On googling yourself, publicity goals, The Boys, The Rachel Incident and The Bee Sting
Hello everyone!
Woah, this last fortnight has sped by so fast. I would like to say I have been making time fly by having fun, but in reality I have spent most of the last two weeks feeling depressed about the referendum and wanly googling myself to see if any online strangers have said nice things about my book; it’s not a great way to live.
When not busy googling myself (not a euphemism) I have been trying to get out and do some book publicity related things. I did some guest lectures for Melbourne Uni last week about the process of writing and editing a book, and it was delightful to go back to the campus where I spent so many hours of my youth learning about Marx and Derrida and Simone de Beauvoir, and even more hours mooning over all the aloof, unattainable hotties in my arts tutorials. Because I am now incredibly famous and important, essentially the Beyoncé of Melbourne’s literary scene, this week I am also doing a podcast, a radio show and a book club Q&A session. My main goal for all these interviews is to be entertaining and to emerge with no new enemies….is this too ambitious??
I am also very excited to be appearing at the Wheeler Centre on 15 November with Jacinta Parsons—please come along if you’re around! I did laugh when I saw a bit of promo the Wheeler Centre put on their Instagram which makes it look like I, personally, represent the opposite of success:
Possibly I should have considered this risk before deciding on the title of my book, but ya know what? I kind of love it. Now planning to call my next book ‘What a Total F*cking Idiot’ for the poster possibilities alone.
Television
This week I’ve been watching an extremely brutal show on Amazon Prime, mainly because I subscribed to Prime so I could watch Deadloch and then wolfed it down in one weekend, so now have to find something else on there to make me feel better about giving Jeff Bezos my $9.99. FFS, Bezos! Earn your keep! The show we are watching, The Boys, is a dark satire of the superhero genre in which the superheroes are actually corporate shills who love a spot of summary execution and aren’t too bothered if they accidentally take out a few dozen innocent bystanders here and there in the course of fighting crime.
The show involves a lot of extremely graphic violence—it’s not unusual to see people having their heads ripped open, or their brains melted with laser beams, or their entire bodies blown up in a fiesta of blood and gore. As you all probably know by now, I am basically a sheltered Victorian maiden when it comes to brutality on TV; I do a lot of gasping and shielding my eyes and swooning back on the divan when I am forced to witness the pain of others. Partly, this is because I am squeamish, but it’s also because I feel uncomfortable with cruelty being used as entertainment (is this perhaps because the cruelty arouses a savage part of my own psyche that I would prefer to keep chained up and sedated in the basement?? I am still refusing to go to therapy so I guess we’ll never know). Interestingly, though, I find myself almost entirely unbothered by the violence on The Boys.
I think the reason for this is fairly straightforward—the violence on The Boys is garish and a bit silly; it doesn’t really resemble the kind of actual violence that happens to people in real life. It also helps that the violence is not 100% gratuitous. Don’t get me wrong, it’s probably, like, 85% gratuitous—but it also exists to say something about the way people would actually wield their power if they could shoot laser beams out of their eyes or crush physical objects with their psychokinetic powers.
Oh man if I had the laser eye power so many MAFS contestants would be dead right now
The Boys can be read as a kind of allegory for the way America uses its status as a military and economic superpower. Like the United States itself, the superheroes paint themselves as a heroic force for good who stamp out the bad guys and stand up for democracy. However, in reality their power is primarily used in the economic interests of corporate America, and they often demonstrate a complete indifference to the suffering they cause to anyone unlucky enough to get in their way. Not all the superheroes are entirely villainous, but they’re all extremely compromised, and none of them resemble the image of themselves drummed up by the company’s PR department.
I am surprised by how much I am enjoying the show, given that I usually have less than zero interest in superhero-based entertainment—to me, the Marvel and DC domination of modern cinema is as perplexing as the rise of the bucket hat as a fashion item:
The Boys definitely revels in the superhero tropes it’s critiquing, and there’s a bit of the show having its cake/eating its cake/pretending it’s not enjoying the cake/secretly loving the cake—for example, the show has one of its female superheroes complain about the tiny outfit her sexist employers maker her wear, but the show also…makes the actress wear the tiny outfit? Still, it is genuinely funny and subversive, it frequently surprises me, and it’s at least as interested in the psychological drama as it is in the big action scenes. It actually reminds me a little of a bigger-budget, more blokey version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show with which I was obsessed in my late teens and early twenties.
Anyway, it’s probably not for everyone, but I do recommend checking out if you find yourself with some free time and a Prime subscription—just as long as you can cope with occasionally having to see someone having the skin ripped right off their face.
Books
As an extremely white person with very white skin and a white inability to cope with spicy food (don’t tell anyone but I sometimes order my curries ‘mild’), I always feel a bit embarrassed about my boring ethnic heritage. Could anything be more shameful than being a descendent of the British Empire? I feel like England’s main claim to fame is that it stole literally half the planet and then acted like it was doing the locals a favour. What fun! Such japes! As such, while there are many things I like about British culture (bleak vibes, dry sense of humour, great writers, Jarvis Cocker), I struggle to feel any allegiance to the Union Jack.
On the other hand, I’m delighted to acknowledge the Irish part of my heritage. I feel like the cultural stereotype of the Irish is that they’re charmingly downtrodden: they might be losers, but boy are they funny losers! As someone who identifies strongly as both a loser and a joke, having Irish ancestors has always felt very right to me.
How I dress my children on multicultural day
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been getting in touch with this side of my family tree by listening exclusively to Irish novels: The Rachel Incident, by Caroline O’Donoghue, and The Bee Sting, by Paul Murray.
O’Donoghue would probably roll her eyes at me claiming my Irish heritage—in her novel she has this to say about imposters: ‘Perhaps it’s because so many people claim Irishness that we keep putting our private jokes on higher and higher shelves, so you have to ask a member of staff to get them down for you.’
Well, private jokes or no, I adored The Rachel Incident. It’s a sharp, witty and warm novel about Rachel Murray, a tall girl in her early twenties who works in a bookshop, is doing a degree in English literature and knows fuck all about life—all things that are highly relatable to me (me from twenty years ago, that is). She moves in with a colleague, develops a crush on her English professor, falls in love, has her heart broken. Even though it sounds like an old tale, it often moves in unexpected directions, with the characters’ relationships and the reader’s expectations constantly having to shift and adjust. It is so well written—the prose is very natural and easy to read, but god, it gleamed with intelligence. It felt superbly intimate and true, like being out for drinks with an old friend and listening to her tell you about the messiest part of her youth. Definitely one my favourite books so far this year.
Unfortunately I am not loving the The Bee Sting quite as much, even though I can see that it is good. It follows the story of a family falling on hard times in Ireland following the financial crisis, and is told from the perspectives of multiple characters: the teenage daughter, Cass, who is obsessed with impressing her glamorous best friend; her younger brother, PJ, who is afraid that his parents are going to split up and is plotting to run away; their mother Imelda, a beautiful woman from a rough background; and their father Dickie, who is in the process of losing his father’s business (there may be others as I haven’t finished it yet).
It is technically impressive, and parts of it are great—the sections from PJ’s perspective were particularly engaging—but there are other parts of it where I feel a little too aware of the author’s engineering to be fully immersed in the story. The characters frequently feel like…well, characters, rather than actual live human beings I might run into on the street (in contrast, I feel like I personally know and might have once been in love with just about every single person in The Rachel Incident). Still, I think I’m in the minority in experiencing the book like this: reviewers have been raving about The Bee Sting and it’s on the Booker Prize shortlist, so if you’re thinking about reading it please don’t let me put you off!
Other Things
Some other things I have been getting into recently include:
Michael Williams’ Read This podcast, which features excellent interviews with excellent authors. I particularly enjoyed the interview with George Saunders, who seems like the loveliest and most down to earth genius of all time.
The First Time podcast, a podcast from which I’ve learned an enormous amount about how publishing works over the last year, and which has been very supportive of the writers in my debut author group (including sharing short vids we made for them about our books—here’s my very chaotic one!). They have a great series of interviews with ‘Masters’—once again I recommend the one with George Saunders. I also loved this one with Cate Kennedy.
This piece making a moral case for no longer engaging with Twitter/X (which I came across via Read. Look. Think.).
The launch of Roz Bellamy’s Mood: A Memoir of Love, Identity and Mental Health. Roz is the lovely person who brought together the debut author group I mentioned above which has been such an amazing source of support, information and friendship this year. I can’t wait to read Roz’s book!
This open letter from Indigenous leaders in response the referendum: ‘The truth is that the majority of Australians have committed a shameful act whether knowingly or not, and there is nothing positive to be interpreted from it.’
Until next time,
Eleanor xx
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