97. READ.LOOK.THINK.

READ: Dress, Memory by Lorelei Vashti: a beautiful memoir. | Moving experience, by Helen Garner. | “I found that the whole secret of human connection with others was to give the deepest self.” | “Knowing too much seems a strange problem for an author to face, since the work of the novel is to impose meaningful order on the welter of experience…” | “I see the nine years I spent working on my Ph.D. as (...) a quest for a lineage that might give me a right to speak.” | “As an intellectual or whatever, I was skeptical.” The tarot card reader. | “I want to leave in more mistakes, to leave an impression more provocative than good.” Imperfect beauty. | “But then again, you don’t really have a “reason” to feel this way, do you? People have been through worse.” | The Referees, a story by Joseph O’Neill. | So excited to read In the Light of What We Know. | Loneliness and solitude: a reading list. | I finally read The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P because my friend Emma and I have been quoting Sheila Heti’s essay for weeks: “The women around him do the heavy labour of making relationships honest and tender, because that’s their position culturally: they’re the ‘immigrant labourers’ in the business of love.” And what about Nate always getting his work done even as Hannah’s suffers?

THINK: Carefree Black Girl: The life and death of Karyn Washington. | The problem of writers’ entitlement. | “Shame (...) is what we feel when we haven’t lived up to some ideal of ourselves.” | “(M)any Indigenous childhoods look all wrong to those who regard them from the fortress of their own system.” Andrew Solomon on how the stolen generations are an unending disaster for Australia.