On Covid-19, Happy Valley, Somebody Somewhere, Milk Fed and Eleven Letters to You
Why, hello there!
Can you believe it has been two weeks since I last blessed your inboxes with my insightful cultural analyses? Ahh, those halcyon days of two weeks ago. Do you remember what it was like, back then? Martin Amis was still alive! We hadn’t yet seen Croatia’s entry to Eurovision! We all had two weeks longer to live than we do right now! Yes, my friends, the past was indeed a different country. We did things differently then.
It has been a pretty exciting fortnight around here. First of all, my mother’s exquisite memoir about her early life in Boronia in the 1950s and 1960s was released into the world:
Helen Garner says that it’s ‘A quietly ecstatic work of memory—intense, witty and beautiful’, and Helen Garner does not lie! Well, actually, she might lie—I don’t know her life—but she’s not lying about this.
The book is written in the form of letters to the friends, neighbours and teachers who were significant in my mother’s early life, and one of my favourite chapters is about two elderly women, Viola and Elfreda Stapley, who lived down the street. Viola, with her stories of traveling to Egypt to work as a nurse during World War I, is particularly vivid:
You went out riding as the dawn, the pink, apricot, gold dawn, spilled across the Egyptian desert. You were specific about this. There is nothing, really, Hellin, nothing at all, to compare with the dawn in that desert. The lines melted into long bars of pale colour, and there was no distinguishing between the earth and the sky. You would ride as if you were riding across the sky. An English captain you knew had a particular horse he allowed you to ride. A black horse that you galloped like the wind across the dunes. That still gives me a thrill. The wind. The dawn. The pink, apricot, gold dawn that slid into my head and lodged forever. The desert. The dunes. And you, a small figure bent low on a huge black horse.
Obviously I highly recommend that you all rush out and buy it—however, full disclosure, the memoir only covers mum’s life up until she was in her early twenties. As such, if you’re hoping for some dirt about what a horrible little child I was, sorry haters, you’re gonna have to wait for the second volume!
In other thrilling developments, I have finally contracted Covid-19!!! And guess what? Covid sucks balls! Do not recommend! Zero stars! Lungs currently working sort of okay, but my brain feels a bit like I accidentally put it through the Magimix.
this is your brain on covid
This is depressing for me as, alongside the heart and the penis, the brain is one of my top three favourite human organs! My own brain is basically the only part of my body that I’ve ever felt good about—like if I was on one of those makeover shows where they ask you what part of your body you would like to accentuate, for me it would definitely be my frontal lobe. And now covid is taking that away from me? So fucked up.
My partner pointed out that there is one positive thing about having covid, which is that I am now basically a walking chemical weapon. This means that if I were a deeply terrible person—and I clearly am—I could just invite all my mortal enemies (ie anyone with the temerity to be better at life than I am) over for a slap up fish dinner right now….and INFECT THEM ALL with my HELL SPORES OF DOOM.
Luckily for my mortal enemies, however, covid turns out to be quite fatigue-o-genic and I am not really in the mood for entertaining :-(
Television
Happy Valley
When I first tested positive for the ‘vid the rest of my family were still negative, so I spent a whole day isolating from them in my bedroom and watching TV on my phone. Theoretically this would seem like an absolute dream come true for me—being alone? Watching TV? In bed? What could be more delicious! Unfortunately, in reality, it was a deeply depressing experience—possibly partly because my binge-watch of choice was the second and third seasons of British police drama Happy Valley:
I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but I think it’s okay to say that the valley in question is not in fact a very cheerful one, unless you are the kind of person who is cheered up by sexual assaults and housing estates and murders and suicides and long-term psychological trauma coming at you from all sides. Also it rains all the time!
So, yes, in retrospect, it was maybe not the best choice of show to watch for ten hours straight while feeling brain-addled, feverish and medically deranged, but the main character was so compelling that I couldn’t look away. The show follows West Yorkshire police sergeant Catherine Cawood, who is tough and kind and damaged, and who has been left to raise her grandson (with the help of her sister) following the suicide of her daughter. It’s kind of stressful viewing, but if you’re ever in the mood for a spot of unrelentingly bleak entertainment with a side serve of deep and abiding sibling love, and assuming your brain hasn’t recently been transformed into a roiling pit of bewildering nightmares courtesy of Covid-19 (or similar), I would definitely recommend checking it out.
Somebody Somewhere
Somebody Somewhere is another brilliant show which weirdly enough also happens to feature two blonde middle-aged sisters who have a loving, yet troubled, relationship. The premise of this show is that a 40-something woman, Sam (played by Bridget Everett), returns to her home town after the death of her sister. She gradually works through her messy feelings in relation to her parents and surviving sister, and also forms a friendship with an adorable dork called Joel (played by Jeff Hillier), a gay man who remembers her from high school because of her incredible singing voice. There’s not a whole heap of action—basically it’s a character study, but it’s a wonderful one: funny, moving and tender, and incredibly real. In particular, the relationship between Sam and Joel is delightful—I don’t think I’ve ever before seen such a relatable depiction of the joy that can be experienced when you find a person who is ready to embrace you as your truest, weirdest self.
Something else I find a bit revolutionary about Somebody Somewhere is that its focus is on a fat woman in her 40s, which is still rare to see on TV, even though we are not at all hard to find IRL. It’s not entirely unprecedented, as anyone who grew up watching Roseanne and modelling their entire personality on Darlene Conner would know, but it still feels shocking to me when I see a big body on the screen—particularly when the body in question is attached to a complete, complex human personality, and not purely there as a source of slapstick lols. Perhaps it is terribly needy of me to want to see big people on the screen being treated as though they have an inner emotional life that matters, but I don’t care: I love it, and want more of it.
Books
Have you guys ever tried to read a book while you have Covid? Turns out reading is very hard! While I was confined to my bed, I did try to read a number of books, but I hated them all—however I think this was because my brain was rolling around in my skull like an overcooked cabbage rather than due to any inherent fault of the literature itself.
Last week, though I did read Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed, which is about a bisexual woman with an eating disorder who falls in love with a server at a local frozen yoghurt shop. Rachel, the narrator, vacillates between obsessive calorie restriction and binge eating, and she is peculiar, intense and sometimes hilarious character. “It would be like cutting off my head because of a headache,” she thinks, while considering succumbing to a day of wild binge eating because she has already exceeded her calorie intake: “But I was so tired of my head.”
Broder does a great job of depicting the narrator’s disordered thoughts about food in a way that is equally funny and tragic—as well as describing the profound sensual pleasure she experiences when she allows herself to eat. There are also a lot of explicit descriptions of the narrator’s sexual fantasies, which are sometimes unsettling, but they’re kind of fabulous in their extreme specificity. I didn’t exactly love the book—there was something about it that kept me from plunging into it emotionally—and yet I was absolutely gripped by it. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything quite like it, and I’m definitely going to look up Broder’s other work.
Other things
Some other things I have enjoyed over the last couple of weeks include:
This depressingly accurate cartoon guide to tech ‘disrupters’ in the New Yorker
An extremely delicious dinner at Smith & Daughters in Collingwood
This website dedicated to the socialist modernism of the former Eastern bloc, which includes photographs of some truly spectacular and other-worldly architecture.
This strawberry cake which my partner and kids made the other day, the leftovers of which now languish in the fridge, taunting me and my newly non-functioning tastebuds with our inability to enjoy them.
Until next time,
Eleanor xx
Comments