#joanna biggs

[writerly-ramblings]

Books Read in May:

1). Charming Billy (Alice McDermott)

2). The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem (Julie Phillips)

3). The Dressmaker (Beryl Bainbridge)

4). The Pleasing Hour (Lily King)

5). Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table (ed. Amanda Hesser)

6). The Mirror & the Light (Hilary Mantel)

7). Disappearing Earth (Julia Phillips)

8). A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again (Joanna Biggs)

9). Kitchen Bliss: Musings on Food and Happiness (Laura Calder)

10). A Month in the Country (J.L. Carr)

11). Dinner in Rome: A History of the World in One Meal (Andreas Viestad)

12). Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Anne Fadiman)

[authorstalker]

My October & November Reads

A Life of One's Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again, Joanna Biggs - One of my favorite reads of the year! A delicious blend of memoir and literary history, the author researches the personal and professional lives of women writers (including Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, Zora Neale Hurston, and George Eliot) as a way to cope with her decision to leave her husband. I learned so much and wanted to murder Ted Hughes. It's an excellent, gossipy good time.

I Meant It Once: Stories, Kate Doyle - I would rename this collection Stories for Sad Girls, which used to be my brand........but to be honest, at first I felt too ancient for all of the early-twenty-something emotions. A few stories in I adjusted, however, and then the reading experience became more like a journey to a time when the future was unknown and excitinggggg rather than ya know, constantly fearing that life's various, terrible inevitabilities are just around the corner.

Lives of the Saints, Nancy Lemann - A novella that made me laugh, cry, and consider booking a trip to New Orleans.

[annacswenson]

•

"I too had felt that nothing would change— but I had been wrong. And I was so relieved to be wrong."

- Joanna Biggs, A Life of One's Own

[yourbespokeartisanalapocalypse]

Joanna Biggs' essay on the Paris Review on love, loss, and Mary Wollstonecraft is so beautiful and moving I can't help sharing it: https://t.co/tyslQ4RfMe

[biglisbonnews]

On Mary Wollstonecraft “I do not choose to be a secondary object.” https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/04/03/on-mary-wollstonecraft/

[charlicpace]

name masterlist: love island uk edition ! some folks like to stick to names that are more 'realistic' & my favourite place to look for those names is reality tv, because... well, that's their names ! so here's a list of every name that's ever popped up on the uk version of love island ( seasons 1-8 ) so all these names are perfect for characters aged 18-40 if we're going off ( uk-based ! ) actual likelihood.

aaron

abigail

adam

afia

alex

alexandra

alexi

amy

anna

andrea

andrew

anton

amber

amelia

arabella

belle

ben

bethany

billy

biggs

brad

brett

callum

cally

camilla

cara

caroline

charlie

ched

cheyenne

chloe

chris

chyna

clarisse

coco

craig

curtis

daisy

dale

dami

dan

daniel

danielle

danica

danny

darylle

davide

dean

deji

dennon

demi

dom

ellie

elma

ellisha

emma

eva

eve

ekin-su

eyal

faye

finn

francesca

frankie

gabby

gemma

george

georgia

grace

greg

hannah

harley

harry

hayley

hugo

iain

idris

ikenna

india

jack

jacques

jade

james

jamie

jake

javi

jay

jazmine

jess

joanna

joe

john

jonny

jordan

josh

kady

kalia

katie

kaz

kazimir

kem

kendall

kieran

lacey

laura

lauren

lavena

lexi

liam

liana

liberty

lillie

lucie

lucinda

luis

luke

malia

malin

marcel

marino

maura

maria

mary

marvin

matthew

maya

max

medhy

megan

michael

mike

molly

montana

nabila

naomi

nas

natalia

nathan

niall

olivia

oliver

ollie

omar

ovie

paige

paul

poppy

priscilla

priya

sam

salma

samira

savanna

scott

shannen

shaugna

sharon

sherif

siannise

simon

sophie

summer

stephanie

stevie

steve

rachel

rebecca

remi

reese

rob

rosie

rykard

tasha

teddy

terry

theo

tina

toby

tom

tommy

tony

travis

troy

tyla

tyler

tyne

wallace

wes

yewande

zara

zoe

[hoursofreading]

My idea of marriage was a Plath–Hughes one: meeting at Oxford, honeymooning in Venice, sharing a study, writing a book each, painting our living room French gray, babies in view. I had “love set you going,” the first words of Ariel, engraved inside my wedding ring. I wanted that fusional marriage yet I lost myself in it; it broke down when our fantasies for each other clashed instead of harmonized. He imagined me pushing a pram in red lipstick, while I worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep myself showered. I imagined negotiating for time to write and only managing a sentence before he came home from the park with the stroller: neither baby nor book. The idea of a shared life, a place I could live, where I would be believed in and valued, crumbled. After twelve years together, my marriage was over in less than a year of raising the questions. I was thirty-four, stunned and exultant. I wanted to understand why it ended, what had changed, and I asked and asked—of friends, in therapy, when high, when sober, of serious books, of stupid ones—and it was six years later, chatting to Frances, that something was offered that finally made sense.

Joanna Biggs - A Life of One's Own_ Nine Women Writers Begin Again-HarperCollins (2023)

[ephemeral-winter]

interesting to have now read two reviews of the new sally rooney (alc for vulture and joanna biggs for the lrb) that basically argue that love is communism but do this mostly on the basis of a couple of key lines from conversations with friends (a book i adore so much i can't reread it more than once every two years because it puts me in a pleasurably bad mood for weeks on end) and not really on the basis of whatever happens in intermezzo (which i have not gotten my hands on yet but expect to enjoy based on the new yorker excerpt). i have no opinion on whether love is communism having experienced neither but i just. well. i just find this critical consensus interesting

[catholig]

The problem with biography is that it’s impossible. Have you ever tried to write down the thoughts, the emotions, the memories that bubble up in a person over sixty seconds; where she is; what she’s wearing; what she can smell, taste and hear; who she’s with; what she’s saying; not to mention what contribution this 0.069 per cent of a day is making to the meaning of her life?

Joanna Biggs 

[braidedgraphite]

Joanna Biggs. Max Beckmann, Quappi

[qudachuk]

The lives of female authors provide inspiration for a woman who finds herself starting over after divorceAround the time I realised I didn’t want to be married any more, I started visiting Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave,” begins this unusual blend...

[iphigennia]

At the end of the Catacombs, having walked among the bones of six million Parisians, you come to a single gravestone. Somewhere in the ostuary are the remains of Racine, Charlotte Corday, Robespierre and Montesquieu, yet the only monument is to Françoise Gillain, who, you discover, died in 1821 after spending years trying to free a writer unjustly held in the Bastille. Arriving at her tombstone is a confrontation. Even if you weren’t already thinking that every skull stacked here represents a person who also had parents and lovers and wondered what to have for dinner – or that every pair of femurs is now nameless, as one day your own femurs will be; or that the snatches of poetry from Lamartine and verses from the Bible painted on the wall aren’t ss comforting as they might be – you now are. To us, our lives are full of texture and incident and feeling, but to history, we are two dates engraved in stone, if we’re lucky.

‘The Palimpsest Sensation’, Joanna Biggs, The London Review of Books, Vol. 43, No. 20

[sleepydrummer]

Day Sleeper Dorothea Lange crédit: Literary Hub

[londonreviewbookshop]

Gwendoline Riley was at the bookshop to talk about her new novel, First Love, an exploration of marriage as battleground. Anne Enright described her previous novel, Opposed Positions, as ‘more than up to the job of writing the wasted hinterlands of the human heart’; Stuart Kelly called it ‘a continual joy’. Riley was in conversation with Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (Penguin 2012); the discussion was chaired by Joanna Biggs, author of All Day Long (Profile 2015) and editor at the London Review of Books.

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