READ: Meaghan O’Connell: Who’s taking care of your baby? | Elevating dinner for one: “if it’s not what you do when no one’s looking, it will never be truly what you do.” | Zadie Smith: Find your beach. | “Look,’ she said. ‘She can be your cat. Some friends of mine got her, but they have no idea how to look after a cat. They were feeding her on lobster soup. She’s called Grey Cat. Come in.” The fairytale story of how Doris Lessing took in Jenny Diski. | Eerily composed: a profile of Nico Muhly. (Nico Muhly’s
LOOK: Interviews with Melbourne gallerists on Good Good Girl. | New Steve Reich album: Radio Rewrite. |
THINK: “Back-burners.” | “There is a roadmap for much of our lives, neatly plotted out… those who hew most closely to its contours in youth end up feeling most lost in middle age.” | “Ah now I see, this aspect of things was always there, I can see it now where I couldn’t before. I have lived with it for so long but I have found ways of getting round it, or of simply not seeing it, or of pretending it was something else. But now I do see it, as clearly as that chair or table.” | Stop telling women not to “take things personally”: the plague of gendered criticism (this broke my heart).