Tag: Literary Fiction

Judith Barrow’s Memories

‘The Memory is a poignant tale of love and hate in which you will feel every emotion experienced by Irene.’– Terry Tyler

Wonderful author of the Bestselling Haworth family saga, Judith Barrow, is launching her latest novel.  The Memory explores a ‘Mother and daughter tied together by shame and secrecy, love and hate.’ I can’t resist books with secrets and know Judith is an expert at weaving these into her narratives.  I invited Judith to tell me more about the background to The Memory because I know it is close to her heart and experience.

Much of the background of The Memory is taken from my own memories of when I was carer at different times in my life. With the support of my husband I’ve looked after two aunts. One who lived with us for thirty years before dementia took hold of her – and then, at the same time, her aunt, who came to us when the disease first made its presence known and she had no one else. The idea was that we found a care home for her in Pembrokeshire where we live, but she cried when we left her there. So we brought her home. Physically robust, she lived with us for twelve years. We were four generations under one roof and, looking back I don’t think it did our children any harm. Indeed I think it taught them empathy. And finding the humour in the chaos of living with someone with dementia far outweighed the sadness.

A portrait of Judith’s Auntie Olive who lived with Judith’s family for over thirty years.

I truly believe that the role of carer for a loved and respected relative with dementia is something that takes over both lives with unseen stealth. The disease steals away the person who affected until they gradually disappear. The carer increasingly and sometimes automatically takes on the role until their whole life revolves around the caring. And, mostly, it’s a mantle that’s taken on willingly.

But it’s hard.

During the years I was a carer I met others whose lives, despite help from any professional bodies, had become a constant round of tiredness and stress. And it was only when the trust was built up between us that the word ‘resentment’ would sometimes be voiced. But spoken of with shame, as though it was a reaction that had no place. After all, most of them were caring for a person who had been a constant presence in their lives as a cherished parent, relative, companion, partner. It was the carer’s time to give back the love – wasn’t it? They had no right to sometimes feel resentful. Or so they believed. I remember the relief to be able to admit it, to relax, to know I wasn’t alone. And to share stories of the ridiculous and bizarre situations we found ourselves in.

I’ve tried to show those two contrasting emotions in The Memory; love and yet resentment. But with Irene Hargreaves, the protagonist, hatred often rears its ugly head. All because on one dreadful memory.

Pots and Pans is the memorial where the Remembrance Services are held. It’s a memorial where memories are kept and/ or shared to the wind.

As a child, I escaped to a place known as Pots and Pans in Saddleworth.  Pots and Pans, quite high, windy and isolated, is the memorial where the Remembrance Services are held.  I used to climb with my first dog when I was eleven to get away from home. It’s where I used to chunter on about the unfairness of anything that was happening.  It’s a memorial where memories are kept and/ or shared to the wind. Well, that’s what I always thought. The dog was also a great listener!  This is the place where the bones of my books were constructed.

The Memory is a stand alone book about a woman, Irene Hargreaves, who is the career for her mother. One a dark evening in 2001 Irene stands by the side of her mother’s bed and knows it is time. For more than fifty years she has carried a secret around with her; a haunting memory she hasn’t even confided to her husband, Sam, a man she has loved and trusted all her life. But now she must act before he arrives home…

About Judith:

Wonderful author of The Memory and the bestselling Howarth family saga.

Judith Barrow,originally from Saddleworth, a group of villages on the edge of the Pennines,has lived in Pembrokeshire, Wales, for forty years.

She has an MA in Creative Writing with the University of Wales Trinity St David’s College, Carmarthen. BA (Hons) in Literature with the Open University, a Diploma in Drama from Swansea University and She has had short stories, plays, reviews and articles, published throughout the British Isles and has won several poetry competitions..

She is a Creative Writing tutor for Pembrokeshire County Council and holds private one to one workshops on all genres.

https://www.judithbarrow-author.co.uk/
https://judithbarrow.blogspot.com
https://twitter.com/judithbarrow77
https://www.facebook.com/judith.barrow.3
https://www.honno.co.uk/authors/b/judith-barrow/

Please see all my guests’ posts at Mail from the Creative Community and my website and blog at JessieCahalin.com.

A copy of my novel is available here.

Woolf Scholar’s Novel Choice

Maggie Humm

‘Without a doubt, Lullaby will be one of the most unsettling, absorbing, un-put-downable novels of 2018,’ according to Professor Maggie Humm.  Intrigued, I invited the internationally acclaimed Woolf scholar to tell me more about Lullaby by Leila Slimani.

It was a delight to receive mail from Maggie Humm, as all her academic books were once crammed into my student rucksack. I am honoured to step aside so that Maggie Humm can challenge us with her review of a novel from a newly-refreshed sub-genre of literary fiction.

Leila Slimani Lullaby

Lullaby Leila Slimani

As Match of the Day might say ‘leave the room if you don’t want to know the result.  Lullaby recounts an apparently simple scenario. Louise, a nanny of indeterminate age, is hired by Paul and Myriam, a successful middle-class Parisian couple, to care for their two children, baby Adam and Mila.  Louise is tiny, with immaculate finger-nails, constantly wearing the Peter Pan collared blouse of the novel’s cover. Soon she transforms her employers’ lives for the better: the children adore her, she unobtrusively cooks, cleans and anticipates all their desires and needs. The kind of woman you’d never spot in a crowd.

In flashback, and through multiple characters’ interactions with Louise, we come to understand and empathise with her past: a loveless childhood, poverty, and domestic and sexual violence. Unusually, and intriguingly, these features are not presented as completely explanatory reasons for her final violent act – the murder of the two children. Myriam and Paul are occasionally caring and thoughtful employers whose actions to some extent compensate for Louise’s past traumas. And their kindness becomes the problem. Louise is desperate to live full-time with Paul and Myriam, to have them ‘adopt’ her. Until she kills.

‘…isolation from other nannies in the park’

Although none of the stories are told in first person we inhabit the minds of differing characters almost in real-time at key turning points: the nanny’s sensual exploration of the apartment where she will kill; her physical disgust with men during sex; her isolation from other nannies in the park; the warmth and beauty of a Greek island holiday with her employers and children. This ‘sticky mess’, as Heiser says, takes over our emotions and our  bodies. We can feel Louise on our skin, even taste what she eats.

Lullaby joins a newly-refreshed sub-genre of literary fiction recreating real-life crime, exemplified by another best-selling French novel Emmanuel Carrère’s The Adversary; combined with a women’s fiction genre of apparently affectless short sentences as in Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton

‘It could be any Western urban capitalist city.’

These novels focus on the gap between what we think we know and what we experience in the diurnal life of the novel – a technique often characterised as metamodernist. That is, novels which deal with structures of feeling after postmodernism. Lullaby appears intensely intimate – narrating the lives of each person in the lead up to murder. But, as a metamodernist novel it also portrays (very subtly) ways of feeling and thinking about contemporary issues: immigration, poverty, homelessness or the threat of homelessness, women’s bodies and misogyny played out in the physical geography of Paris. It could be any Western urban capitalist city.

Lullaby is also a woman’s novel (although not without interest to male readers hopefully). Clothes, jewellery, cooking and meals, women’s physical differences from men, are all as significant as actions, and trigger and shape actions in many cases. For example, Louise takes the children out to dinner one evening hoping that her employers will be able to have sex undisturbed, and produce the new baby that Louise needs to retain her place. The children are disconcerted by being dragged around strange streets to eat and when they return Louise discovers that the wife went early to bed alone. Louise’s ensuing anger (hidden from Myriam and Paul) contributes to the build-up to murder. The significance of meals and fashions were themes of the great modernist writer Virginia Woolf, but what makes Lullaby essentially metamodernist is the way in which Lullaby displaces and undercuts notions of the feeling subject by the continual unknowingness of motive and desire. Rather than arriving at a resounding ending – a Joycean ‘yes she said, yes she said, Yes; or Woolf’s Lily Briscoe’s ‘I have had my vision’ (note the present perfect containment),  Lullaby ends with the reader alongside the female detective, re-enacting the murder. In The Adversary the narrator leaves behind the protagonists, drives back to Paris, deciding ‘that writing this story could only be either a crime or a prayer.’ Lullaby forces the reader to become Louise ‘who takes a knife from the cupboard,’ and to recreate the murder ourselves in our minds.

Without a doubt, Lullaby will be one of the most unsettling, absorbing, un-put-downable novels of 2018.

Manuscript of Talland House is waiting for a front cover

Maggie Humm is an Emeritus Professor, University of East London. An internationally-acclaimed Woolf scholar, the author of 14 books both for an academic and general readership, the last 3 focused on Woolf and the arts, the topic of Talland House – her debut novel. Talland House was shortlisted for the Impress and Fresher Fiction prizes 2017 (as Who Killed Mrs. Ramsay?). A short story ‘Cult Love’ was ‘highly commended’ by the National Association of Writers’ Groups (2018).

Maggie Humm’s debut novel Talland House was shortlisted for the Impress and Fresher fiction prizes 2017 (as Who Killed Mrs. Ramsay?).

Talland House will be released soon.  Maggie’s manuscript is waiting for a front cover but even the manuscript looks tempting.  Maggie will send a photo of her book in a handbag when it is available.

In the meantime, here is an overview of the novel:

Talland House   

The Royal Academy, London 1919. Lily Briscoe has a painting displayed. She’s put her student life in picturesque St. Ives behind her: her friend and substitute mother Mrs. Ramsay disliked Lily’s portrait of her it seemed; Louis Grier, her tutor, didn’t seduce her as she’d hoped. Ten years on she’s been a suffragette, a nurse in WWI, and now a successful artist. But then Louis appears at the exhibition. He tells Lily that Mrs. Ramsay died suddenly and Lily has to investigate. And she realizes that she still loves Louis.

 

Please see all my guests’ posts at My Guests and my blog and website at jessiecahalin.com.

 

Talland House and the Mystery of Mrs Ramsay’s Death

Maggie reading on St Ives beach being filmed by a French TV crew.

I have waited over a year for the release Talland House by Maggie Humm. According to the blurb, “Talland House takes Lily Briscoe from the pages of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and tells her story outside the confines of Woolf’s novel…” It is an honour to introduce you to Maggie Humm.

Maggie Humm is an international Woolf scholar, she is the author/editor of fourteen books, the last three of which focused on Woolf and the arts. Talland House was shortlisted for the Impress and Fresher Fiction prizes in 2017 (as Who Killed Mrs. Ramsay?) and the Retreat West and Eyelands prizes in 2018.

Jessie: Tell me more about Talland House.

“Maggie Humm has brilliantly filled in the edges beyond Woolf’s canvas…” Lauren Elkin

Maggie: Talland House re-imagines Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse from the point of view of Lily Briscoe the artist character. Set between 1900 and 1919 in picturesque Cornwall and war-blasted London, the novel tells Lily’s emotional journey in becoming a professional artist: her love-life, mourning her dead mother, as a suffragette, nurse and solving the mystery of Mrs. Ramsay’s death. The novel contains a prequel to To the Lighthouse and many fictions of Woolf’s life, including her family, the artists and friends she knew.

Jessie: What was the initial inspiration for the novel?

Virginia Woolf’s wonderful, quasi-autobiographical To the Lighthouse. I first read it as an adolescent after the death of my mother and fell in love with the mother-figure Mrs. Ramsay. Only years later did I discover that Woolf’s mother Julia Stephen was 49 when she died and Virginia 13 – the exact ages of my mother and me when my mother died. There’s something so extraordinarily moving about mothering in To the Lighthouse. In the novel Mrs. Ramsay dies suddenly and in parentheses (apologies to those who haven’t read the book!). The death is unexplained – the most surprising death in 20th century literature. I knew I had to write a novel discovering how Mrs. Ramsay died!

Jessie: How long have you been working on the book? Did it involve any special research?

Years! I took a UEA/Guardian diploma in creative writing followed by nine months of mentoring with The Literary Consultancy and much revision.

The research was huge but so enjoyable. As a Woolf scholar (my last three books focus on Woolf and the arts) I’d read all Woolf’s writings and writings by her family and friends. For Talland House I read Cornish newspapers for the times Lily is in St. Ives for weather, incidents, and atmosphere. I loved being in the airy, light map room at the top of the British Library looking at old photos of St. Ives for housing types, street scenes. I read artists’ memoirs, art journals of the turn of the twentieth century for a sense of artists’ lives and studios. I read everything on-line about World War I in London and how it felt to be there, for example, when the Germans suddenly switched from Zeppelins to Gotha bombers in 1917. London and St. Ives almost became characters in Talland House. I googled about music halls, other leisure pursuits, clothes, transport, and the accurate names of buildings and visited all Lily’s places. Lily gradually took over my life, my feelings, even my physical characteristics. She’s always early for appointments, she’s an only child with a dead mother, and her fingers are the shape of mine. Sometimes I wondered if I existed outside the novel!

Jessie: I am intrigued and want to delve into your writing. Please present some extracts from the novel so that will transport us to the settings in Cornwall.

Talland House

“Talland House…a kind of home, a place where she’d always wanted to return, and she’d missed it with the sadness of missing an old friend, a real person.”

“Lily glanced up at the house. Over the years, Talland House had come to mean more and more to her, a kind of home, a place where she’d always wanted to return, and she’d missed it with the sadness of missing an old friend, a real person. There was a special spot—the steps from the drawing room into the garden where Mrs. Ramsay liked to sit—at a specific moment of the day—early evening when the low sunlight caught the bright escallonia hedge—and it looked magnificent.”

St Ives

“Here no one knew her, here there were no family responsibilities, here she could be herself or whatever herself would become.”

“Lily had a glorious view of St Ives’s harbour, the seagulls twisting iridescent in the sun, a lighthouse seemingly close enough to touch. The weeks ahead spread out before her like a freshly washed sheet. Here no one knew her, here there were no family responsibilities, here she could be herself or whatever herself would become.”

Beach and Godrevy

“The beach began to empty as families took their children home for tea, and Lily rested on the top bar of the promenade railings looking out over the glare of the sea at Godrevy Lighthouse, hearing distant cries, the pat-pat of sails flapping against the rigging, the waves lapping. Now she felt the whole of the past could be present, as if her childhood days inched forward as slowly as the tortoise in the garden at home.

Godrevy Lighthouse

“It was pure joy to be with Mrs. Ramsay, lit by gleams from Godrevy…”

“It was pure joy to be with Mrs. Ramsay, lit by gleams from Godrevy, the conversation from the dining room too faint to understand. Mrs. Ramsay’s face seemed atop a statue, marble and firm. She looked so commanding suddenly, and Lily felt the rich essence of female connection, a fervent intensity because they were both women and Mrs. Ramsay was a mother. She gave Talland House a point of view, a sense of life, of its odd but necessary capacity.”

“Maggie Humm has brilliantly filled in the edges beyond Woolf’s canvas; she has a deep, awe-inspiring understanding of the role of the visual in Woolf’s work, and here she reveals that she also has a novelist’s gift to create something new, that has its own imaginative life, from that understanding.”

-Lauren Elkin, author of the award-winning Flaneuse

Find out more about Maggie Humm and her writing at:
http://www.maggiehumm.net/

 

Please see all my author interviews at My Guests and my website and blog at JessieCahalin.com.

A copy of my novel is available here.