Posy Simmonds Posy Simmonds is a brilliant artist, acute satirist and eye-watering cartoonist who, in Literary Life Revisited, exposes authors, publishers and the book trade. Her work is currently on display in the Centre Pompidou in Paris. She has the essential gift of making you laugh at yourself. Funny Feminist Cartoons I became addicted to Posy Simmonds’s Mrs Weber’s Diary […]
Covent Garden Encounter
As I walked up from Covent Garden Tube to Neal’s Yard I saw my teenage son coming towards me. We had not planned or expected to see each other there or then. As we smiled at each other in recognition we both became aware that a small demonstration was taking place on the street between us. To my right was […]
On being non-gendered
I read this wonderful piece in the marvellous The Marginalian compiled by Maria Popova and thought with delight that it may explain me and perhaps other women of my generation. Ursula Le Guin writes: “I am a man. Now you may think I’ve made some kind of silly mistake about gender, or maybe that I’m trying to fool you, because […]
Horror hidden in the Woman in the Wall
‘I hate horror stories.’ I said as we watched the first episode of The Woman in the Wall. ‘Turn it off now!’ I wasn’t alone in switching away and other viewers did too. Did we do so for similar reasons? One viewer thought it ‘weird’. The next day I heard Ruth Wilson talking about the drama and why she chose […]
Saving my stories
What are the risks to my stories Saving my stories required an agent, high-profile reviews, media links, book launches, hard work and lots of money. I had none of those and I had to save my stories myself. Publishers told me that if a book is not successfully marketed in the six months after publication, it will die. As a […]