My favourite things I wrote this year
Some things I wrote this year are still in edits, and some things are the start of new projects, new fiction and so on, so may not be out for a little while.
I have some new fiction out early next year which I’m excited for you to read, and some essays I’ve worked a lot on this year too. But this is a list of the work I published this year which I am happiest with. (Not an extensive list of everything, but I will update my website soon if you feel you absolutely must read everything I write!)
First though I spoke to Lucie Elven about my book for LitHub.
My year in review:
This essay, on what it means to want the best of things, and happiness. This was on the cover of the New York Times.
This essay on getting so much more out of psychoanalysis than I ever expected for the Financial Times Magazine. I thought about writing about scientific repeatability as a concept, the fact this is a very fraught topic within the sciences and how strange it is to apply this to human behaviour, but I decided it would be more interesting just to hint at this. I think this turned out really well.
This profile and essay on the photographer Hannah Starkey for the British Journal of Photography, about a series of photos she took to commemorate the contribution women have made to peace building in the North of Ireland.
This profile of Blindboy, also on the cover of the New York Times. I wrote about the generational gaps opening up in the North and South of Ireland here too.
An essay for Slate on status seeking, and a manner of operating which I think of as “red rope around a bin” mentality.
I reviewed Shy by Max Porter for The New Republic and wrote about the idea of trauma as it appears in fiction compared to how I see it in reality. This is a theme in my book too and I was really grateful with one review in particular for picking that up.
An essay on humour and cagey interpersonal behaviour (which links to previous writing I have done on ghosting for New York Magazine) for Liberties Journal, who I think are doing interesting essays and criticism right now.
A profile of Jemima Kirke for GQ. We spoke about love and sex and I found something about her manner very liberating.
An essay for Elle on one of my great loves: fake tan.
A review of Nothing Special by Nicole Flattery for The New Republic. I wrote about fame, success and social media here too. These are, to my mind, the themes of the book. This was the most stylish novel out this year of those I read, I also found it to be the most radical in terms of its commentary on human nature. It’s the kind of book that doesn’t get published so much right now.
I didn’t write my book this year but it was out this year. I’ve been pleased with most of the reviews. My favourite is still the first one from John Self, a critic who I rate a lot, who I know takes books very seriously (you may think this is a given, it is not). Here are my highlights from that piece:
To group them together, however, is unfair on the best examples of the form, of which Lazy City, the debut by Belfast-born, London-based writer Rachel Connolly, is one. It’s also a novel about trauma and its aftermath: again, a common theme today, but done sophisticatedly here, with a quality of thinking rare in a debut…
… Connolly gives Erin a dry, wry voice, and one that’s frequently very funny: “Some men start talking about their dads, or worse, their mums,” she observes of the pre-sex verbal dance. Erin thinks as she talks, and opens up the reader’s thinking as well….
… Erin feels better after visiting a church; I felt better after reading this book. Connolly is a writer in whom I have faith.
Here is a thread with others.
When my book was coming I was worried that my non fiction writing would be used as a point against me in reviews, as well as the fact I taught myself to write instead of doing an MFA course in creative writing. I remember speaking to a friend who doesn’t work in my industry about this and she said: Oh, but surely that’s a good thing about you, all the other stuff you’ve done?
Ha! I thought. If I was a young man then possibly, yes. I can see that framing. Because I’m not I expected it to be turned into something negative. And yes, the two negative reviews I have had did do this.
One, by a person who does not seem aware of post modernism as a concept, said I was trying to write my book in the style of an MFA novel and didn’t understand (??) how to do it, and that because I’m a journalist (I’m a critic, not a reporter who writes about the news, but you can see the different weighting in those words) my writing is “pedestrian on a sentence level” (there weren’t any sentences of mine used as evidence of this, of course, even though the most basic facet of criticism is to provide evidence for the points you make).
I don’t know if there’s a single pedestrian sentence in anything I write. I think the distinctive voice in my writing is what people like about it and pay me for. But I also think if something feels different it can be hard to take it on its own terms. It’s easier to say it doesn’t fit into X or Y box. I’m proud to do that kind of work though. Who wants to fit into a box?
Have a good Christmas, till next year xxxxxx