Nonfiction by Julie Myerson

Julie Myerson has, somewhat confusingly, written a novel called Nonfiction. The confusion of course is the point, because this is her squarest attempt so far at auto-biographical fiction. The French author Serge Doubrovsky is widely credited with writing the first ‘autofiction’ when he published Fils in 1977. Autobiographical novels have proliferated ever since, notably by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk and Edward St Aubyn. Hari Kunzru, when asked to discuss similarities between himself and his protagonist in Red Pill (2020), said: ‘It was just the simplest solution to a set of problems to give him the furniture of my biography.’

Myerson’s narrator is a novelist whose father dies by suicide and who has a child with a drugs problem. (The furore in 2009 over Myerson’s The Lost Child, partly about her eldest son’s skunk habit, was so great that a sympathetic journalist summed up the pre-publication reaction in an article entitled ‘Hating Julie Myerson’.)

The School for Good Mothers by jessamine chan

Frida Liu, the 39-year-old mother of a toddler named Harriet, has a very bad day which will haunt her for the length of this novel. She is divorced from Harriet’s father, a middle-aged man called Gust who has left her for a 28-year-old Pilates instructor called Susanna. Harriet will only fall asleep, Frida explains, ‘if I’m holding her hand’. As a consequence, Frida herself has been averaging two hours sleep a night when she finally cracks and decides to leave her daughter unattended so that she can collect some papers from her work place. After her neighbours hear the child crying they call the police and Harriet goes to live with Gust and Susanna. Child protection services install cameras in all the rooms of Frida’s home except the bathroom, but her efforts to change count against her. When she begins to clean her apartment scrupulously, they question why she wasn’t able to do this before.

Frida is sent to a corrective facility for a year, where she will be taught to erase all aspects of her identity that may interfere with being a good mother.

The Life Inside by Andy West

It seems unlikely there are many philosophy teachers with the family background of Andy West—his father, uncle and brother have all spent time in prison. West, in contrast, only teaches there (he is philosopher in residence at HMP Pentonville). As he relates in his memoir, The Life Inside, his compulsion to help is not simple do-gooding: he has a desire to fight against inherited guilt.

Some of the passages where he attempts to ignite debate in his classes about subjects as varied as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the black feminist thinker Audre Lorde and Caravaggio are not always easy to follow; but other passages succeed because of his wry humour. The men in one of his classes assume he is gay, and he doesn’t have the heart to tell them otherwise; women in another class argue over who will bring him tea.

Outside the classroom he is struggling with his own issues. He takes pictures of his oven as he leaves for work in the morning so he can reassure himself that he hasn’t left it on and inadvertently burnt his own house down.

Outside, the Sky is Blue by Christina Patterson

The journalist and broadcaster Christina Patterson’s memoir begins promisingly. She has a talent for vivid visual description, not least: ‘We are a pink and navy family. Two pink girls, a navy boy and a navy wife.’ Her early family holidays in Sweden, where her mother is from, are full of lingon-berries, hammocks and mini-golf. She recounts the story of her parents’ courtship as students and says of their relationship: ‘Love at first sight. Love for nearly 50 years. Love till death do us part’ — ominously pointing out how easy they have made love and marriage look. Most arresting, however, in this early part of the book, is her depiction of her elder sister Caroline’s nervous breakdown as a teenager. From her mother’s diary she quotes that her sister ‘says everything is her fault and mixes up bombs and security agents and hears children crying in the streets’.

Patterson writes about her sister’s schizophrenia with candour and sensitivity. Caroline’s lucidity about her own illness pierces the heart, particularly when a psychiatrist writes to their parents.

Nico: the voice and face of a generation

Christa Päffgen was born in Cologne in 1938 to parents of Spanish and Yugoslavian descent and only became known as Nico in her late teens, when she had begun modelling and the fashion photographer Herbert Tobias suggested the name. She went on to find fame via a bit part in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) and, later, in Andy Warhol’s Factory and as the frontwoman of the Velvet Underground – much to the chagrin of their existing singer Lou Reed – before becoming a solo artist. Her singing style was once described rather beautifully as sounding like “a body falling through a window”. And she has so often been viewed in relation to the men in her life: “Andy Warhol’s original factory girl” or “Lou Reed’s muse” are two examples. Her life ended at the age of forty-nine when she suffered a brain haemorrhage while in Ibiza with her only child, a son named Ari. Ari’s father was the film star Alain Delon, but the young man had grown up largely with his paternal grandparents, only bonding with Nico as an adult by taking heroin with her.

Siri Hustvedt

Siri Hustvedt is in her kitchen in Brooklyn – a high-ceilinged room with walls painted a deep navy and a few glass ornaments in bright reds and greens placed on shelves near the ceiling.

Her bestselling books, from 2003’s What I Loved, to 2014’s Booker-long listed The Blazing World, may have given her the reputation of being an intimidatingly intellectual 21st-century Virginia Woolf, but she is brilliant at putting me at ease. She leans forward to hear me better and when, at one point, her dishwasher beeps, she leaps up to open it so that steam pours out.

Her latest collection of essays, entitled Mothers, Fathers, and Others, showcases a wonderfully relaxed erudition. Blending family memoir and feminist philosophy, its subjects include misogyny, motherhood and what we inherit from our parents — including her own at times difficult relationship with her professor father.

“I was seeking my father’s approval and I think it’s good in many ways that I didn’t receive it,” she tells me. Why? “Well, I think it toughens you up and it’s no good to want to be patted on the head by the patriarchy.”

(c) Spencer Ostrander