On family holidays, Succession, Rebecca Makkai, and Cormac McCarthy
Hello, my darlings!
How was everybody’s Easter? Mine was pretty good—we went away with my brother’s family and my de facto mother-in-law, which was surprisingly peaceful. In my experience, no matter how much you love your family, no matter how charming, kind and interesting they are, if you spend enough time with them in a large group situation, there is a 90-95% chance you will eventually develop an intense urge to murder at least one them. It’s nothing personal, it’s just science! However, we went away for three nights, and during that whole period I didn’t form a desire to seriously wound anybody, let alone snuff out their life force like a dead-eyed assassin. I call that a success.
I have also started exercising this week for the first time in about a billion years. I wish I was a person who loved to exercise, a person who experienced a dopamine hit from moving my muscles rapidly and repeatedly to the point of discomfort and perspiration. Unfortunately, I am not such a person. I am a person who gets her biggest rush of endorphins from hearing the sly piano riff at the beginning of the Succession theme song, or discovering a half-price sale on Tim Tams at my local Woolworths. However, lately it is becoming increasingly clear that unless I do some more exercise my body is going to swiftly congeal into an immobile concrete lump.
Me, three weeks from now, if I don’t do my reverse lunges (© The Henry Moore Foundation / DACS, London. Photo: Andrew Smart.)
As such, I’m begrudgingly trying to incorporate some movement into my daily routine. If anyone can think of an exercise I can do that will make me feel as good as eating a Tim Tam, please let me know.
Television
I am currently obsessed with the final season of Succession. Obsessed to the point where it is hard to get anything done. Honestly, how can I be expected to attend to the copy edit of my novel when I could be reading recaps and think pieces analysing the latest plot developments or Sarah Snook’s pants?? I am BUSY, goddamn it. I have FISCAL RESPONSIBILITIES to my SHAREHOLDERS and I must be ACROSS THE DETAIL.
Me, spending my days looking up Succession gifs to illustrate my every emotion
I can’t account for how much pleasure it gives me to watch awful rich people be mean to each other in luxury accommodation. I sometimes think it works as anti-capitalist propaganda, showing us the kind of people who rise to the top in our economic system (sycophantic, self-interested, self-aggrandising) so we will be inspired to overthrow them like a mob of angry 18th century French people who have run out of bread (and cake). On the other hand, I’m also slightly suspicious that the whole show actually supports the status quo by making us believe that this is what the ultra-rich are really like (paranoid, miserable, dead on the inside) so we don’t need to feel envious of them and their ridiculous lives. Probably, it’s neither of these things—it’s simply a fabulously dark tragicomedy, with thrillingly flawed characters, brilliant actors, and hilariously good scripts. Every time I watch it it makes me want to become a TV writer, because how fucking fun would it be to write Succession!
Tom and Greg are my favourite characters—not in the sense that I think they are good people (on Succession, there is no such thing), but because they get some of the best lines. It’s quite old now, but if you haven’t already seen it, please enjoy this reworking of the Tom/Greg dynamic as a romantic comedy:
If you, like me, are also counting down the days until next week’s episode drops, another fun exercise to pass the time is to play the game my partner and I recently invented called WHICH ROY IS THAT. Basically, this just involves examining the characters of your friends and extended family and deciding which Succession character they most resemble.
(We included ourselves in this game. My partner is Roman. I am Cousin Greg.)
Books
I’ve been spreading myself a bit thin with books this last fortnight, starting many things, finishing few. One thing I did finish was Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions For You, which was a highly entertaining #metoo novel about a woman who returns to her former boarding school and starts digging around into the murder of a former classmate.
I’ve also been loving Makkai’s excellent substack, which has heaps of great material on various aspects of writing. It made me wonder what advice I would give to people wanting to write novels, and I quickly came to realise that…I am a little fetus of a writer who is not yet capable of surviving outside the womb, let alone dispensing wisdom from on high about how to write a book.
The one thing I thing I could think of was that, when writing my first book, it was useful for me to completely switch off my critical voice—to write that novel as if nobody would ever read it. I somehow convinced myself that it did not matter one bit whether or not it was any good. However, now I know that it’s going to be released into the world, and that people will in fact be (a) reading it and (b) judging both it and me based on the things I have said in it, I am not sure I would wholly recommend this devil-may-care approach.
My novel, testifying convincingly before Congress regarding whether or not it is actually any good (JUST KIDDING!!! My novel VERY CONFIDENT that it is A DAZZLING CONTEMPORARY COMEDY that will EMOTIONALLY RESONATE WITH EVERYONE WHO READS IT and also make them LAUGH SO HARD THAT THEIR LIMBS WILL FALL OFF ONE BY ONE but they won’t care because they have NEVER BEFORE been so RAPTUROUSLY AMUSED)
I’ve also been listening to the audiobook of Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger, which is about—well, I must confess, I’m not entirely sure what it’s about. On one level, I think he’s kind of a genius, and the book has some stunningly good writing in it. However, I keep finding my mind drifting away to other things while I listen. There are various reasons for this (boredom? confusion? the fact that my children/partner can’t see that I have my headphones in and keep trying to converse with me when I’m trying to listen to it?) but I do feel like I would enjoy it more if I were reading rather than listening. If I were reading it, I could at least skim over the duller parts about, e.g., the history of physics, and just dip down into the bits in which I’m more interested (incest, madness, staring into the abyss). I normally quite like the fact that audiobooks don’t facilitate this, as I think being forced not to skip through a book makes me a better reader…but I am currently facing another 6.5 hours of Cormac’s enigmatic characters having baffling conversations about things I don’t quite understand, and I’m afraid my commitment to being a better reader may be on the wane.
Other things
Did you know Margaret Atwood has a substack? It’s great! Turns out that alongside her talent for writing narratively gripping and emotionally profound novels, she can also scribble out funny little cartoons. Yes, you are correct, Margaret and I are basically the same person.
On an unrelated note, my daughters are both currently into writing Dungeons & Dragons inspired stories, and I find myself weirdly proud of how gruesome they are. Here is the first line of my 6 year old’s latest:
The red tiffling STRIKED at the orc, ripping off his arms, legs, head and hair.
You have to admit, it’s a vivid opening. This from my 9 year old is also pretty great/alarming:
He whisked around, facing a smallish orc, sending a long, black, ebony spear through the gory thing’s heart. It fell to the ground, gasping for air. Its body was sprawled out, weapons dropping from its limp arms. Black sludge oozed out of its chest and now mouth. A dying orc was not a pretty sight.
Not sure where my sweet children’s lust for blood comes from, but I’m here for it!
Until next time,
Eleanor xx
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