Bits #74
Things to read, watch, listen to, google
The British weather is back to its usual mercurial self - after last week’s sweltering heatwave, I packed my daughter off on her school trip in torrential rain. I hate wearing a raincoat, I miss the swelt. I’m also talking about the weather, which is a sure sign I’m entering old age.
Under the paywall: a fantastic weekly podcast to add to your audio line-up; 3 intensely moving interviews about living with locked-in syndrome; a brilliant conversation on sex, bodies, fame and motherhood; the Sheinification of sustainable fashion; a gorgeous piece on grief and clothes; the biggest reader I know shares her top 5 reads of 2026 so far; and is Strangers the new Salt Path?
Quick hits:
The Observer mag interviewed me about my perfect fantasy hour, my theory of making time for the things you want to want to do and why I’d be scared to live till 100.
Heated Rivalry: The Unauthorised Musical Parody hits Edinburgh Fringe this August. This is such a smart idea. Please can someone report back! The last parody I went to was Jerry Springer: The Opera when I was 15 - The Diaper Man will haunt me forever.
Why you might feel drenched in cortisol, but you probably aren’t (via Business Insider).
The Guardian ranked Jilly Cooper’s bonkbusters. I’d switch Tackle! for Pandora and replace Jump! with Score! (so many excl points) because I think her pre-2010 novels are best - but it’s a good starting list for Cooper novices.
Martha’s translated summer reading list is a generous, transportive guide for those wanting to read outside the box.
The best thing I read last week was Ann Patchett on her three fathers - a 2020 essay for The New Yorker (later published in These Precious Days) which passed me by until Johanna Thomas-Corr flagged it in an interview with the author. “My problems were never ones of scarcity” writes Patchett, of her family’s appetite for marriage - she and her sister married twice, her mother three times. “I suffered from abundance, too much and too many. There are worse problems to have.”
Her birth father never wanted her to be a writer, while her first step-father was desperate to be one himself - he wrote fifty terrible novels in his spare time that he would Fedex to her overnight. “This would be child abuse" says Patchett to her husband, “except I'm fifty-two.” Her second step-father - her mother’s final husband - is the most at peace. I aspire to be like this:
“When he read one of my books or came to a reading, he would give me a hug afterward and say, “Aren’t you a wonder,” which was also what he said when I picked up Italian food for dinner or helped clean out the garage. I heard him say it to his children and to his grandchildren and to my mother. “Aren’t you a wonder.” It was a statement, not a question, and, as many times as he said it, it never sounded like a stock phrase. It was as if he saw us separately, equally, and found the wonder in each of us… If he had any gaping holes in his life, I was never, for an instant, made to feel that they were mine to fill.”
It is droll, sharp, clean as a bone - with a wonderful accompanying photo of her with all three fathers. She whistles through what each man had to offer, how he shaped her life, how he exited it - and it has the bite I sometimes find lacking in a Patchett novel (or at least, Tom Lake.)
I was thoroughly entertained by Benoit Denizet-Lewis’s piece in The Observer mag on the importance of a name. He meets a group (which some former members call a cult) founded in the 1930s, the Kabalarians, who are paid to help people change, or choose, a name. For £100, they suggest that Denizet-Lewis - whose name they associate with “tragedy and losses” and “nervous disorders” - changes his name to Epifani, Angilberht, Fricor, Valmyre, Medias or Phidolin, amongst others, and his surname to Sartre, Gonsoulin or Demelville. What Angilberht Sartre has that Benoit Denizet-Lewis does not, I can’t fathom.
“Sigmund Freud wrote that a person’s name, was ‘perhaps part of his psyche’.”
Denizet-Lewis also explores the Dorian Grey effect (when people tweak their personalities to match their name), the symbolic extinction of a deadname, the names most commonly seen as lucky (Katie, Jack and Lucy), the names with sex appeal (Sophie and Ryan) and the “two-pronged identity exercise” of naming your child.
As someone with an unusual name (I once found a list that my father had written when my mother was pregnant; it included ‘Persephone’, so I think, despite the decades of creepy jokes about my box, I got off lightly) I love reading about names. Denizet-Lewis’s piece is tied to his his new non-fiction book, on our obsession with self-transformation - I bought it as soon as I finished the piece.
I can’t remember the last time three friends recommended the same TV show to me in the same week, let alone one as mediocre as Two Weeks in August. (Meow.) Leila Farzad and Hugh Skinner are genuises, and Jessica Raine is brilliant in this, particularly, but it was so bloated! It could done in 4 eps what it did in 8.
There were some deliciously snitty bits of dialogue, and on occasions it is both witty and moving (Skinner plays a gay man terrified of commitment, while Farzad is a glamorous, single woman who has built her chosen family to avoid the vulnerability of falling in love) but it felt like it didn’t know quite what it wanted to be, and there was a little too much grasping for White Lotus. If you want some light relief (also with shades of White Lotus) I recommend Your Friends & Neighbours. It’s excellent prestige drama.
For some distinctly un light relief - the heaviest non relief possible, really - I recommend Richard Gadd’s extraordinary new drama, Half Man. Gadd is the Emmy award-winning mastermind behind Baby Reindeer and I think this is even better. It’s about two Glaswegian “brother[s] from another lover” (their mothers are in a relationship), violent, witty Ruben and brainy, callow Niall. The show plays with time, shuttling between the moment they start living together at teenagers - 17-year-old Ruben, recently released from juvie for biting a man’s nose off, tearing Niall’s carefully blu-tacked posters from the wall in their shared room so they can “bring birds back” - and their 40s, at Niall’s wedding, when the two square off, in a barn, for one final reckoning.
The younger Ruben and Niall are played by Stuart Campbell and Mitchell Robinson and the older by Gadd himself and Jamie Bell, who Gadd wrote the part for without knowing if Bell would even be interested. They are both exceptional: Gadd’s Ruben is captivating, all wounded pride, sharp tongue and barely simmering violence, an entire room shrinking as he enters; while Bell’s Niall is palpably anxious - it vibrates through the screen - deeply wounded, sexually confused and full of self-loathing.
But the younger two actors are equally brilliant - Robinson’s wide-eyed, dry-lipped fear and adoration for his older ‘brother’, who Campbell plays with a curled lip and spry walk, flitting between jovial and shockingly violent in a fraction of a second. The scene when Niall loses his virginity with Ruben’s ‘help’ is one of the most uncomfortable scenes I have ever watched on television.
It is a show about masculinity - how could it not be - but it is also a show about mothers and sons (I laughed out loud when I read Niall’s merciless mum described in The New Yorker as “very British” - no, she’s just mean) about nature vs. nurture (despite his multiple stints in jail, Ruben builds himself a much richer life than Niall), about queerness, inter-generational trauma, inherited rage, and the fine line between hate and love. So fine, sometimes, that there isn’t a line at all.
My book agent, Nelle, is the biggest reader I know: she’s on 66 books this year. By the time this is published, it will likely be 69. She keeps a rolling list on her Notes app of what she’s read on her phone, which sounds like an incredibly useful thing to do - whenever I come to do a books round-up on Instagram, I have to prowl round the house looking on various shelves and piles trying to recall when I’ve read.
Over lunch at Andrew Edmunds - welcoming, elegant, tasty, quintessentially olde London - I perused the list, and asked her for her top 5 of the year so far. (This does not mean that they were all published this year.) She told me that this was her “worst nightmare” but reluctantly agreed, caveating by text, later, that “these reads have to have come out and cannot be advanced copies but this is still VERY HARD”.
Here they are. You’re welcome!