Silver linings

Books and bookshops I have loved

Hello friends,

As I promised in last week’s newsletter, this one mostly consists of book recommendations – or, in some cases, reviews that turn into rambling, interconnected essays.

I am having something of a reading renaissance at the moment – and it took me a little while to work out that this must be because I’ve got more time on my hands, because I’m not off riding hundreds of miles every other day. I miss the era when cycling took up most of my time, and I very much hope that my health will eventually improve, and permit similar eras to unfold, but being able to read loads of books is a very bright silver lining, and probably the reason I’ve managed not to be too depressed about the decline in my lung capacity and energy levels.

(And, since you ask, things seem to be improving at the moment. I’m exercising most days, and I’ve managed to increase my intensity, though not so much my endurance. I haven’t felt ill for well over a month now, though I am sometimes tireder than I used to be. There is a lot to be thankful for.)

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Ghost Wall, by Sarah Moss

I found this one in a charity shop in Eastbourne, and had to buy it because I’d enjoyed The Fell (last month’s recommendation) so much. Ghost Wall is similar, in that it’s short, gripping and brilliantly written, but if I’m honest, I found it slightly less satisfying than The Fell. I can’t really go into the details of why without giving away the plot, but I would still firmly recommend this book as a good use of two hours of your time. The protagonist is Sylvie, whose troubled family have relocated to rural Northumberland for the summer, to re-enact Iron Age life alongside a group of archaeology students. Her father, we rapidly discover, is a tyrant – violent towards his wife and daughter, and grimly obsessed with recreating his antediluvian vision of pre-Roman Britain – and the novel’s growing tension comes from the unsavoury directions in which this threatens to spiral. I’m pleased to find that Sarah Moss has written six other novels, assuming they’re anywhere near as compelling as this and The Fell (which reviews suggest they are). In fact, I’m tempted to order the lot of them now, so that I have something to hand next time I need to avoid my phone on a long train journey.

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Everybody, by Olivia Laing

I’m a huge fan of Olivia Laing’s writing, which manages to be both extremely learnèd and intensely readable. One of the things I most appreciated about Everybody, as with her earlier The Lonely City, is that it took me through the lives and ideas of a variety of twentieth-century thinkers and artists, exploring how they intersect, and looking at them across the dual axes of freedom and embodiment. I got to know Susan Sontag, James Baldwin and Andrea Dworkin a bit better (and renewed my intention to read more of each of their work), but I also discovered Wilhelm Reich – the brilliant, problematic and (later in his life) quite frankly bonkers disciple of Freud, who left Weimar Germany for McCarthyite America. I learned a bit more about Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin, and about Malcolm X’s character-defining experiences in the US prison system, and I discovered the artist Ana Mendieta, and the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. (I was both surprised, and really not surprised at all, to discover yet another queer person of colour who has been hugely influential in history, yet is largely unknown – though apparently there’s now a film about him, which should change that.)

When it comes to art, literature and criticism, I mostly feel quite ignorant about who contributed what, and when, and their relation to the various currents of intellectual history. So I really appreciate Olivia Laing’s books, not only for her own brilliant ideas, but also for the ways in which she sketches out a context for them, and helps me understand the position and relevance of each person she includes. She also has a knack for finding good stories, and there are moments when this book reads like a novel, even as it scales the heights of intellectual endeavour.

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A Bookshop of One’s Own, by Jane Cholmeley

This one isn’t actually published till next month, but James, the lovely man who published my last book, is Jane’s agent, and he sent me a proof copy. It’s the biography of a bookshop – Silver Moon, which sold books by and about women, on London’s Charing Cross Road. I moved to London in 2005, five years after Silver Moon closed, and after reading this book I am even more heartbroken that I never got to spend time there. People still spoke of it with great affection – like many of the best bookshops, it had been a community hub, and a sanctuary for the lost and lonely. In fact, during my miserable early days in London, when I was struggling to find work, and felt unwelcome in the temporary accommodation I had found, I would often lock up my bike outside Foyles, on Charing Cross Road, and gravitate to the top floor, where a ghost of Silver Moon survived, in the shape of a few shelves of women’s literature. And I would sit on the floor between the shelves, in my cut-off jeans and battered cycling shoes, unashamedly losing myself in books for a few hours.

A Bookshop of One’s Own tells the story of Silver Moon right from the beginning – founders Jane and Sue lost their jobs in publishing in 1981, and during a windy walk on West Shore Beach in Llandudno (less than three weeks after I was born), they decided to set up a feminist bookshop. And over the next couple of decades they found themselves right at the epicentre of the women’s liberation movement. If you’re interested in women’s history, if you avidly read Alison Bechdel’s comic strips during the 80s and 90s, and if you want to recapture some of the energy and vision of feminism’s second wave, you’ll love this book.

Silver Moon closed at the end of 2000, a victim of rising rents (a chapter is titled ‘Bastard Landlords’), but for most of its existence it was a robustly successful business – a long way from the stereotype of penniless activists scraping a living. Jane, who was the more mathematically inclined half of the partnership, can’t resist the occasional foray into graphs and spreadsheets, and proudly demonstrates just how close Silver Moon was to turning over £1 million at its zenith.

And for the 17 years it was open, Silver Moon was arguably the home of women’s literature. (Though Jane doesn’t fail to acknowledge London’s other women’s bookshops, Sisterwrite and Virago, with whom they carefully negotiated their coexistence.) The book contains not only a list of all the authors who were welcomed at the shop, including giants like Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood and Alice Walker, but also endless testimonies from customers for whom the shop’s London premises and quarterly newsletter were both a lifeline and a highlight.

It seems impossible that such an institution could have folded, but Jane is also very good at tracing the historical currents in which Silver Moon swam. The shop flourished during the radical 1980s, and we hear about Section 28, Thatcher’s abolition of the Greater London Council, and the 1984 raid on fellow bookshop Gay’s The Word (plus their subsequent trial for “conspiracy to import indecent books”). Then, in the late 1990s, feminism edged its way into the mainstream – and for a while seemed to dissolve altogether.¹ It was this, along with rising rents and the collapse of the Net Book Agreement (which prevented excessive discounting by larger retailers like Amazon and Tesco) that finally led to Silver Moon’s demise.

There is a tendency for each generation to forget the work and achievements of those who went before – either because we mistake our own discoveries for inventions, or because, as so often happens, certain people, places and events are left out of history. So I’m delighted that this book is coming out now, at a moment when independent bookshops are somehow thriving.

Last weekend I went to a crafting session at Juno Books, an intersectional queer and feminist bookshop that opened in central Sheffield around 18 months ago. Sarah, one of the founders, had also been sent a proof of A Bookshop of One’s Own, and we enthused about it together, as an amicable assortment of women and queer people sat around with their knitting, embroidery and beadwork. I may have missed the golden age of women’s bookshops – but perhaps there is a silver age, evolving as we speak.

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The Northern Clemency, by Philip Hensher

Shortly after I moved house, I googled ‘novels set in Sheffield’, and ordered the first few books that came up. Although I’d been here a few times, for talks and events, I felt that I didn’t really know this city at all, beyond the broad knowledge that it was historically interesting, agreeably hilly, and full of outdoorsy people. I was reasonably sure I’d grow to love it – I just didn’t yet know how. I wouldn’t always launch myself into something with so little prior knowledge of it (a bike trip, for example, or a new country) but I will admit that sometimes the best discoveries are the ones you weren’t expecting.² And currently, learning about my new home is one of my favourite hobbies. I’ve been Sheffield carolling, I’ve found out more about cutlery than I ever expected to know,³ I’ve admired Victorian warehouses and modernist architecture on my local runs, and I’m an enthusiastic subscriber to the Sheffield Tribune – a local newspaper for the 21^st century, delivered via Substack.

And on top of that, I’ve discovered some really great books. The Northern Clemency is one of them. I read all 700 pages of it in a few days over Christmas, exclaiming now and then that I couldn’t understand why I found it so compelling. It’s not the sort of book you’d expect to binge on: there are no mysteries or cliff-hangers. I’m still not even entirely sure what carried me through it so swiftly and enjoyably, but I think it must have been the quality of the writing, and Philip Hensher’s cast of perfectly observed characters. This is not a sensationalist, or even a particularly plot-heavy novel. We follow two interlocking families through a generation or so of their lives, from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. History intervenes now and then (there is a set-piece episode where some characters participate in the Battle of Orgreave); there are a couple of incidents that are truly shocking, and some moments where I laughed out loud, but there are also pages and pages where Hensher simply recreates daily life in the 1970s and 80s. His characters are complex, universally flawed, and yet in most cases human enough to hold our sympathy. They do not always behave in ways that are straightforward, or even explicable – which of us does? And yet, by the end of the novel, I was sorry to leave them.

I was delighted to find that Philip Hensher had written about Sheffield, because I consider myself a committed fan of his, so it was surprising, when I read through the list of his other novels at the start of this one, to realise that I’d only read one of them: The Mulberry Empire, which I think I encountered when I was an undergraduate (so, around twenty years ago). He has loomed in my consciousness via a different channel since then, thanks to an article he wrote about Gay’s The Word bookshop in the early 2000s (I think it was published by the Independent, but I can’t find it anywhere online), which for a while was stuck up in the window of the shop.

This was the point at which Gay’s The Word, like Silver Moon before it, was in danger of having to close because of precipitously rising rents. Hensher passionately pointed out that, if we want cultural treasures like this bookshop to survive, we have to buy from them. I was a masters student at the time, and didn’t have a lot of money, but I instantly made a resolution to spend as much of it as possible at Gay’s The Word – and during the week when we were assigned Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (of which there were only one or two copies in the library), I sent an email to my classmates with a link to Hensher’s article, and the suggestion that they consider buying the book at Gay’s The Word, which was conveniently located midway between SOAS’ two campuses.

Several of them did, and to my delight, one of the straightest women on the course said she had nervously crept into the shop, and asked

“Do you have Gender Trouble?”

To which the person at the till (who can only have been Uli) responded by theatrically checking himself over, and saying

“No, I don’t think so!”

They both laughed, the ice was broken, and she bought the book.

The story has a happy ending, because now Gay’s The Word is thriving. A few years ago I went in, and asked, as I periodically do, how business was going. And Jim, who has worked at Gay’s The Word since 1989, gestured eloquently about the shop, where there were browsers standing in front of every shelf, patiently waiting their turn, politely shuffling through the crowds as they moved from Lesbian Fiction at the back to Textbooks near the till. Everywhere there was the mutter of gentle conversation, as people started up conversations, offered each other recommendations, or nodded their approval at someone else’s choice of book.

“This is normal now,” he said. And every time I visit Gay’s The Word these days, they’re doing a roaring trade. I usually have to queue, if I want to buy a book. I can’t say for sure how much of this was down to Philip Hensher’s article (or the five or six copies of Gender Trouble that the SOAS MA students bought back in 2008), but I remain grateful to him – and to the community he helped to galvanise: a community which is much larger these days, thanks to the expansion of the LGBTQIA+ acronym, and the increasing involvement of our wonderful allies.

If you ever have an hour to kill before catching a train out of King’s Cross, or getting on the Eurostar at St Pancras, I’d recommend you go and pay Gay’s The Word a visit. Not only is the range and selection of books they stock quite extraordinary – they are also very good at recommendations. Tell them what you’re into, mention a few books you’ve enjoyed lately, and they will come up with a shortlist of things you might like to read next (this service is also now available online). Or if you’re looking to learn more about a particular subject, or figure out a problem you’ve come across in your life, they’ll help with that too. More than once I’ve gone in on behalf of a friend who’s in the process of coming out, and asked them to recommend a starter pack. And if you’re never in London, there are other queer and feminist bookshops all over the country – you can find a list here.

A queer woman's starter pack, as recommended by Uli, Erica and Jim, November 2019

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As ever, I’ll be really happy to receive further recommendations in the comments, or to hear if you’ve read any of these books and enjoyed them (or not…).

And as for my current TBR pile - it seems to consist mostly of the sort of old-man books I used to find intolerably boring, when I had to shelve them in the bookshop I worked in as a teenager.

Isn’t it fascinating how our interests evolve?

Until next week,

Emily

1. Although this now seems like a fairly brief interlude, when I came of age at the turn of the century, feminism was only ever mentioned as the butt of a joke – I knew about Millie Tant in Viz magazine before I came across Alison Bechdel, and until at least my second year at university, most people I knew would go to the same lengths to avoid accusations of feminism as they would to distance themselves from homosexuality. Things picked up slowly throughout the early 2000s, but even in 2007, when I started my MA in Gender Studies, feminism was seen as a very niche interest – now, a decade and a half later, the course I did is SOAS’s most popular programme.

2. For example, my New Year’s resolution in about 2009 was to read a new book every week, and I asked everyone I knew for recommendations. I listed these in the back of my diary, and prioritised the ones I did not feel compelled to read, or where neither author’s name nor title meant anything to me – the books that, had I been browsing along the shelves of a bookshop, my eye would probably have skipped over. This successfully levered me out of the reading rut I’d sunk into the previous year, and led me to all sorts of undiscovered treasures.

3. Did you know, that ‘cutlery’ refers to anything with a sharp cutting edge? So a breadknife is cutlery, a scalpel is cutlery, an ice skate is cutlery – but forks and spoons are not. (They’re properly known as ‘flatware’.)