallow, or stupid, or vain for caring about clothes and outfits and make up and DRESSING UP. For those who feel off or not able to be themselves if they’re not looking like themselves or sartorially expressing themselves. Not necessarily for lovers of “fashion” because I feel like that is often for a certain clique but clothing and what we do with it.
I learnt about David Robilliard and how he would hand paint t-shirts. Effective and pleasing. Just like his canvas’. I didn’t know about him - a peer of Gilbert & George. Living and working as a gay man in 1980s London, he faced oppression. He as a beautiful, witty, charming, clever man so would always be living life in love and lust. He managed to turn his beginnings as a poet into a career as an artist “using humour to mock the aesthetics of the male idealism”. He continued to release poetry books alongside his work and became a pillar in Soho society until he died in 1988, a victim of the AIDs pandemic.
I urge everyone to check out this book. Sarah Lucas, Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Basquiat. From jeans and t-shirts - the humble but iconic - to tailored suits and paint smeared studio overcoats. They all have stories to tell.
6 _ Sea State by Tabitha Lasley
A memoir that taught me a lot about off-shore oil rig workers. I remember getting involved in a long conversation with lots of engineers at a party that, had I not read this book, I would never have been able to join in on. My conversation topics don’t generally cross paths with that crowd often. Tabitha Lasley also didn’t know anything about off-shore oil riggers, but when quitting her job and her relationship in London and headed to Aberdeen, she goes to find out what men are like when no women are around. She ends up having an affair with a man who spends half his life stranded in the middle of the ocean. The book is about isolation, female desire and class. I really loved her style of writing. I also copied her freckle hack - as who doesn't miss their freckles in the winter - just pop them on with a bit of eye brow pencil. A bit bleak, a bit sexy, quite revealing and very cold. Another recommendation for the colder months.
7 _ The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House by Audre Lorde.
A short book of five fire fuelling essays by self-described ‘Black lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’ Audre Lorde. She frames how we can use the power of women to guide us through the dark. The essay which gives the book its title is powerful and very applicable to the times we are living in now. I’m going to re-read it this week because I think I need to find some energy to get through this horrifically fucked time.
Here’s an excerpt from the essay ‘Uses of the Erotic’ as I’m hoping to harness some more of this in 2024.
‘ There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.
We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.
It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power.
As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters.
But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.
The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”
8 _ Rosewater by Liv Little
Another STUNNING read about female desire set in my dear home South London. Written by the cleverest icon and old friend Liv Little. Liv has always supported my work. She is an absolute legend and not only did she start GalDem Magazine, wrote a novel and lots of amazing tv and development bits in between, she also included my brand in her novel. El Bras IMMORTALISED in her beautiful love story set in the London that we grew up in together. Rosewater is a story about queer love and friendship - the sometimes painful and ever confusing love that exists between best friends that I am far too familiar with.
9 _ Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti
My year, and my art practice, was completely flipped upside down by my education of Cosey Fanni Tutti. I read this book on the beach in Mallorca with my bestie boy Oscar when I was finally feeling like myself a month after starting on anti-d’s for the first time.
Cosey was born in Hull, and moved to London in her early twenties. She describes her life with former partner and bandmate of Throbbing Gristle - Genesis P-Orrigde - as initially eye-opening but quickly became abusive. She never stopped hustling and always needed to be making art. I think this book forced me to acknowledge my own work with El Bras as art and has inspired me to push that further. I will always be indebted to Cosey.
>>>> Here’s my essay from when my mind was fresh in Cosey land.
https://songs2swim2.substack.com/p/photo-booth-reincarnations?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Read it while listening to Chris & Cosey’s back catalogue.
10 _ Faith, Hope and Carnage Nick Cave and Sean O Hagan
Any long time reader of this substack will know how much this book affected me last year. The perfect novel long conversation between Nick Cave and Sean o’Hagan discussing grief and love. I might be a masochist the amount i’m obsessed with reading and thinking about death. Either way this is a very long substack so maybe i’ll just insert my previous stacks on Nick Cave and you can have a read if you want. 10/10 though. I even made friends at the lido because of the book.
https://songs2swim2.substack.com/p/nick-cave?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
https://songs2swim2.substack.com/p/a-sketchbook-with-words?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
11 _ Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex by Sophia Giovannitti
Gobbled this one up. Amazing book. Sophia Giovannitti opened my eyes with her critique of the notion that sex and art are two separate sacred spheres and neither can be commodified. Yet the two industries are incredibly lucrative. She argues for acceptance, not moral or political outrage, and builds a very compelling argument.
Another person i’m obsessed with - I’ve got a twitter account now just to follow her. I took the most photos of her writing so instead of butchering some sort of summary i’ll paste some pages that took my fancy instead so you can see for yourself. Go buy this book!
12 _ Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Another gorgeous memoir about grief and food. When you lose a parent in your early twenties it’s hard not to look back on the times you were an utter arsehole to that parent - the teenage years - which were not that far from the last time you saw that parent. Michelle Zauner tells the story of her mother’s death and everything that goes with it - family, food, identity, memory - in such a funny and relatable way. Read my favourite bit in this essay here where she likens grief to kimchi. Obsessed.
13 _ Happening by Annie Ernaux
A recounting of Annie’s abortion she had at 23 years old 40 years after the event. I adored this book. The descriptions of Paris in the 60s were dreamlike. I felt so much relief while reading this that I lived in a time where abortion is legal and safe. Also inspired to continue my work looking at memory and archives. I found faith that reliving trauma can uncover beauty and meaning.
This book was so encouraging to know that writing vulnerably and intimately isn’t just for oversharing millennials but that the memoirist can be a powerful thing. I don’t actually believe that being revealing with strangers is necessarily a “weakness” (maybe that is imposter syndrome or perhaps my inner misogynist?). The female, the personal, the domestic, the body is suggested to be not as important as other writing in society. Annie Ernaux won a Nobel prize for her writing so I guess that shows how important the memoirist is.
14 _ Dad’s diaries
Last year in the midst of my heart break I decided to read my dad’s diaries for the first time. One diary was from when he was 21 travelling with my pregnant mama in South America. A fucking hilarious account of the mad people they met and the tone no different to how he spoke when he was in his 40s when I forged my grown up relationship with him. I could hear him through his words. I count myself very lucky to have these tiny portals into his thoughts. The second diary of his is one from when he was going quite mad in the last years of his life - jokes and dark snippets about what was going on, all told through nonsensical limericks. Fucking miss that silly billy gorgeous stupid man. I think I wrote about the diaries in my Kimchi post.
Being open or revelatory or vulnerable on the internet isn’t a new thing. And I don’t think it’s a cool thing. But I think for me, it’s a necessary thing. When you lose someone to suicide. Your favourite person in the world. At the beginning of your twenties. And then have an abortion. And a horrible break up. The worst, loneliest, saddest, break up. At the end of your twenties. It forces you to have a real think about what's important. And work some grief stuff out. Which is why I have used the experiences from the beginning of this year as the drive for an artistic examination of grief. Hopefully this year I can put it into something beautiful and meaningful (please art council pls give me that grant - i’m going to wish on my January morning candle for that art money - pls pls say a prayer for me). It also means maybe building a community. I know i’ve had a few messages from people who read this substack who have also suffered a traumatic loss and it's a confusing thing to navigate, but hopefully, if I can say this to a bunch of strangers, we have each other.
Nothing is paywalled on here but if you you’d like to give me some pocket money for my writing because you appreciate my work I would be over the moon (obvs only if you can afford). I’ve somewhat stupidly made my full time job my creative and artistic endeavours so please if you like what I do sign up to a little paid section and I'll send you stories, recommendations and thoughts to your inboxes every (other sometimes) week. It’s free for everyone else and I don’t resent anyone who doesn’t give me money - I just hope my words can inspire, provoke thoughts or comfort in some way. Thank you to everyone and anyone who has supported me and my work this year. I love you all (apart from the stupid Zionist men who have started harassing me on instagram, don’t love you one bit).
xxxxxx
PS. this is my reading pile next to my bed now. I’ve just finished Vida Adamczewski’s Amphibians & Other Bodies. You can really tell Vida is a poet. Truly a delight to start the year with these swampy and raw short stories. So bloody proud of all these incredible women from South London who are carving out creative space for us in the world. You are a super star Vida <3