Demolition plot (extended play)

There was a time when I wrote a diary. Not every day; intermittently, for about four years. I stopped when I realised that a) I was only writing it when I was miserable, b) I was repeating myself, c) writing it changed nothing.

There was a time when I thought Chekhov, if not the most boring playwright in the history of theatre, certainly in the top 10.

I'm sorry if you've read these things before here.

Remember that last sharp day of winter we had? At least, it was the last sharp day London had: Tuesday 26 April, 2016. I stood at the kitchen window and tried to work out if those slushy white flakes were hail or snow. A few days later I stood in the same place and realised I was looking at the first sharp day of spring: green leaves so defined against a bright blue sky they seemed extra-dimensional. And I had a thought I'd never had before: this means nothing to me. The spring, the brightness, the green, the blue. Time turning, age grinding, unremarkable repetition, and a slow, inexorable deadening.

This is the emotional voice in my head that listened to Chekhov's First Play and heard its echo.

But we won't start with either of those.

Let's start with Dominic Dromgoole.

In 2000 he published an “A-Z of contemporary playwrights”, The Full Room, written with such irascible passion that with every dip I come away scalded. On Phyllis Nagy: “I'm sure she's terrific, but for me it always sounds like someone being a writer, rather than someone writing about being.” On Lee Hall: “Somehow he manages to keep many thousands of hungry mouths happy with a few loaves of a talent.” That the witticisms emerge from a forensic scrutiny of the actual plays gives everything he writes an air of justice, despite his protestations in the introduction that he's not here to judge, and regardless of whether or not I agree. But if he's ruthless in exposing flaws or inconsistencies, he's also intemperate with admiration: in the heat and light of his praise, his subjects glow.

He also writes with a strong moral compass, whose true north is Chekhov. In the entry on Anthony Neilson, he notes approvingly: “As Chekhov could dream of a better world in time to come, without providing some glib programme of improvement, so Neilson looks four-square into the heart of our sexual darkness, and allows himself to dream of a better world.” And in the entry on Patrick Marber – “a brilliant boulevard entertainer” – he looks in vain for “a real wish for good. With a Chekhov, with a Brecht, with a Beckett,” he explains, “you see a brilliantly realised and brutally honest vision, behind which there hovers the ghost of a better, fairer, more beautiful world. With Marber … beyond what we see is a chaos filled with violence, sexual desire and sexual disgust, and endless mutual loathing.”

I think about this chapter on Marber a lot, in particular for what Dromgoole says in the final paragraph:

“Chekhov wrote volumes of work, built schools, opened hospitals, interviewed ten thousand prisoners on Sakhalin island, kept his family, kept his patients alive, held hundreds as they died, spent fifteen years coughing his own life away, and still managed to keep hope in balance with despair, still managed to love life and its mad optimism.”

The leaves, drunk on chlorophyll, radiant and meaningless.

*

The “director” of Chekhov's First Play (warning: a frenzy of spoilers lies ahead) has read a biography of Chekhov; he knows these facts and knows that, by comparison, he himself is failing. I put “director” in quote marks to differentiate him from Ben Kidd and Bush Moukarzel, who co-directed Dead Centre's production, not because they didn't genuinely read the biography, but because I left the Mayfest performance stupefied by an adolescent crush on Moukarzel, who also wrote the adaptation and plays the “director” on stage, that heard everything he said as soul-dredging confession. I need the quotation marks to remind me that this is a character, that the voice that is speaking is a performed voice, that when the “director” begins berating himself as “a fraud”, when he says “I don't know what I'm doing” or that “I haven't been feeling myself lately. And by lately, I mean ever”, what I'm hearing is a fabrication. Never mind if it's the words I hear in my head all the time.

But let's avoid that voice a little longer.

It's hard to avoid the “director's” voice in this production. Once he's delivered his pitch-perfect introduction – light as a meringue and yet ominous, not just because he wields a gun, but because he makes visible something I (and likely others in the room) had never contemplated before: the audience member's temporary legal ownership of their theatre seat, its status as “private property” – he retreats to the wings and talks around, across and over his actors, commenting on their performances, his own choices, the themes and subtexts of the play. Of course, some of his own text has a subtext: when he says, close to the beginning, “I love real life. The detail”, there is an underlying irony that is quickly exposed when he begins to berate the actors for moving in the wrong way and forgetting their lines, in other words being real people, but also an undertow of pathos whose emotional pull operates more slowly.

What he particularly wants to draw our attention to is the reflection – no, continuation – of Chekhov's world in our own. Some of that is to do with unchanging human nature: as he notes in his introduction, all Chekhov's plays “ask the big questions: who am I? What kind of a society do I want to live in? What do I want?” But some of it is to do with the ways in which Chekhov thought about “the kind of society” that surrounded him, his attitudes towards privilege and work, property and debt, social stagnation and the possibility or imminence of change. These attitudes, compassionate, socialist and challenging of orthodoxy, have a pliability that the best directors (and playwright-adapters) seize as gleefully as children do playdoh.

I didn't think any of this until I watched Benedict Andrews' production of Three Sisters (Young Vic, 2012): it spoke so precisely to the frustrations of my own life, and to the stuckness I've been able to name since reading the Ann Cvetkovich book on depression, that I heard more vividly the play's address to society at large. I felt the same wonder and excitement watching Katie Mitchell's production of The Cherry Orchard (Young Vic, 2014): as adapted by Simon Stephens, it wasn't a play about privileged (albeit poor) people for whom I felt no sympathy, but the complex relationship between class, capitalism and environmental devastation. Robert Icke's Uncle Vanya (Almeida, 2016) was the least convincing of the three, in that a lot of the staging choices were fucking annoying even if they did make intellectual sense, but as a portrait of people damaged by the basic condition of being alive, holding down the lid on their hopes, desires, frustrations and anger before inevitably boiling over, it was exemplary.

I'd seen all of these plays before, sometimes in pretty good productions, but my general idea of Chekhov was sealed early on by a Cherry Orchard played in a wealthy suburb of London, by actors with plummy accents wearing white lace and linen suits, that left me wanting to punch every person on stage, for their entitlement, apathy and mediocrity. This was the problem of Chekhov's First Play for me: when the curtain rises, it looks like just such a traditional, tedious production. And that's a lie. The directors, Kidd and Moukarzel, know that it's a lie: they know they're working within a “German theatre” aesthetic, but they pretend not to be for dramatic and comic effect. To be fair, it works: the jokes teasing conservative theatre, in which the “director” complains about the actors and lets slip the sexual shenanigans going on behind the scenes, easily win the laughs they chase. OK, I sound like a miserabilist. But Chekhov's First Play does something incredibly powerful politically, and for me that could have been more potent still if Dead Centre hadn't settled on the chocolate-box image of a sprawling country house as the site for that action: an image that distances more than it implicates.

In other ways, Chekhov's First Play is rigorous in implicating. It makes explicit reference to Ireland's recent history, first with jokes about its flaccid economy, but gradually becoming more serious about the spiritual effect of debt. (Something about the way it compacted gravity and sickly unease into comedy reminded me of John McDonagh's film Calvary.) It talks about the central character of Platonov as someone “over-educated but useless, unnecessary”, typical of a generation who have “let go of ideals”: people who know that there is social inequality, rising poverty, ecological catastrophe taking place, but are comfortable enough themselves never to do anything more serious to challenge it than mouthing off on social media. (I'm very much describing myself here.) It spends its entire first half insistently arguing that we can't wait for someone else to save us. And then. And then.

Two months on, I still feel giddy and breathless just thinking about it. Because the hinge point of Chekhov's First Play unleashed all my wildest fantasies of what I'd like to do in the political world. It drops a wrecking ball from the flies and proceeds to demolish everything: the physical set, but also the metaphysical structures that hold the characters – and us, the audience – in place. That wrecking ball smashes at property, at family, at propriety and expectation. When it falls, the women stop talking in a vaguely dissatisfied way about lacking a sense of purpose and start naming their specific hatred of “my marriage and capitalism and my student loan and how the modern consumer society separates us from ourselves … normality and monogamy and gender normative privilege”. Being idealistic about wanting these things to change isn't enough. You have to get out there and actively fight them. You have to live the difference you want to see.

To do that takes courage and verve. It takes a willingness to make mistakes, look awkward, feel out-of-step with everyone else. It takes quick thinking and attentive listening. And Chekhov's First Play shows us how. It pulls someone out of the audience, someone prepared enough in advance to be wearing a particular red denim jacket but no more, and gets them to play Platonov. I've since read the playtext (THANK YOU OBERON for replacing the copy I stupidly lost) and understand a lot more about what happened in this half of the production, but I'm going to be truthful about the experience of watching and say that there was much that I didn't hear or that didn't feel clear in this section. It didn't matter: chaos was part of the point, the necessary correlative of destruction.

Through most of this, the “director's” voice is absent: he's silent because he shot himself, unable to bear the disparity between what he wanted the production to be and what he had actually made. Implicit in his adaptation is a question – what does it take to be extraordinary, and actually change the world? – and a recognition that it's the wrong question, playing into patriarchal notions of singularity and genius. Far better to be a nobody: but a nobody genuinely dedicated to the cause of helping other nobodies, enabling them to escape the bonds that tie them, enabling them to cast off the pressures of keeping up with life as shaped by neoliberalism. Platonov is that nobody: he's just a stranger, plucked from the auditorium. It could have been any one of us. And because of that, it's all of us.

Such was my intense sense of identification with this Platonov that I felt quite upset when the staging required him to point a gun at his own head. It felt wrong, an unethical ask. Reading back over the text, I wonder what it means to have a character repeatedly described as useless and unnecessary, and then have him played by a member of the audience. I worry that if I pick at the wrong thread of Moukarzel's adaptation, the whole thing will unravel.

What holds it all together for me, allows me to live in its contradictions, is that voice, the “director's” voice, which is also Platonov's, and mine. That voice caught between idealism and pessimism, hope and depression, knowledge of the work that needs doing and terror of actually doing it. The “director” seems so confident when Chekhov's First Play starts, but it's all bluff. He lacks faith not only in himself but in theatre as a medium: “It's so aimless,” he mourns, as his characters sing People Ain't No Good in Russian. The song returns in the final scene, when the “director” returns, head bandaged, for a speech that devastated me:

“This gun. At least let me explain one thing right. Chekhov's first play had a gun in it and his second, and all the rest had guns in them in one way or another, until in his last play … it was gone. It's like he got over it. He wrote away the gun.

He realised his characters have to do something even harder than dying. They have to go on living.”

I've lost count of the number of times I've thought those last two sentences in the past few years. The accuracy with which they echoed my inner voice – the inner voice that the “director” explicitly acknowledges in his opening speech – meant that the words that followed reduced me to a puddle. “I don't know who I am, what it is I want, why I'm alive. But I need to have courage,” his voice, my voice, said. “I wonder will this voice ever stop? … This commentary, commenting on everything. Will it ever go away?” Not just my inner voice but the voice I hear speaking to a counsellor, a weirdly out-of-body experience. “Where would I go, if I could go, who would I be, if I could be, what would I say...?” These are the questions that consume me at night, lying awake in my too-hard bed. And as I sat in my theatre seat – my own private property, which holds me in place, in which I always behave with absolute decorum, just as I do in the world outside – I knew exactly what was coming next, but still felt an intense sense of gratification when Platonov's final word is: hello.

*

For such a basic word, hello is really hard to say.

On Friday 1 July, I visited the South-East London Sisters Uncut occupation of a disused shop in Peckham. I'd planned to get there early and sit with my laptop, writing about the room, but also maybe writing this, or about Ria Hartley's work, or maybe about what it was to grow up in Thatcher's Britain as a way of reflecting on the terror and anxiety but also weird sense of euphoria I felt in the first week post-referendum, when it still seemed vaguely possible that there might be a left-wing resurgence (excuse me while I wring my hands with despair). Instead, I found all sorts of excuses to delay leaving home. There wasn't going to be wifi in the building. I had some scraps of food in the house that I ought to cook for my lunch. And so it was 1.30pm by the time I arrived, giving me barely an hour in the space before the school run.

The people on the door were immediately friendly but the usual shyness consumed me so I rejected the offer of a tour and had a look round on my own. The main room was welcoming, warm and light, despite having few windows and no carpet on the concrete floor. It was the warmth and light of generosity and political fervour. The occupation was staged to draw attention to the lack of provision for women living in Southwark who experience domestic violence, particularly black and minority ethnic women following austerity cuts. Along one wall was a huge banner bearing the group's slogan: how can she leave if there's nowhere to go? Along another, lively posters detailed previous Sisters Uncut actions, in photographs and clips from less than sympathetic media. There were sofas and a large children's play space with toys and a wendy house and drawing materials, and a stack of food with an invitation to all-comers to help themselves. Scattered around were copies of the excellently thoughtful safe space policy, and reminders that the space was open only to people who identify as female or non-binary. It was beautiful.

Looking around gave me the courage to go back to the people at the door and say hello. This is how I met Sita X. When a friend of Sita's arrived I continued the conversation with Becca, asking about how the occupation was going, and about Sisters Uncut generally. When I had to leave, I felt like an idiot: I hadn't had enough time. I wished I'd been there all day.

I asked Becca why Southwark in particular and she patiently told me about its appalling record of failing women who come to the council seeking help in escaping abuse situations. We talked about the council's bristly, patronising response to the occupation, that “statistics don't tell the whole story”, and the blog Sisters Uncut planned to publish in reply. I asked how they managed to get into the building, and Becca told me about laws related to squatting and the mechanics of the occupation, how everyone involved was taking time off from work or study to be there. I've always been terrified of this kind of direct action – and there was a moment when the Sisters gathered at the door, worried that an aggressive man might be seeking entry, that reminded me why – but talking to Becca and Sita, it felt possible. More than that: necessary.

I can't imagine not writing about theatre but nor can I carry on as I am, advocating in the abstract for social change without doing physical work to bring it about. In the time it's taken me to write this post, I've been reading Here We Stand, a glorious, invigorating book of interviews with and texts by female activists, that is nourishing me and encouraging me and giving me a way forward. There's one woman in particular, Mary Sharkey, that I'm clinging to because she was in her early 40s before she became politically active: what a relief to encounter her, and recognise that there's no point berating myself for wasting time and not doing this sooner (that voice again, commenting on everything) because – as she says in the final line of her interview – it's never too late to start. She has an excellent motto, too: “Behold the turtle, who makes progress when she sticks her neck out.” Perfect.

So I've been inhaling that, and also Kimya Dawson's album Thunder Thighs, which I deeply regret missing on first release, if only because it would have done me much good to hear her sing “now I'm 37 and I'm glad that I'm alive” when I was 37 and really not. There are so many best-friend songs on this album: Same Shit/Complicated, which trumps me for ultra-earnest expression; Utopian Futures, which to the letter describes the place I want to live; Zero or a Zillion, a piquant fuck you to the art accountants out there. But I think my favourite is Miami Advice, in particular the chorus that closes it:

You think I'm preaching to the choir

But I am not

I'm singing with the choir

This is such a key point made by the women of Here We Stand (a book, it's worth noting, that was recommended to me by Mary Paterson, with whom I've been working for a couple of years and in that time has taught me so much about collaboration and political engagement): the real goal isn't individual action but collective. “What we create are ripples,” says Liz Crow, “where the work of many peoples combines to make change.” And collectivity starts with saying hello.

*

Five years ago, I started writing a diary again. It's going OK: I'm doing better at turning to it in different moods, and trying hard not to repeat myself. I still know it doesn't change anything, not materially. But it does something my old diary never did. It says hello. I know this because you're reading it now.

 

all the right moves, all the wrong words

Another year, another summer made fractious by the Edinburgh fringe. Even opening the programme this year made me feel queasy: I marked performances, turned the corners of its pages, feeling like I was wading through the Argos catalogue, consuming consuming consuming. And although I was careful and made sure I had lots of space for conversations and walking and a balanced diet of cake and fruit, and although I took almost no risks and so almost everything I saw felt meaningful, smart, exhilarating sometimes, nourishing other times, I still ended up glutted and sick. So since then I haven't been going to the theatre. I haven't even been able to look at theatre listings. Instead I've had stillness. Other doings and beings. And before I re-enter the fray – despite all misgivings, a sense of superfluity, and the fear that writing about theatre is no longer the thing I love – a celebration: of things I've been able to do because I haven't been witnessing in the dark...

1: Most of the recipes involve 150ml of double cream. Most of the recipes display an astonishing lack of concern about the environmental impact of eating so much meat. Most of the recipes involve tablespoons of chilli and ginger and spice concoctions that I haven't been able to use since starting to cook family meals five years ago. But Nigel Slater's Eat is the most inspiring, I-want-to-make-that-inhale-that-savour-that cookbook I've read in aeons. And not just because it's the only cookbook I've read in aeons. Snip-snap sentences. Unctuous language that sizzles and simmers and glistens on the page. The first thing I cooked from it was a chicken and farro recipe that I sold to the children as an Italian version of chocolate rice and they ate it and didn't whinge once. Result.

2: In my list of top 10 albums of all time and ever that is at least 500 albums long, Father John Misty's Fear Fun is, it's emerged, somewhere in the elastic top two. I keep posting Now I'm Learning To Love the War on here, but there's also this one

and this one

and this one

And still I'm startled by its country twang, but I grew up on Dolly and Willie and Kris, and took myself deeper backwoods, through the dark mysteries of the Appalachians, and country feels like home. In any case, it's not the style but the voice, so plangent, a deep seam of disappointment in which he mines still for hope:

Before the star of the morning comes looking for me

I would like to abuse my lungs

Smoke everything in sight with every girl I've ever loved

Ride around the wreckage on a horse knee-deep in blood

I listen to that voice and I swoon.

3: I've been getting a lot of emailing done, sitting at the table beside my husband on the sofa watching TV, and I haven't quite followed The Honourable Woman but Orange Is the New Black has lesbian sex – romantic, playful, teasing, functional, aggressive, tender lesbian sex – and it's proving very distracting. I'm not always convinced by the glossiness of its surface, but there's enough feminist nous and queer abrasion beneath to make me want to down tools and just watch.

4a: I read Donald Barthelme's The School in an anthology of short stories 19 years ago and every synapse shivered. I ran off a dozen photocopies and used it as a secret handshake; last week I sent the link to Churlish Meg and realised I still think of it as a soul gift. Originally it was published in a collection called Amateurs, which I bought in the days of scouring secondhand bookshelves for Brautigan and Barthelme and names that don't begin with B, but only got around to reading in August; The School remains my favourite story ever written, and Rebecca might turn out to be the second.

4b: From the days when the chimneys of Battersea Power Station, those crumbling columns that puncture the sky as the children and I walk to and from school, still reconfigured the clouds with smoke; from the days of open racism and closed abortion and communities of women laughing in the soapsuds of laundries; from the days when warehouses weren't apartments for the wealthy but factories employing the poor; from that moment of transition, between the demolition of slums and the rise of estates, Nell Dunn's Up the Junction emerges so vivid, so raw, that reading it made me gasp. London has moved on from there but how far I'm not sure. The tale of the Tally Man captures an exploitation of poverty that abusively persists; the desperation of teenagers, for a fuck, for an approximation of freedom, that doesn't change. Dunn writes elliptically, mostly in dialogue, rough jottings scrawled on the hoof, in the dark; it's social realism, but compressed, made poetic, edited with lapidarian skill. Reading her and Barthelme has not only made me want to write again, but rethink how.

4c: Page after page of D.I.Y, the manual for theatre-makers edited by Robert Daniels, inspires and soothes with its generosity and common-sense. It's reminded me why I keep saying yes to theatre instead of doing the writing that requires me to sit on my own at a computer hour after hour. It's reminded me to listen to the Mountain Goats more. It's reminded me to treasure my shift away from being a “professional”, why it's important to keep struggling in the unknown. Above all, it's reminded me that:

We are humans. We have feelings, we have souls. Don't beat yourself up about your practice. Ever. It is the self-loathing and doubt that delays EVERYTHING. Imagine yourself as a baby, if you keep being mean to a baby, it will hate you and poop out all sorts of nonsense to punish you. Take care of yourself. Be kind. Give yourself time, chocolate, holidays and a fucking break. Negativity breeds contempt. Happy artists make good art.

Not for the first time this year, reading that makes me want to give Bryony Kimmings a great big kiss.

5: This doesn't count because we went in the daytime but the Doll Museum in Dunster is one of the strangest places I've ever been. Arguably I write about theatre now because of a B&B in Scarborough whose eerie parlour was crowded with dolls: tiny dolls, foreign dolls, dolls to my thighs that lined the stairs as if waiting to trip me up or push me down. The Doll Museum in Dunster was that room to a factor of three, all staring eyes and twisted limbs and fraying national costume. A repository of white colonial thinking on history, class and race. But at the same time, a really fun place to take my daughter. Weird.

6a: And OK, there were two nights at the theatre. The first was the Benedict Andrews/Gillian Anderson Streetcar Named Desire at the Young Vic, which bored me to itchiness. I couldn't unthink the Secret Theatre's version: the musicality of its European accents; the sensual melt of ice-cream, the crack of watermelons, the ice spill of water; Leo Bill's humble, bumbling Mitch, with his bad jumpers and stuttering desire; the rejection of every lurid colour that Andrews and Anderson made garish again. The day after seeing it I hosted the Young Vic Two Boroughs Project Theatre Club on it with Lily Einhorn and we talked for well over an hour about how the play sits in Williams' oeuvre and how it relates to his biography; how the play isn't misogynist but an indictment, a really aggressive and scathing indictment, of patriarchal culture, not just the old patriarchy of America's old south but the bullying, entitled patriarchy of the emerging new south; women, age and feminism; how familiar aspects of the play felt to those of us in the group from ethnic backgrounds (including, on that particular night, Nigerian, Spanish, Indian and my own Cypriot); witnessed accounts of alcoholism, bipolar disorder, domestic violence; and on and on, a rich and involved and really smart discussion that was far more engrossing than the production itself.

6b: The second was Itai Erdal's How To Disappear Completely at BAC, seen on a night of such precarious, panic-streaked instability that even walking into the theatre was like punching myself in the brain. Oh well. Erdal is a lighting designer by training and his demeanour is scuffed and gauche, in a likeable way. He introduces his mother, his step-father, his furiously intelligent sister and gawky best friend, the way he might if we were sat around a pub table with him, making friends. One story, of an overexcited dugong, made me cry with laughter; but its overarching story just made me cry, because it traced his mother's demise, from cancer that spread through her body with relentless purpose, taking them all by surprise. Erdal speaks with the dangerous honesty of a child who hasn't yet learned to self-edit, the kind of honesty that provokes alternately alarm, disapproval and relief. And because he is a lighting designer, he makes us think about how stories are told in theatre, how emotions are manipulated through luminosity. I keep talking to people about this show, because its bravery startled me, and because its argument for assisted suicide has a clarity that makes it unimpeachable. But I also keep talking about it because Erdal's mother believed something about motherhood that I emphatically reject. She told both her children that it was vital for them to reproduce, because it's through their children that individual humans perpetuate their existence in the world. Such thinking is inimical to me, egotistical, and damaging in the ways intimated by Virginia Woolf, in a book I haven't read yet, quoted by Jacqueline Rose in a terrific essay on motherhood published in the LRB:

“In The Years, written on the eve of fascism, Virginia Woolf [comments] on the dire consequences of parental exclusivity, on the damage it does to the social fabric – which was on the point of being rent beyond repair – to think it right to put your child, your family, before everyone else. She is also suggesting that, while England takes pride in its difference from Nazi Germany, there might even so be a link between the overweening egoism of the bourgeois family and the autocracy of statehood.... At a family gathering in the mid-1930s … North, the now grown-up grandson of Colonel Pargiter, watches as people inquire after each other’s children:

My boy – my girl … they were saying. But they’re not interested in other people’s children, he observed. Only in their own; their own property; their own flesh and blood, which they would protect with the unsheathed claws of the primeval swamp, he thought … how then can we be civilised?”

Woolf, Rose concludes, is describing how “the intricacy and breadth of human possibility can be sidelined or quashed before it has even begun”. Yes, they're my children. But they are their own people. The least I can do is respect that. No, that's not true. The least I can do is not resent how, having made them, they eat up time and energy, leaving only scraps of both with which to make anything else.

7: Speaking of which:

A month of being home to tuck them in.

Reading bedtime stories.

Learning the times tables together.

(Never quite mastered the 7s or 9s).

Sitting at the computer with earphones on listening to Father John Misty so loudly that I can't hear their voices.

Talking about how I could be a better mother.

Her ideas include creative mealtimes inspired by typical menus in different historical periods, a designated painting space that doesn't always need tidying, and taking her to the theatre in the night-time.

A month of being present. And sometimes not coping with what that means.

8: Escaping not into the dark of the theatre but the light of the kitchen. One night I made chocolate cookies using an ounce of black treacle instead of golden syrup; they were fudgy, smoky, much more grown-up than I'd intended when adding most of a packet of white chocolate chips. Another night I made pastry with 20g cocoa, 100g flour, and 60g cold butter, rubbing them into crumbs as usual then blending in a tablespoon of golden syrup, pouring the crumbs into a loose-bottomed, buttered, 28cm tart tin and pressing them into the base and edges. That went into the fridge for 15 minutes then – covered with baking parchment and copper coins – into a preheated gas 4/180C oven for about 15 minutes. Meanwhile in a bowl 110g softened butter, 110g light muscovado, 110g ground almonds and one egg, beaten with a fork until amalgamated. Out comes the pastry, off come the coins and parchment; over the chocolate base four or so tablespoons of apricot jam, spread almost but not quite to the edges, and over that the frangipane mix, smoothing its surface to cover not blend with the jam. That baked in the same oven for about 35 minutes, so when it came out it was still squodgy; in retrospect, another 10 minutes wouldn't have hurt it. Still, the bitter crumble of the chocolate crust and sweet melt of fruit and frangipane was heavenly. And even better the next day.

9: The mother in the Dardennes brothers' film Two Days, One Night makes a tart, too, a really crisp-looking fruit tart that the family share after takeaway pizzas. And then she sobs that she's invisible, irrelevant, I can't remember the exact words but that's because approximations of them had been ringing through my head all that day. And the day before that. And before that. It's not an easy film to watch, and not just because she keeps having anxiety attacks and crying and snapping at her husband when he expresses concern at her taking Xanax. She spends a weekend traipsing around the houses and haunts of all her co-workers, trying to persuade them to take her back at the factory where they earn so little that many of these people need to take on secret second jobs to get by, trying to do this knowing that if they take her back they won't each get a thousand-euro bonus that might relieve the pressure in their own lives. Sometimes on train journeys through London's suburbs I feel stifled by the number of houses, people, stories in this city; Two Days, One Night enters those houses, talks to those people, listens to their stories, and sympathises. And even where it doesn't sympathise, it attempts to respect. This made it not an enjoyable film so much as a sternly moral film whose politics I share.

10: I'm speedwriting now because it's getting late. And because I'd like to write about Cate Le Bon and the gig at Koko (a stronger performance than the one I saw in February, but I missed being close to the stage), about the wild magic of her voice and the angular jolt of her guitar, and how she makes me wish I could sing, about standing on the balcony of Koko between two of my oldest friends, the same people I've been sharing angular jolting guitars and wild magic voices with for over 20 years now, and all the history between us, the honesty and safety, but I've been writing this listening obsessively to Perfume Genius, all three albums, and now his voice is all I know of music. He was a surprise guest at Koko and for those few minutes when he sang I thought I was levitating. I can't get a handle on his albums: they're so intimate, and yet something in them resists intimacy. I think it's a problem of timing: they'll make more sense alone in the dark. I should have been writing about the new one tonight instead of writing this. I should have been doing all sorts of things all day instead of writing this. Seduced by the wrong words again.

break on through to the other side

I no longer know where this one starts. It's restarting at 1am on 21 July 2014, with just three days of school left before the summer holidays. It started 10 days ago, although I didn't know how to start, and panic set in at the thought that everything I'd wanted to say had disappeared. It started three weeks before that, in the midst of work-related despair at the pointlessness of my existence. That was the week I finally read Nicholas Ridout's Theatre & Ethics and for a brief galvanising interlude felt there was some purpose to this stupid thing I keep doing. The book is 70 densely argued yet gently repetitive pages scanning history and philosophical argument that ends with the most concise and exacting manifesto for theatre criticism I think I've ever encountered. Theatre isn't at its most ethical, Ridout posits, when “what the work says or does matches our own sense of what we would like it to say or do, corresponds with our own sense of how we would like the world to be”. For theatre to be ethical, it “would have to confront its spectators or participants with something radically other, something that could not be assimilated by their existing understanding of the ethical”. Such work requires “a labour of critical thought for its ethical potential to be realised”, requires a critic to approach it “with uncertainty, with a view to the possibility of surprise, challenge or affront”. The way I read this, the theatre that's genuinely going to contribute to the shaping of a more humane, liveable, empathetic society is going to require the rigorous reading and storytelling of critics. So there's a reason to sit at the desk every not-so-spare hour of the day.

*

On Tuesday of that week, my friend Jake saw Christopher Brett Bailey's This Is How We Die and sent me a text assuring me I would fall apart watching it, in all the best ways. On Wednesday my twitter friend Megan saw This Is How We Die and tweeted to make sure I was going to see it because I would love it. On Thursday I saw This Is How We Die and spent the first 50 minutes wondering how I would confess to them both that it was good but not so blam-pow-whizz. And then The Thing happened and my whole body lurched and my insides felt bigger than my outsides, and I bought a ticket to see it again on Saturday, because this time – knowing what was coming – I could watch it with uncertainty. That sounds paradoxical, I know. It's that kind of show. (From here on, it's all spoilers. But the show is so full of ideas and images and language that I'll barely scrape the surface.)

It starts with Bailey sitting at a desk, a small table rather, small enough to make him look a little awkward and cramped. It starts with some methodical arranging of the script piled before him and the glass of water beside it, so that everything is positioned precisely so. It starts with a cheeky sort of hangdog half-smile, and then he leans into the microphone and it's like when a tap is broken and a fountain gushes out uncontrolled. Except every word is positioned precisely so. This opening speech – Beckett meets Burroughs – talks about masculinity and sex and violence and the seep of prison culture into everyday society, about apocalypse and living hell and the impossible weight of bringing children into this world, but most of all it talks about words, words as weapons, words that have lost all their meaning. How do we relate to each other in a world where language is abused and can't be trusted any more?

A line I've never forgotten, from the stapled pages of a typewritten book, hand-made by someone I loved long ago: “If you take a word out of context, what might it mean? (MEAN.)”

And then snap: This Is How We Die becomes a love story, a teen romance, the kind I grew up watching. Misfits against the world. Qui elevent leurs skinny fists comme antennas to heaven. In exquisite detail we follow the couple – Chris and a girl dressed all in black, immaculate beehive, a mouse, chain-smoking, where her mouth should be – to her parents' house for Sunday lunch. Her parents are grotesque, cartoon monsters, but she has described them to Chris with a surgical accuracy he almost can't fault. “God you are so literal,” he tells her admiringly. “I love that.”

She gives words meaning. She makes words mean.

Another shift: the girlfriend upbraids Chris for his carelessness with language. When you use language like that, she bristles, [you sound like] a misogynist. The accusation heralds an electrifying harangue from Chris, against the policing of thought through labels: that's racist, sexist, misogynist – not very humanist. Rewind to a line in the first section: PC has gone mad. Who's using these labels anyway? Are they really an expression of ethics? Of morality? Or just plain hypocrisy? Let's pause here and watch Panti Bliss speaking at the Abbey Theatre again, talking about oppression and self-hatred. This is the world Chris – or “Chris” – is wriggling within, in which the homophobic are victims of homophobia and white people get to tell people of colour what constitutes racism. It's enough to make your head spin.

Attack the -ism instead of the -ist, the girlfriend tells Chris. Not the individual but the concept. Smash the ideology. But it's hard when the words themselves are so unreliable, slipping and sliding against each other into contradiction. His only solace is to take everything she says at face value. Go fuck yourself, the girlfriend tells him. So he does. Literally.

It's important to know this about This Is How We Die: its thought, its politics, are fierce, incendiary, but it's also very funny in places, teasing as much as testing abuses of language. It's also, for a show so limited visually, just a man at a table speaking into a microphone, vivid to the point of lurid excess, as fascinating yet appalling in its colour as fresh vomit. The more disgusted Chris appears with language, the more he makes us hang on every word.

That was truer for me the second time I saw it than the first; in the road trip episode that comes next, I began to drift – to be honest, exactly as I would on a long car journey across flat plain lands, turning inwards, dreaming inconsequentially. Shaking that off in the second watch, I could appreciate its quiet reflection and troubled expression. Chris gazes out of the car window and thinks about America, and the arrogance of humans who think they know everything, about nature, and death, and what it is – oh god I love this line – to be “fucked up by static and watched over by satellites”. He knows he's repeating the moves, the poses, of a hundred indie movies, the barfly philosophy of almost every Beat or drugs book ever published, because culture, especially American culture, invades and absorbs us, and that's what teenagers do (I did, in the back seat of my auntie's car, driving through mountains in Greece, gazing up at a new angle on the stars, listening to the Swirlies and feeling nothing like my family, nothing like people at school). The lighting, positioned precisely so throughout, expands here into a long, thin sheet across the stage: it becomes widescreen cinematic, and so do the images conjured up by Chris' text.

This was also the point at which I began to marvel at how meticulous the piece is in construction and argument, and hear how words and lines repeat across the whole like musical refrains. The first episode begins with an excoriating delineation of masculinity; the “go fuck yourself” episode plays with notions of emasculation; the first line rages that “masculinity is measured in pussy”; on the road trip Chris muses on the triple meanings of the word pussy, its conflation with cowardice, and how impossible it is to square that with the bravery of vaginas. More than once, the couple raise their “fists at the sky or at God or maybe just the satellites”; on the road Chris is haunted by the reverberation of an A minor chord in the air; constantly he is drawn back to thinking about death and meaning and death and articulacy and death and fear and death.

Is it really about dying? I'm not sure. I think it's more about what it is to live without spirituality, on a planet so surrounded by satellites that it's no longer possible to trust our view of the stars, in which every mystery of the world can be crammed into a small metal box that fits in the palm of a hand, and we “cannot picture the future because we cannot imagine living through the present”. A sentiment that haunts me, from Kieran Hurley/AJ Taudevin's Chalk Farm (annoyingly, I can't quote the line accurately, because I haven't got the text to hand and, perhaps tellingly, no review I've encountered mentions it, despite it being, I think, the crux of the play): Why do we find it so much easier to imagine the end of the world, than more equal ways of living together? This Is How We Die is saturated in those visions of apocalypse. We are destroying each other with the stories we choose to create and share.

If I'm honest, though, I'm not sure how well I followed Chris' line of argument around climate change and environmental crisis. For instance, I can't quite tell if he's being sincere or sarcastic when he says (I think I got this down right): “I'm so glad there's no concrete proof that this planet is struggling to support the people alive on it.” It comes in between his descriptions of humans as an “arrogant hex of a species” who are “fixated on their own demise”, and before he suggests “maybe our species and our planet are in their infancy”. There's another echo here for me, of a brilliant children's book by Michael Foreman from 1972 called Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish, in which a single obnoxious businessman who represents the repugnant entirety of capitalist industry decides the planet he's covered with factories belching pollution is too ugly to bear, so he flies off in a rocket to search for a more beautiful place instead. Reaching a grey, rubbly star on which a single flower grows, he looks across space and sees a planet glowing sapphire and emerald in the distance: there, there is his paradise. Of course it's our Earth – but an Earth where dinosaurs have come back to life, broken up the roads, destroyed all the factories, and returned the land to verdancy. I think what Chris is saying is we have the potential to be that place of beauty again. But society has to change. Radically.

Again, even after a second watch there was something about the final episode that felt elusive. Chris transports us in a blink to a gladiatorial amphitheatre in which “we are humble, we are naked and unafraid”. X In this amphitheatre – and that “theatre” is part of what confuses me – the tongue is a blade in the mouth, a weapon, a whip, and again and again we – the we present in the arena, performing for a baying audience – “declare this language dead”. But if there is a death here, it is the ritualistic death of the phoenix, consumed by fire in order to live, brighter and better, again. Chris declares this language dead, and then – not alone, as part of a group, and that feels so crucial – he makes a new language. A language that rips through skin to pummel heart and gut, a language that bypasses meaning and goes straight for affect, a language that – like the language of Godspeed You Black Emperor – speaks plaintively, furiously, of everything that is fucked up in the world, but shimmers, always, with hope. A language made entirely of hope.

I keep describing This Is How We Die as episodic, but in the days and days it's taken me to write this I've realised it's more musical in structure than that makes it sound. Initially I thought it was symphonic, each episode or section a movement. But then I thought, no: it's like an album. Each episode is a song, and each song has its own mood and atmosphere and distinctive intensity, and the whole thing ends in extraordinary catharsis. And then I thought of albums like it, and I realised: Spiderland. Christopher Brett Bailey has made me theatre's Spiderland. And that, my friends, is how I die happy.

*

There's been some terrific writing inspired by This Is How We Die: by Megan Vaughan, who says of Bailey, “He’s the taste of cigarettes on a kiss”; by Catherine Love; and particularly by Andy Field, who does the inspired thing of sitting it side by side with Deborah Peason's The Future Show, to think about theatrical illusion, the visible script as accomplice, and the blissful release of nothingness. (I disagree with Andy on that final note: Debbie's release isn't blissful to me, and Chris' isn't into nothingness.) If This Is How We Die is Spiderland, The Future Show sits in the space between these two songs:

Which, because Deerhunter are genius at (well, everything, but in this particular instance) album sequencing, is the infinitesimal space between two tracks, which on vinyl is a silence full of texture, the barely audible static of natural electricity. A sentence that will mean nothing to an entire generation. (As an aside, one of these days I'll have to stop connecting everything I love to Deerhunter and actually write about why I love this fucking band so fucking much.) But it's also in the gap between two conjoined sentiments, the metal holding together two sides of a coin, between:

When you were young

you never knew which way you'd go

what was once grace, now undertows

and:

I don't want to get old

I don't want to get old

I don't want to get old, no

I first saw The Future Show in a diamantine 20-minute scratch showing in spring 2012; the next time I saw it, in summer 2013, it was more like an hour long, its basic premise, its single coruscating idea, unchanged but mined for everything it is worth. Debbie starts with her final breath in the performance, and the audience clapping; she describes leaving the space, chatting in the bar, going home, working the following day, the quiet rhythms of married life, maybe she gets a cat, maybe a parcel arrives when she's out, all those tiny inconsequential incidents that fill up time and make up a life, shaping her possible future with lapidarian skill, slowly, gently, inexorably as a tide, working her way to that final breath in the performance that, when it happens, is devastating. It is full of politics, yet what I remember of it, the residue of it that sits in my bones, is purely personal. It is so intimate that every word seems absolutely truthful, although a fiction, a projection, a fortune read from a palm. It is brave yet resigned, hopeful yet bleak; however we differ in our details, our endings are all the same. The best we can do? Measure each step, look straight ahead, and don't forget to breathe.

*

On the Friday night between my two run-ins with This Is How We Die I was at Ovalhouse again, for Greg Wohead's The Ted Bundy Project. A few months before its London run I had a lovely chat with Greg, who wanted to pick my brains about my different experiences of post-show gatherings, decompression spaces in which audiences could talk about and process difficult work. (In the end – at least, judging by the Ovalhouse run – Greg decided not to create such a space. Even so, I had another little moments of thinking, oh, maybe what I do isn't a total waste of time after all.) Sure enough, The Ted Bundy Project is hard to watch – how could a show about a serial killer not be? But nothing about it feels gratuitous, or anything less than painstakingly thoughtful. Unlike a really appalling quantity of culture, it isn't enthralled by violence, but nor does it condemn that fixation; it simply holds up a mirror and invites its audiences to see themselves. Whether or not you see that the reflection as ugly, distorted and brutalised is up to you.

It didn't occur to me, watching it, that people would find the structure of Greg's show, particularly his use of repetition, mystifying; it was a response I encountered at the Dialogue Theatre Club Jake Orr and I hosted directly afterwards. To me, every idea was expressed with subtlety but piercing clarity. This is what I saw:

A man, an all-American guy, medium build, winning smile, in a male equivalent of bridal white: pure, clean polo shirt and pristine tennis shorts. Doing a camp little dance to Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, the kind of dance that would endear him to the most conservative of mothers. A man who confesses to sitting in bed listening to the voice of a serial killer, over and over again; watching gory videos of murder, necrophilia, cannibalism online, and reaction videos made by people watching those same videos, a loop of hypnosis. We're intrigued, too, right? We're intrigued by all that material hidden there in the dark net, intrigued by the extremities of existence. Right?

A man, medium build, in pristine tennis whites, laying out the paraphernalia of Ted Bundy's first murder while Lou Reed drawls Walk on the Wild Side. I said hey honey, take a walk on the wild side. There's the sling Bundy wore to attract a woman's sympathy, the handcuffs he used to restrain her; a wig modelled on a victim's long brown hair, a handbag, some lipstick.

A man, winning smile, asking a member of the audience – also male – to join him on stage. He asks the second man to stand with a sheer stocking over his face, obscuring his features, his identity. This second man is standing in for Ted Bundy. Meanwhile, the first man, an all-American guy, in pristine tennis whites, puts on the wig, the handbag, the lipstick. And while Hall and Oates' Rich Girl plays, this young woman, a student, gazes at the face of the man who will turn out to be her murderer, her lower lip quivering with the beginning of sexual excitement. She is a rabbit in headlights, and she doesn't even know it. She is caught, and she doesn't know it. Because right now she is flattered, and attracted, and vaguely aware that she shouldn't be doing what she's doing. She's a rich girl, and she's gone too far, and watching her, Greg as her, with that song, so vindictive, my stomach clenched and I wanted to scream: no.

A man, medium build, in pristine tennis whites, standing with his head inside a sheer stocking, in the same place that his stand-in for Ted Bundy just stood. He repeats the opening section of the show. Whose voice is this now? Greg's? Or Bundy's?

A man, an all-American guy, winning smile, describing a murder fantasy he once indulged, of killing a teenage girl who filled him with jealousy, smashing her head until it turned into pulp.

A man, dancing to Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, the kind of dance that would endear him to the most conservative of mothers, while beside him on a plywood board is the opening scene of a video that can easily be located via Google, in which a man attacks another man with an icepick, before dismembering him, fucking the limbless torso, ripping out chunks of the corpse's flesh with his teeth, and inviting his dog to do the same. We know this because the man, this all-American guy with the winning smile, has described the video to us in detail. Even typing the words I can feel acid nausea sting in my throat.

And this is what I noticed:

Throughout, Greg is punctilious in naming Georgeann Hawkins, the murdered woman he chooses to represent all of Bundy's victims. In this, he distances himself from a voyeuristic tabloid culture that, for instance, no less consistently refers to Reeva Steenkamp as the girlfriend of Oscar Pistorius. And demonstrates an awareness of and sympathy with the Everyday Sexism campaign.

An awareness of and sympathy with 1970s feminist thought – contemporaneous with the deaths of a still unknown number of women at the hands of Ted Bundy – particularly (to quote my new favourite feminist, Sarah Ditum) Andrea Dworkin's “disturbing insights into the way patriarchy distorts the act of sex into an act of violence by which men assert their possession of women”.

The bravery of Greg's willingness to identify himself with Ted Bundy. In that business with the stocking, Greg admits that his own charming surface might not be so different from Bundy's, that he could be just like Bundy, because he lives within a social system – a patriarchal system – that is inherently misogynistic, in which “rape culture” is actually a thing, and in which popular culture does everything it can to support that system by fixating on the violent deaths of women in TV and cinema and literature, filling music videos with semi-naked women, using female objectification as a marketing tool, representing rape as a woman's fault, using topless women to sell newspapers, and on and on and on.

How visceral the fear of rape is in me. It dates back to school days, when I was given my first rape alarm in sex education lessons, and read Helen Zahavi's Dirty Weekend, a book in which a woman “conquers her fear and transforms herself from victim to avenger”: far from empowering me, it introduced me to realms of sexual violence I hadn't by that point imagined for myself, and that frighten me still. There is an extraordinary blog post by the playwright Katherine Mitchell delineating how this fear, inculcated in young women from the earliest possible age, can affect how they comport themselves for the rest of their lives, how an accumulation of experience of everyday sexism can affect their confidence and their sense of even having a voice. I felt almost dizzy when I read that blog post, from gratitude that someone had articulated this filthy secret buried deep inside me. A few weeks before seeing Greg's show, I went to Soho Theatre for Adrienne Truscott's Asking For It – subtitled “A one-lady rape about comedy starring her pussy and little else” – and had a similar experience. Truscott spends most of the show's running time wearing a tight-fitting dress split to reveal her pubic hair; she starts it downing cans of G&T; she does headstands and projects the faces of sexist men on her torso, allowing them to print themselves on her body. She is the very definition of asking for it. And while she does all this she mercilessly satirises men who espouse misogyny, picking at every loose thread of anti-abortion arguments and sexist politics and representations of rape in popular culture until it feels as though the whole world has unravelled. Her strip-tease is so mocking it made me cry with laughter; her run through common rape-prevention tips – pointing out how they're essentially designed to stop women ever feeling at ease as they have fun – is so contemptuous that it made me laugh with crying. Around this time, I came across the list of 10 things men can do to prevent rape (“9. Carry a rape whistle. If you find that you are about to rape someone, blow the whistle until someone comes to stop you.”), and that, too, was a balm to my soul.

In The Ted Bundy Project, Greg Wohead accepts responsibility for that fear, that violence, that everyday sexism.

The Ted Bundy Project “confront[s] its spectators or participants with something radically other, something that could not be assimilated by their existing understanding of the ethical. It … issue[s] a demand they [do] not know how to answer.” To skip a few pages back in Nicholas Ridout's Theatre & Ethics, it puts its audience “face to face with the other, in a recognition of our mutual vulnerability which encourages relationships based on openness, dialogue and a respect for difference”. I don't think for a moment Greg is asking his audience to respect Ted Bundy, or his actions. But he is asking that we empathise, with the man committing the violence, and the woman experiencing it. He is asking us to recognise, name and face up to this violence, so that, instead of allowing it to be perpetuated within a conspiracy of silence, we can work together – through openness and dialogue – to change the social systems in which it can flourish.

The queen of my world

This morning my head is full of this

and this

and this

Last night I fell asleep burning to write about Kathleen Hanna, but then my son woke me up at 1.44am and 6am needing help because he has a dicky tummy and was exploding with diarrhoea, and now I'm looking at the eight-project to-do list and wondering if I should bother.

This morning my best friend from teenage years, the girl who stood on stage with me in an upstairs room in Camden and read out poetry by Sylvia Plath while I clanged around with a guitar (we only did it once), sent me an email confessing that she feels ordinary, vanilla. “Having kids knocked the stuffing out of me,” she writes. The line rattles in my heart like a pebble.

Last night we saw The Punk Singer together. It reminded me of every time I've thought about starting a band and weaselled out. Of every time I've shut up and let someone else tell me what to do rather than standing my ground. Of wanting to start a magazine and looking for permission, which is slightly more than but also the same as looking for money, instead of just slapping one together with a stick of glue and a stapler. The constant nagging thought in my head: I'm not doing enough, I'm not loud enough, I'm not strong enough to remake the world.

But that's not what it's about.

There's a brilliant line in The Punk Singer, where Hanna talks about making the first Julie Ruin record, alone, in her bedroom, quietly rebuilding herself after the fallout of Bikini Kill. I won't paraphrase it; here's her making the same point in an interview in 2013:

I needed to get used to the sound of my own voice, and I think that’s what makes a girl’s bedroom special. You can make whatever you want when you’re alone in your room. The thing that’s interesting to me about the mention of it in the film and the way it was structured is that there are all these different girls' bedrooms and all these girls are making their stuff, and then they’re throwing it away, and how can we connect these bedrooms? We’ve seen today that we can connect these bedrooms through the Internet. That’s one of the positive things happening.

Around the time that interview was published, I threw away most of my teenage years and 20s: it was all just so much clutter. Not the fanzines, though. I kept those. 

(I talk a lot at the moment about wanting to connect the disparate conversations happening in theatre, about finding ways to share ideas, the responsibility I feel to join the dots. How writing might do that, a magazine might do that. The itch to make another fanzine is strong.)

Truth is, when my best friend and I went to see Bikini Kill, I guess when they toured in 1993, I was disappointed: they were a racket, and aggressive, and the whole thing was so confrontational I couldn't connect to it. The anger terrified me. And there was a lot about their construction of feminism I didn't understand. Why push boys to the back, instead of fighting for a space where girls and boys could stand-dance-sing side by side? I have a letter from another riot grrrl, older than me, explaining that one with gentle patience; I remember reading it and feeling like an idiot.

I'm berating myself again.

Watching The Punk Singer, I recognised the extent to which Kathleen Hanna raised the stick against which I have measured most of my life. Riot grrrl changed me. It gave me feminism, politics, a way of looking at the world. I knew I wanted to make stuff when it happened (writing, art, music, I didn't know, but something), and it told me to just get started. It told me to think hard about what I was saying. And something else it told me, which even now I keep needing to remind myself: if, by saying something truthful, something vulnerable, you can connect with one other person and make them feel less weird, less stupid, less alone, that is enough.

Like all feminists, I have moments of feeling unutterably depressed by apparently how little has changed for the positive in the 20 years since I encountered it. From the micro – girls are still pushed out of the front at gigs – to the macro, which is just about everything. When I started reading Susan Faludi's Backlash last year, a book I bought some 20 years ago, I was astonished: she's writing about the virulent media, cultural and political backlash against feminism in the 1980s, but all the newspaper articles she quotes, all the instances she gives of films and speeches and stupid attitudes, could have dated from any time since.

But the systems we struggle against are strong, and we can't give up, I can't give up. There's another brilliant line in The Punk Singer where Hanna talks about starting Le Tigre with Johanna Fateman, the two of them sharing all the shit they'd experienced, and deciding they wanted their new band to be celebratory, to focus on the stuff that made them happy. By the time I got home I had Diane di Prima shouting in my ears: ALL POWER TO JOY, WHICH WILL REMAKE THE WORLD. Anger is vital. But so is joy.

Having kids knocked the stuffing out of me, too. I still feel I have to ask for permission to work, not just from the family, from myself. Every day is a fight against spurious expectations, guilt, convention. If dismantling the patriarchy starts at home, I'm failing. I don't need anyone to tread me down: I do it to myself. As for the kids, every time one of them espouses conformist gender cliches, a bit of my soul breaks. But it's not just about me teaching (nagging) them to be different: it's about letting them find the culture that will give them the tools to make themselves different. If they find something even half as inspiring, challenging, electrifying as riot grrrl, I'll be happy.

This morning, over breakfast, I played them Le Tigre, and we talked about What's Yr Take on Cassavetes?, and my son said he's not a misobogutist because that would mean he hates me and his sister. So, you know, that's a start.