AL Kennedy’s On Writing is intended to be “company” for budding writers, she says, more than a straightforward manual
read me I’d be screwed. There are many genuine ways in which everybody is all in it together. Before the courses and before you had to pay for things, and before you got mentored on an official scheme and you had to pay by the hour, writers helped writers. Writers have always helped writers. We understand it’s not an easy thing to do. It’s weirdly little amazed that such a relaxed soul has written such a fine manifestation of that trauma, though it’s far from perfect.
Imagine a combination of Mairi Hedderwick, author of the Katie Morag children’s series, set on an island, plus Sylvia Plath, food writer Elizabeth Luard (in Family Life) and the best of Mills & Boon, and you will have some idea of the overarching mood of this slightly overlong volume, which sometimes struggles to maintain momentum. Yet sometimes the writing borders on the exquisite.
Here for example, to set the scene, posh and luxurious and wonderful, but it’s also lonely and horrible. You’ve got to pass it on otherwise it’s really toxic, it’s bad karma.
“And it’s practical as well. If you’re sorting out somebody else’s problem, it is still keeping your problem-solving equipment in good shape. It’s not like your wisdom is going to leave you. It’s like happi- is our heroine shortly after arriving at the Big House. It’s not the kind of prose you often see in Knight Frank particulars, though maybe you should: “The house is as draughty as a colander; all the windows rattle in their frames like loose teeth despite the wooden wedges and the duct tape. Cold winds lift the carpet as they whistle through the fabric of a house whose ceilings are as high as tight ropes in a big top.”
And here she is coping with baby blues in the same house: “If he asks me once more how I am feeling, when it is glaringly obvious that I am falling apart, it might just be his ness; it’s not a finite quality. You don’t have to make people miserable in order to preserve that happiness.”
For the first time in our conversation there’s something like silence at the end of the phone. Is everybody in the café eavesdropping? Have the remorseless city noises simply been a recorded backing that