Barbara Comyns Our Spoons Came From Woolworths (The 2016 Reading Challenge: A Book Published Before You Were Born. Our Spoons Came From Woolworths was first published in 1950 and I was definitely born after that.) I found a copy of Comyns’ novel in a charity shop, and bought it for its attention-grabbing title and beautiful…
Tag: autobiography
‘Excluding the lumpen hoi polloi’: The auto/biographies of Muriel Spark
I’m a Death-Of-The-Author kind of student and I’ve never been a reader of biographies, but I’ve recently read through a fair amount of biographical material relating to the subject of my research thesis, Muriel Spark, and I thought it would be a useful exercise to collect my thoughts on this material and record them here.…
Marinated and battered administrator with chips and mushy peas
I’ve been reading Peter Stockwell’s Cognitive Poetics, and one of the suggested exercises was to write your life story as a cookery recipe, which sounded like fun, so I’ve given it a go. One thing I noticed straight away as soon as I started to write was just how many very violent verbs there are…
