01. My (almost annual) Reading Holiday – away with two friends; I read one book (Patchett) and started another (Perry); had two glorious walks by the ocean (I never get tired of fossicking by the shore); and basically the BEST, most relaxing time. Continue reading
Proving that I don’t actually care about my never-really-shrinking-TBR-list are these upcoming 2026 releases that I intend to add to my bookshelf. Continue reading
It took all my restraint to not type ‘Anna Delvey’ into Google as I was reading My Friend Anna by Rachel DeLoache Williams because, although I was vaguely aware of the outcome of Williams’s ‘Sex and the City meets Catch Me if You Can’ story, I couldn’t recall the detail. And it is the detail that makes this memoir so engrossing. Continue reading
Seems that every second person in my Twitter feed is reading (or talking about) Lena Dunham’s Not That Kind of Girl. While everyone else has been busy getting stuck into Dunham, I wound the memoir-clock back to what is considered one of the first novels to emerge from the Women’s Liberation Movement (according to the Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing) – Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen.
Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, Shulman’s debut, was published in 1972 and tells the story of Sasha Davis, following her ordinary, middle class life from childhood through to marriage and motherhood. The book is set in America during the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, and although it is fiction, there are notable parallels between Sasha’s life and that of the author. Continue reading