The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (and Life)

by Andrew | 2 Comments

I’m interested in ideas about story that deviate from the usual nagging about conflict – ‘Where’s the conflict?’ ‘This narrative arc lacks conflict’ etc., etc. The idea of conflict works well for many books, and especially for the visual media of films and plays. But too conflict can account for an awful lot of formulaic writing. I often raise this matter in workshops, quoting St Ursula from her classic writing guide Steering the Craft.

Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction is an essay by Ursula Le Guin that explores some of these ideas in more detail. It has recently been republished in a bijou volume by Ignota Books. Le Guin posits that ‘the novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story’, even if the hero has frequently taken it over. She critiques the linear ‘Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic’ where fiction is embodied as ‘triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, holocaust, then or now)’.

For Le Guin, that sort of story is represented by weapons – ‘long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing’. The killer story.

Instead, Le Guin proposes a different object to represent the novel, and opens a space to discuss a different type of story: the life story.

The daughter of eminent anthropologists, Le Guin draws on the idea that the earliest cultural invention was a container that held items that had been gathered: ‘A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.’ The mammoth hunters might ‘spectacularly occupy’ cave paintings, but in reality it was the gatherers of seeds and nuts and leaves and berries who provided most of the food consumed in prehistoric times (they worked less hard than we do today, apparently). Thus we reach the Carrier Bag Theory:

A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

And working out the nature of the things held in that container often relies on something other than resolving conflicts, or even finding them in the first place. This container (or life story) can be ‘full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand’. For writers, negotiating the nature of those relationships within the life story often forces us to dig deeper in the writing, drawing out greater feeling and purpose as we interrogate connections.

I relate this to something Ocean Vuong says in a 2019 podcast, where he is critical of the dominance of conflict-driven plots in the conventions of creative writing:

The way we move through the world … tension and drama happen simply by proximity. The way chemistry works, you have oxygen and hydrogen: fine on their own. Put them side by side and all of a sudden: water.

I often prefer to look for tension rather than conflict in writing – a subtle difference, I feel. The tension of anticipation: what’s coming out of the bag next? The tension of loss: how will what’s left behind adapt when we take something out of the container? The tension of newness: what happens when we add something to our bag of tricks? 

Such questions are, I feel, often more interesting and sustaining than asking who’s fighting who, or demanding an inner conflict. Warfare is soooo 20th century, after all, and don’t we have enough neurosis already – do we really need to add more?!

I jest – but only a little. Conflicts and inner turmoil are the substance of many of our stories. I’m just inclined to think they are often not enough, and that we emphasise conflict at the expense of other things and at the risk of creating further conflict in the world.

My friend Bhanu Kapil gave me a copy of Carrier Bag Theory as a gift as we sat in the café in Foyle’s on Charing Cross Road just after Christmas; what a different world that now seems! This great epic we currently find ourselves in – a vast public health crisis with the potential for economic calamity – could be framed as a war against a virus, and certain politicians and pointless rentagobs are certainly playing to type as their first close-minded response is to cast blame at other politicians or at people from other countries. 

But in truth, isn’t the best resolution to such a crisis not one based in conflict but one that relies on cooperation? See Roosevelt’s New Deal in the US in the 1930s. See the foundation of the United Nations after the Second World War. See the foundation of the National Health Service in the postwar era. See the GI Bill. See the ingenuity and expertise of scientists collaborating in the creation of a vaccine. See the sacrifice and public-spiritedness of health workers and supermarket staff and community volunteers. These are not stories whose primary drive is conflict. These stories have a utopian impulse, and require kindness and openness and truth (and certainly not spin or lies). These stories require imagination.

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction is a short book, and the Ignota edition adds a scintillating preface from the publishers Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers, as well as illustrations. It also has French flaps! (We love French flaps.) It also includes a thought-provoking introduction by cultural theorist Donna Haraway, who tells the stories of three bags she has brought back from a trip to Colombia. One is embroidered, one is intricately knotted, one is crocheted, and all three carry the stories of the activists and artists and environmental campaigners and craftswomen she met there. For Haraway, each of these bags ‘grows from, and demands a response to, the urgent questions about how to tell stories that can help remake history for the kinds of living and dying that deserve thick presents and rich futures’.

Ursula Le Guin has touched on these ideas in several essays gathered in the collection Dancing at the Edge of the World, which is where I first read ‘Carrier Bag Theory’ (and thanks to Ignota for sending me back there). One very short essay, simply called ‘Conflict’, is critical of the ‘gladiatorial view of fiction’, and finds Le Guin asking us to locate the conflict in EM Forster’s classic definition of plot: ‘The King died and then the Queen died of grief’. She even questions whether the plot of War and Peace ‘can be in any useful or meaningful way reduced to “conflict,” or a series of “conflicts”?’

Another essay, ‘Heroes’, takes Le Guin’s critique of the conventions of heroism and heroic stories further. As the author of one of the greatest pieces of winter literature – the trek across the ice in The Left Hand of Darkness – Le Guin has long been fascinated by accounts of Antarctic exploration. But then she comes across an entry from Shackleton’s diary – ‘Man can only do his best. The strongest faces of Nature are arrayed against us’ – and she startles herself with an instinctive reaction: ‘Oh, what nonsense!’ 

What is false is the military image; what is foolish is the egoism; what is pernicious is the identification of ‘Nature’ as enemy … Nobody, nothing, ‘arrayed’ any ‘forces’ against Shackleton except Shackleton himself. He created an obstacle to conquer or an enemy to attack; attacked; and was defeated – by what? By himself, having himself created the situation in which his defeat could occur.

Plenty of stories have conflict to the max. I love looking at the Hero’s Journey. And I love horror movies and westerns and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the tortured psychodramas of Tennessee Williams.

But sometimes we need more than goodies and baddies, or triumph and defeat – not least as in someone’s defeat lies resentment and the seeds of future conflict.

We need life stories, as well as killer stories. We need truths. In storytelling, conflict is not enough.

Related posts and further reading/listening on storytelling and Ursula Le Guin

Plotting: Conflict, Complication, Curiosity, and Connection    – from my own blog

Only Connect – from my own blog

A Carrier Bag Theory of Revolution – another take on this essay in Ploughshares; note how it particularly pays attention to an alternative cyclical view of time

A Novel is a Dark Bundle by Abi Andrews

Towards a Carrier Bag Theory of Videogames by Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

Steering the Craft – my own review of the book on writing fiction that I recommend most frequently to writers.

Ursula Le Guin: Steering the Craft – interviewed by David Naimon for the Between the Covers podcast

The Worlds of Ursula Le Guin – tv documentary (on BBC iPlayer while/if you can get it)

Great Lives: Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin at 85

Ursula Le Guin at 80

A Whitewashed Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin, Slate, 16 December 2004

Water Workshop at Cambridge University

by Andrew | 2 Comments

This week I taught a workshop at Cambridge University’s Judith E. Wilson Drama Studio as part of Bhanu Kapil’s workshop cycle on Water, which forms a natural overlap with my own sequence of classes on the Four Elements.

I introduced the idea of the Four Elements as an alternative to binary ways of looking at writing (and the world – let’s be ambitious). And then we considered Water for its associations with feelings, which can so often be out of balance in writing. We listened to a passage from Annie Proulx’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’, and through close readings identified aspects of craft that brought a particular emotional charge to that scene. We also read aloud from Joe Brainard’s I Remember, and discussed how memory can activate feeling through specific associations.

And then, after giving ourselves watery workshop names (including Pebble, Fleet, Kelp, Great White Shark, Newt, and Goddess of the Eels and Wrong Fishes), we did some contemplative drawing exercises and wrote some powerful I Remembers of our own.

What was special about this class was that it took place in the Judith E. Wilson Studio – we had watery props, and communed with a manatee! And we had lighting: I’ve not considered so deeply before how classroom lighting might affect how we write or how I teach, and it was a real treat to be working in such a shadowy turquoise space; it was like writing on the ocean floor. It reminds me of an exercise suggested in Elaine Showalter’s Teaching Literature where she tasks students of Victorian literature to write by candlelight – such a simple idea, yet one with the potential for profound shifts in what we create. Thanks to Lorraine Carver from the English department for making this possible.

Thanks also to everyone who came for joining in so fully, and special thanks to Bhanu Kapil for hosting this workshop; the whole series of classes sounds rich and imaginative. Cambridge is one of my favourite cities, and it was a real pleasure to be teaching there.

I also saw the sacred lawns dug up by Extinction Rebellion, eek! See below. As a gardener, I was probably unconvinced … though as a teacher I’m thinking ahead to my next workshop on 21 March, when we shall mark the equinox with the WRites of Spring at Earth Works (shovels not required).

Water Ways

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On Saturday a lovely group of writers came along to Water Ways, the newest of the Four Elements workshops that I’m running as a series with Kellie Jackson of Words Away.

Among the Four Elements, Water is identified with feeling, and as the workshop approached I realised the field of emotions presents a pretty HUGE and amorphous subject as a topic within writing. Given my ambition slash weakness of needing to be comprehensive, how would we cover it ALL?!

So we approached the subject of emotion through a few specific lenses. We started by discussing memory and symbolism as ways to activate, contain or convey feeling in writing. Inspired by Lynda Barry, we also gave ourselves watery names for the day – with my teacher hat on, I became Professor Newt.

We then looked at methods of crafting narrative tone, paying special attention to perspective and sentence structure and examining the emotional shifts within a particular scene in Brokeback Mountain. A good scene will contain CHANGE, especially in the feelings of characters – and readers. We also looked for Proulx’s use of water imagery.

And I forgot to ask: where in the story do Ennis and Jack say, ‘I love you’? What does that say?

Thinking about tone in relation to pitch, it also occurs to me now that we use the word pitch to describe that brief description we use to sell books. Which makes me think how a good sales pitch really goes to the heart of a book, and ideally grows out of the narrative tone and voice and style of telling the story.

We ended the day looking at the emotion created within the intimate space of a letter with reference to works by Ocean Vuong and Tove Jansson. And then we wrote thank you letters of our own.

I wish we’d discussed the idea of the unconscious a bit more. But it was certainly present; we talked plenty about Ocean Vuong, and only now do I realise: the clue is in his name! OCEAN = WATER, right?! There: the unconscious in beautiful action.

A highlight of the day was our brilliant guest tutor and resident wavemaker: author and illustrator Sally Kindberg. I am really keen in this series of workshops to experiment with practices and viewpoints from creative fields that rely less heavily on verbal forms, because words are so often the problem with writing – words can get in our way, just as writers often need to get out of their own way too, and it often makes sense to develop writing without actually doing any writing. So on Saturday we drew.

At the start of the day, instead of a meditation we did a contemplative drawing exercise using our hands and lines. And then in her drawing workshop Sally got us to make some (hilarious!) self-portraits, and, using her magic top hat, guided us through the creation of characters that we took on adventures in four-frame comic strips. Clouds became potatoes, and much mirth was had. Under my student pen name of Simon Seahorse, I was very pleased to learn how to draw wings in flight.

Comic strips also prompted a brief discussion about yonkoma manga and kishōtenketsu, and we bonded in questioning the necessity of conflict as the central drive in writing (an idea that many of us are fed up with – more on that anon).

Sally inspired me so much I spent the following afternoon watching the wild and brilliant Studio Ghibli classic Porco Rosso and then playing drawing games with a friend who’d come to visit. Thanks, Sally! I finally got to art school.

And thanks again to Sally for bringing drawing into our class so purposefully, and to everyone who came for joining in so fully.

Our next Four Elements workshop is Earth Works, where our guest earthshaker will be dancer and Physical Intelligence expert Claire Dale. It’s held on 21 March, which is the spring equinox; I promise we shall be marking the wRites of Spring in appropriate style!

Food in Writing

by Andrew | 1 Comment

On Sunday I taught for the first time at the Victoria and Albert Museum: a workshop on food in writing called Food: Bigger Than The Page.

We started off talking about food as a genre or genres (plural) of writing. Some books of food writing have an investigative or campaigning approach, such as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and then there are works of food history such as Dorothy Hartley’s Food in England and Mark Kurlansky’s Cod.

Someone also brought up the name of one of the great food writers: MFK Fisher. And I forgot, oops, to mention Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia, which was inspired by the blog she wrote cooking her way through Julia Child’s classic cookbook – if you are interested in the publishing process, you might enjoy this piece from the publisher Knopf on The Making of … Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

Moving on to the use of food in fiction and memoir, we discussed the role of food (and hunger) as symbol and driver of plot in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, then explored the part that food plays in activating memory, using Joe Brainard’s I Remember and Nigel Slater’s Toast.

Paying attention to the ways in which all five senses create images that bring writing to life, we listened to some poems by William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Seamus Heaney, Galway Kinnell and Meryl Pugh. (Meryl teaches popular courses at Morley College and the Poetry School, should you be interested.) Some of these poems celebrate food or everyday life in very straightforward ways, while others have more layered meanings.

And then, after a brief palate-cleansing meditation, we became hunter-gatherers: we created Word Hoards of our sense perceptions by getting intimate with mint and star anise and kiwi fruits, and carrots and lime-blossom tea, and a fancy tiny pear called Piqa Reo (Waitrose, we salute you – and you’ve even given us a further way to use the Q tile without a U in Scrabble) (though the lime-blossom came from Gaia in St Margarets – support your local indie!).

We then paid a visit to supermarkets in California with Allen Ginsberg and Armistead Maupin, and created some characters of our own by thinking about the ways in which food acts as a social marker.

We fitted in a snack-sized look at recipes in food with Heartburn by Nora Ephron (and Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel also got a mention here). And then we finished off by discussing recipes as a form for poems with ecopoet Jack Collom – something to try at home?

I had a lot of fun putting this workshop together – see the links and titles above and also below in the list of resources. Thanks to the V&A and everyone who came along – and especially to Stacy for thinking a writing workshop would be a good idea (I first met her when I attended a V&A book club for The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver – I’m going to tell myself that Frida Kahlo led me here). Thanks also to Michelle for the photos (and the kind words) below.

Further resources

Sandra M. Gilbert and Roger J. Porter, eds., Eating Words: A Norton Anthology of Food Writing

Mark Kurlansky, ed., Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing

Jill Foulston, ed., The Joy of Eating: The Virago Book of Food

Dianne Jacob, Will Write For Food (practical advice on writing about food)

Diana Henry, What Goes On Behind The Scenes Of A Cookbook (for more about the creative and production processes, and Diana Henry is an inspired writer and cook too: I have enjoyed many of her recipes)

Lynda Barry, Syllabus and Making Comics (great on creativity – you might also enjoy this interview with the genius herself: at the least, watch the first five or ten minutes)

Plus, just because, a gorgeous piece of food/cookery writing on candied oranges I read earlier today.  (Will edit for candied oranges: a trade, anyone?!)

And before I go: as I type, I believe there might be one space left on the day-long Four Elements workshop Water Ways on 8 February, which explores how we evoke feeling in writing, and I’ll also be looking at food among other experiences of the earthly realm in Earth Works on 21 March. More info via the links at the Words Away website.

One of our frondy inspirations.
Such a grand setting!

Books I Enjoyed Most In 2019

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I read a lot of good books in 2019. I am never sure about the idea of Best Books, or giving them scores out of 5. I mean, who are we to judge, and sometimes good books are simply no fun. So I like to think in terms of the books I enjoyed most, and for whatever reason: the ones that got under my skin or touched my heart or tickled my fancy or lifted my spirits in some special way. In 2019, these were:

Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous 
Edward Carey, Little
Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Mathias Enard, Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants, translated by Charlotte Mandel
Tatyana Tolstaya, Aetherial Worlds, translated by Anya Migdal
Sigrid Nunez, The Friend
Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions
Nora Ephron, Heartburn
Steve Brusatte, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, audio narration by Patrick Lawlor
Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, audio narration by Richard Armitage
Henry James, Portrait of a Lady, audio narration by Michael Page
Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, audio narration by George Guidall
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, translated by Anthony Briggs

The stand-out has to be Ocean Vuong. Consider the sheer scale of the stories in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: stories of migration, stories of families, stories of trauma. A love story. A working-class story. The great Vietnam War novel we hadn’t read yet. And then there is his gorgeous and often mysterious prose! And he only learned how to read at age eleven! And he’s only thirty-one now! It was also a real treat to see him talk about his book at the Southbank in July too; he sang a hymn to us as well.

Olga Tokarczuk was another notable discovery, and I’m looking forward to exploring more of her work. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is quite something, gnarly and magical and surprising, if you’ve yet to have the pleasure.

I was reading Edward Carey’s Little this time last year, and I finished it early in 2019, and I knew I’d be writing about it today as one of my faves. This fictional life of Madame Tussaud is rich and immersive storytelling at its best.

Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephantsis a gem of historical fiction that transported me to Constantinople in the sixteenth century. And it nearly beat Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead to best title of the year.

The Friend moved me immensely, and not just because of the dog; it just gets the tone right, and goes to show that obvious plotting isn’t everything (even for a reader who loves a juicy plot).

I vowed to read more sf and fantasy in 2019, but I didn’t. However, in a smug and thoroughly unexpected breakthrough I did read three and a half (and counting) monster works by dead white males that have been taunting me from my bookshelves for decades. For various reasons – mostly: too many books, and not doing English A level – I’ve been a latecomer to various classic authors. And I’m enjoying catching up. (Just remembered: I used the hashtag #deadwhitemales on Instagram, and it seemed to lead to me being unfollowed! Be gone, unimaginative followers, and while you’re there get some schooling in irony.)

Reading Tatyana Tolstaya’s salty stories set me towards finally embarking on War and Peace. Philip Hensher is right: it can be read in ten days! If you are on holiday, and not doing much else. And it really is a great novel, the great novel. Other than the epilogues (one dull, one disappointingly reactionary), I loved it. The Briggs translation was the one I read, but I did also dip into three others, as I love comparing different renditions into English. I guess I could learn Russian, but.

This was, in addition to the year of Ocean, the year of the audiobook. Not least, this was the way I finally cracked some of those omissions on my TBR shelves. I finally read (and loved) Portrait of a Lady (on the fifth or sixth try), and I finally understood the big-hearted and nutty brilliance of Charlies Dickens, in no small part because of the fantastic narration by Richard Armitage of David Copperfield, which bowled me over. Armitage gives the characters regional accents – the Micawbers are Brummies! And of course Dickens works so well when you’re listening to a talented performer. I feel set up for watching the forthcoming movie – and also excited for the colourblind casting that will for sure confound the unimaginative. (‘Racism is fundamentally a failure of the imagination’ – discuss. I hate binaries.)

The Left Hand of Darkness was a reread. I love rereading via a good audio narration. That trek across the snow! And just everything about this book, everything. Now I know again why I call it one of my favourites. And a terrible and crushing admission: this year I reread Wizard of Earthsea too, book form, and though there is much to love in the world-building I found the pacing a bit stodgy and the characterisation a bit dry. Maybe I should have tried the audio.

So: audiobooks are just wonderful. One has currently guided me 59 per cent of the way through Moby-Dick, which is about twice as much ground as I ever made on numerous attempts before. The narration, by William Hootkins, is very Ah-ha, me maties, and I feel confident I’ll finish it early next month. Shan’t I feel smug?! (Jury is still out on Melville’s masterpiece, though. I mean, on the one hand. But on the other. Check this space this time next year.)

Some lessons and virtue signalling: a good balance of men/women. A goodly number of works in translation. A number of indie presses. Could probably make a bit more effort with live hetero males as well as the dead white ones? Virago publishes good books. I like being taken elsewhere – other times, new places, fresh angles.

There are plenty of books I didn’t like or didn’t finish. Nowadays I tend to give up on books I’m not enjoying; life’s too short, etc. Others I might finish one day, if: time, mood. Hype certainly got in the way of others. A couple of sequels were disappointments. Perhaps this says something about me and sequels, or maybe it’s about publishers being publishers (that thing they have with more of the same).

Olive, Again was fine in the actual reading, but with hindsight it was pretty forgettable; I only read it last month, but I remember little other than the fact it depressed the fuck out of me. Which was also, I realised, how I had felt about Lucy Barton and its sequel (whose title I forget), which I read a couple of years ago. But how I had adored Olive Kitteridge! That book surprised me when I read it a few years ago, and it’s a book that withstands rereading. Yet despite this author’s command of craft and tone, somehow these others of her books lacked the wit of OK. They had, for me, an overriding grimness, and though I’m no pollyanna I’m getting too much of that in the news and on Twitter.

Find Me read like fan fiction written by the author. Which is fine, as why shouldn’t an author love their own work. But all those bisexual intergenerational relationships among the multilingual metropolitan culturati felt interchangeable and unbelievable and self-indulgent, and I ended up wishing I’d never read it. Find Me succeeded in the impossible by undermining the charm of Call Me By Your Name and my love for Out of Egypt. You can have too much of a good thing – I should have read another Henry James, shouldn’t I?

I decided to read The Testaments next year, after the hype has gone down and when I’m not so irked about the copout of the ‘unanimous’ (don’t believe it!) sharing out of the Booker Prize (ffs!). I’m very keen to read Bernardine Everisto’s Girl, Woman, Other and Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance, and I’m saving a few other books I had my eye on (ear out for?) in 2019 for audio reads. (Which take time! And dog walks.)

I am sure I have forgotten some other reads, including books on the craft of writing. I did find myself reading/rereading Natalie Goldberg and LOVING her more than ever. Oh, and Lynda Barry’s Making Comics! It’s missing from my photo above – but then again I have about ten pages left so perhaps I shall add to next year’s list. Everyone should read Lynda Barry, or just watch this. I also found Charlotte Wood’s Mind of One’s Own series of podcasts on writing really engaging.

On telly, I loved the second series of the adaptation of Big Little Lies until the last episode, which I really didn’t like, and then I read about the production and began to hater on it. Game of Thrones: the ending was just great by me, loved it, but I wish it had had a much better build-up, and I wish one actor had been treated like a grown-up and at least been given a glimmer of their character arc some seasons ago. And after giving up after watching the first three Witchers slack-jawed at clunky writing weighed down with info dumps, we’re now LOVING the new adaptation of Watchmen. My fave tv of the year though has to be the five series of Peaky Blinders. Dodgy Midlands accents aside (big caveat), it’s a cracking piece of drama, and it made me wonder if/who is writing big ballsy blockbuster novels in that mode nowadays.

I attended some good events (some certainly better than books they were promoting). I was very happy to attend Eleanor Anstruther’s launch for A Perfect Explanation. I also attended some super salons from Words Away. Another event that stood out was the series of panels organised one summer evening by Hachette Pride at a crowded Waterstones Piccadilly. Not least, they fit seventeen speakers into a couple of hours! It made me proud I used to work there in another century’s incarnation, and also pleased to see how far the world has come with LGBTQ+ rights and reading. I was particularly engaged by the panel with trans writing and writers; so much to take in. Let’s also pay heed to Patrick Gale’s warning about rights that were earned and rights can be taken away.

‘The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation.’ That line, from ‘La Vie Bohème’ in the musical Rent, reminds me that in tough times we have to forge our own alternatives. One book whose playful and utopian impulse inspired me is Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, whose author, Andrea Lawlor, teaches a class in utopian literature, which led me to the peculiar book The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, which is whimsical and hard to classify, but then the best things often are.

And I mustn’t forget Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, which was salve during tough moments when our dog was ill. Laughter is the best medicine (except for steroids, which saved his life).

So: this was Ocean’s year. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is one book I shall certainly be rereading on audio. And some more Dickens. And I can’t wait for the new novel by Garth Greenwell, or the memoir by Carmen Maria Machado, or Chuck Palahniuk’s book on writing.

Happy New Year! Off to watch more Watchmen.