Three things that I made when not writing about theatre

This first one isn't really something I've made, at least not in the most literal interpretation of the words. It's a poem by Harry Giles, and he wrote it for me in return for me starting to give him money viaPatreon. I'd been meaning to do so since he emailed me about this “scary money experiment thing” in February 2015: I love him, despite having very little contact with him, and think he's all good things in the world, so of course I want to support him. And yet, it wasn't until January 2016 that I actually made that support financial. I still feel weird that there is now this financial element to our relationship.

At the time, Harry wrote an excellent post laying out his own arguments for and against asking for patronage, which I found really helpful. Like him, I worry that “it’s so clearly all a part of the neoliberalisation of arts funding: the expectation that artists have to become solo entrepreneurs” – and, the correlative of that, the expectation that art is something to be funded by its consumers, and not in common, as a basic provision of healthy civil society. More positively, like him, “I like making it clear that art is not something that just happens, is not something that other people decide to make happen, but rather something that we all have a stake in making happen, and in making happen in more radical ways.”

In an email, I admitted to him that the relationship between giving on Patreon and giving to registered charities confuses me. In a nutshell: “if I give £5 a month to Shelter and that's to help ALL the homeless people in the UK then to give £2 or even £1 a month to a single person so they can make art kind of doesn't add up; but then, I can spend twice as much on a single ticket to go to the theatre as I do on a monthly donation to Unicef which is supposed to be helping ALL the children living in poverty and plight around the world, and I could just as effectively give that ticket money to you in £2 per month donations”. In the event, that's pretty much what I decided to do.

The thing that makes me most uncomfortable with Patreon is exclusivity: the idea that, because I have some funds at my disposal, I can get stuff that other people don't get. That's how capitalism divides people and I want to resist it. But Harry's gift to all new patrons is to write them a poem, on a subject of their choosing. I decided that I was only happy for this to happen if it could be a poem that we made publicly accessible, and he agreed, in an email that also contained a gentle reminder that maybe the key problem of capitalism isn't commerce but exploitation. The word that was stuck in my head at the time was “longing” (it quite often is, to be honest), and this is what it inspired Harry to write. I like to think that his poem reflects the many conversations we've had together about class, and capitalism, and togetherness, and making; that, although it isn't something I've made, it has a specificity rooted in our relationship that means I have, in some way, made it happen – and not just by giving money.

THE LONGING FOR ONE THING INSIDE OF ANOTHER

by Harry Giles

There was a world where tokens were exchanged

for food, and when a token met your hand

a spur extended blandly into your palm

to take a sip of blood. This payment kept

the tokens bright enough to check your hair in,

cool enough to glide from purse to purse.

And in this world there were two friends who made

assemblages of wood and steel: stairways,

sunshades, simple things to see through, things

to pause on, things to touch. They worked apart,

and then from time to time they met to look

and say, "This works", and say, "This doesn't work."

One day one friend came with a gift, a question.

They bought some time discussing techniques, and then

they said, "I heard your purse was light. I saw

your building shed was empty and your tools

were sore for oil." And they held out their hand

with sixteen hungry tokens free to take.

Now, both these friends were just the kind of folk

to argue far too hard about the way

things are on other worlds, or could be, or were,

and how to cross between them without snapping

painful laws of space and time. At times,

they held that wood and steel could build a bridge

to where a body could eat without blood.

And so they laughed as they watched the sixteen tokens

pass from palm to palm and felt the prick

and wiped the reddish smears on the handkerchiefs

that all folk carry tucked in their back pocket,

the depth of the dye declaring the force of the flag.

*

This second one started as a whim but became an act of love. At Devoted and Disgruntled in January, a tall man with sandy hair wearing a checked shirt voiced a request for “someone with sewing skills to help a 6'5” drag queen”. I tweeted in response that I might be about to find my calling, and a couple of hours later I was fixing a date with Robert Beck, aka the Marvellous Miss Mimi Martini, to talk frock-making. Our first meeting was spent sharing images: Rob emailed me a few pictures that had given him some tentative notions (floatiness, a big split up the front for showing off shapely legs); we scanned google for drag queens and Adrian of Hollywood dresses, and flicked through my Schiaparelli paper-dolls book (pause to sigh with pleasure that such a thing exists in the world). By the end we had a few sketches, a vague idea to make a dress with a ribbon of chiffon around it like the pink line twisting through a stick of rock, and a plan to go fabric shopping.

Fabric shopping changed everything. To be honest, it was so exciting that after an hour I had a violent adrenaline crash. Luckily we'd already found Rob's dream fabrics: a hot-pink satin and a chiffon dyed fuchsia at one end and electric blue at the other. To show off that colour shift, we switched patterns to something more like a Greek gown (showing my roots, dears) with chiffon floating around the skirt and rippling over the bust before swooping off the shoulders. It took two fittings to get the pattern right, and a third for tweaks with the actual fabric; there are all sorts of things about it that I wish I'd done better, or differently, or more professionally, but at the same time I recognise that it's one of the most ambitious things I've ever made, and not too bad for it. Here it is on my dressmaker's doll: her figure isn't quite as buxom as Mimi's, but you get the general idea. 

 

I rarely sew for anyone other than myself, and doing so was just delightful. As in, I genuinely got teary when Mimi's frock started to come together: the magic of sewing never ceases to amaze me. I already have heaps of ideas for other things I'd like to make for her: things I'd never dream of wearing myself, but would love to construct, to bring into being. And I would so love to do this for more people. So if there are any other drag queens out there looking for someone with sewing skills...

*

This third one I made in the way I make most cakes or puddingy things: somewhat haphazardly, from scratch and imagination and vaguely retained memories of endless reading of recipes. It was for my lovely friends Andrew and Marta, who were coming to my house for dinner before flying off to Poland. I had bought tickets for the double bill at the Yard that night, and so prepared a meal then left my husband to serve it, thinking they were only going away for a couple of weeks on holiday. I found out on my return, at 11.30pm, with everyone heading for bed, that they were leaving at 8am and planned to stay in Poland for several months. Indefinitely even.

I've been feeling a lot lately that I have my priorities all skewed. Going to the theatre as much as I do means I'm almost never home to give my kids a bath, read to them at bedtime, tuck them in with a goodnight kiss. It means that I rarely have proper conversations with my friends, rarely even see them, because I put seeing theatre first. Sometimes that theatre is nourishing, joyful, inspiring; it makes me feel like I'm levitating, like my brain has expanded, that I want to write and write like it's the only thing that matters. Sometimes that theatre is Ophelias Zimmer: technically impressive but gruelling, draining, an act of intellectual violence. Either way, the strongest relationship I have at the moment isn't with a human being, it's with the collective human act of theatre. And I don't know if that's right.

The shows I was seeing at the Yard that night were by people I know and admire and enjoy chatting with; people I would love to call friends, were our encounters less transient, or insecure. It felt important to see their work, to support them in some way, knowing that for each of them it was a leap and a challenge to make this performance. But I feel sad that I sacrificed this other night of friendship for it. I feel sad that so many of the choices I make in life feel like the wrong choice. I'm writing this tonight, having been meaning to write it for three weeks now – I finished Mimi's dress on 7 May, and Harry sent me the poem on 10 May – because at 9.01pm this evening I made the decision not to watch Hannah Nicklin's Equations for aMoving Body at CPT but to come home and work. I've felt a twist of nausea ever since: guilt at not being there for Hannah, not supporting her. She is another person I admire and enjoy chatting with and would love to call a friend; this was my only chance to see the show; the audience was small; it would have been a kindness to stay. I've made the wrong call again, but in the other direction. Sometimes it feels as though the thing I make most productively in my life is worry.

Anyway: Andrew and Marta emailed me from Poland to ask for the recipe for that dessert, and as it came out quite well I thought I'd post it. Apologies to Nigel Slater if it turns out to be one of your recipes that I've unconsciously memorised and am now claiming as my own.

Pistachio and chocolate tart

Stupidly I didn't write down what I did at the time, but I'm pretty sure this was it: first I ground 150g shelled pistachios with 50g caster sugar in a blender, adding some dried orange peel towards the end (in season, I'd use peel grated from a fresh unwaxed orange I think). Pretty sure I picked up the blending nuts with sugar trick from Nigella: it helps to soak up the oil that comes out as they're ground. I then melted 40g butter in a saucepan, and stirred that together with the nut and sugar mixture, a sprinkle of cinnamon and another 50g caster sugar in a bowl until it was all nicely emulsified. I lined a 20cm flan or sandwich tin with greaseproof paper, smoothed over the nut mixture and pressed it down so the surface was flat and the mixture as tight as possible, then baked it for what I think was the equivalent of 15 minutes at about 150C or gas 2 (my oven use is never as simple as that, hence the uncertainty here. Basically: nuts burn easily, and that makes them bitter, so keep things quite gentle). The base has to cool after that for a bit.

Next step is the chocolate ganache topping, which is pretty simple: pour 300ml double cream into a heavy-bottomed saucepan and warm over a low heat until nearly boiling point, then stir in at least 150g dark chocolate (that's how much I used, but I wanted more – I reckon 250g would be good). I used 72% cocoa solids: you need that darkness to counter the cream. Once that's melted, take the pan off the heat and beat the mixture with a whisk for as long as you can be bothered – the more time you give it, the smoother the mixture will be. Pour that over the nut base, smooth the surface, then leave in the fridge until ready to serve – the chocolate mixture firms up in the cool temperature. We didn't have it with raspberries, but I bet a few on the side would be bloody delicious.

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.

each in their own way flailing

Note added 9 July 2021: following the discovery that, through all the years I was working with him, Chris Goode was consuming images of child abuse, I've returned to a self-evaluation process rethinking the work I did with him. That process began in 2018 and some of what it raised is detailed in this post from December that year, in which I acknowledge that I was complicit in some of the harms he caused, for instance by erasing the work of other women who worked with him, fuelling a cult of genius around him, and consistently asking people who criticised his work (particularly the sexually explicit work) to see it in softer ways. A second post is now in process in which I look in more detail at the ways in which Chris coerced and abused particularly young men who worked with him, using radical queer politics to conceal these harms and police reactions. I hope that any other writing about his work on this blog, including the post below, will be read with that information in mind.

i used to sew and bake and art and now it's all theatre bloody theatre

In the past fortnight I have:

attended six plays, one film, one art exhibition and three panel discussions;

written two album reviews, five posts for two different blogs, published a long post on another blog that I'd been working on for some weeks, and written/co-delivered a presentation at a panel discussion;

hosted two Theatre Clubs;

done a job interview while sitting in a stationary cupboard;

got the job (a writing gig for December, nice);

danced at two practices with the Actionettes;

(and spent time reading Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle and Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, both inspiring, in different ways);

(and finally encountered the brilliance of Borgen);

(and done the school runs, and organised childcare, and cooked dinners);

(I think I've just realised why I'm always so tired);

and I honestly think in all of that the thing I'm most proud of doing is making a really nice pomegranate cake on Sunday morning. A few weeks ago I had a glut of pomegranates and the usual recipe books (Claudia Roden, Sophie Grigson, Nigel'n'Nigella) weren't offering any inspiration, so I sent my magic friend Samantha a text asking for suggestions and she offered: a trifle made of lemon cake layered with cherries stewed in sherry, orange flower water and pomegranate molasses and Greek yoghurt mixed with more orange flower water, then drizzled with pomegranate molasses and pistachios; a pavlova with rosewater in the meringue and the cream and pomegranates on top; a sponge cake with them in the cream and on top; and Nigella's pomegranate cake. See why she's magic? I made a less complicated version of the trifle and very good it was too.

On Sunday I had another glut and this time turned to the Nigella recipe. And, as usual, decided to mess around with it. Instead of just putting the pomegranates/syrup on top at the end, I turned it into a caramelised upside-down pomegranate cake, which was just as well because on removing it from the oven I dropped it face-down on the oven door, and it would have been ruined if the topping hadn't been on the bottom. So this is my recipe, and not for the first time it's dedicated to Sam, with love and mutual heritage:

Upside-down pomegranate cake

4 eggs, separated

150g caster sugar

100g ground almonds

50g plain flour

1tsp baking powder

half tsp mixed spice

half tsp almond essence

for the topping:

75g brown sugar

20g butter

1 tblsp pomegranate molasses

seeds of 2 pomegranates

the oven was at roughly 170C for this, and I cook it in a round 19cm springform cake tin lined with baking parchment

Get the seeds out of the pomegranates first.

Put the sugar into a saucepan on the lowest possible heat to melt. While doing the beating/whisking/folding jobs that follow, keep an eye on the sugar so it doesn't burn, and when about a third of it is melted add the pomegranate molasses and butter. It needs stirring to stop it from sticking. Or turning into a lump.

Beat the egg yolks with the sugar until they're pale and thick, then fold in the almonds, flour, baking powder, mixed spice and almond essence – I ended up being fairly vigorous with it, because it gets pretty stiff. Whisk the egg whites until you can turn the bowl upside-down without them falling out, stir as much of them as is required into the rest of the mixture to loosen it, then fold in the rest.

Pour the caramel into the cake tin and swirl it around to cover the bottom of the tin. Tip all the pomegranate seeds on top, then spoon the cake mixture on top of that. Bake for about 45/50 minutes until a tester comes out clean. The caramel oozes into the cake mixture, the sponge is really light because it hasn't got any butter, the almond essence makes it taste a bit like macaroons and the mixed spice got me ready for Christmas.

In the republic of happiness and the radiance of the imagination, except on the days when it's all just a tragic (sloppy usage) waste of time

I've been writing this for most of this year already, which is a ridiculous state of affairs. I've tried to abandon it but it keeps needling away at me, like the children when they want things. What does this post, this blog, want from me? At the moment, I think, it just wants me to remember that writing about theatre isn't a WHOLLY POINTLESS WASTE of fucking time and thought and passion and energy and TIME. I had quite the slump of faith following this year's Devoted and Disgruntled, irritated by the smallness of most people's concerns (mine included), disappointed by the lack of care across theatre, depressed by the wide-spread belief that Lyn Gardner single-handedly keeps the industry alive (I don't dispute that, but I'd like to raise the profile of the generation in her slipstream), flabbergasted that so many people are in thrall to the West End model of existence, despite the fact that it works in the West End for particular reasons that make it unsuitable elsewhere... 

Somewhere in the midst of that petulant sulk, I became haunted by this: 

It was David Peschek who persuaded me to give Father John Misty a listen (I approach Bella Union with caution), and for six months Fear Fun's lilting twists on country music cheered me whenever I put it on. But then Dorian Lynskey tweeted that “Now I'm Learning To Love the War contains one of the best arguments for creating art I've heard” (I paraphrase), and I realised that I'd hardly listened to the lyrics because I'd been too intoxicated by Tillman's voice. He doesn't sing so much as let sound waft from his body, the way fumes rise from a perfectly aged single malt. Now I've started paying attention, Fear Fun feels a lot more complicated, abrasive and brain-joltingly smart. Particularly the ethical argument underpinning Now I'm Learning To Love the War, directly linking the politics of oil to art/everyday existence X.

There is a fragility to Tillman's expression of internal conflict and attempt at consolation in this song that I find terribly moving. But what makes it so specifically acute is his recognition of the egoism involved in any act of creation:

Let's just call this what it is

The gentler side of mankind's death wish

When it's my time to go

Gonna leave behind things that won't decompose

I'll just call this what it is

My vanity gone wild with my crisis

One day this all will repeat

I sure hope they make something useful out of me

The desire to do something meaningful; the frustration of knowing that it's not so much one's own actions but their reception that counts; the desolation of insignificance; the abysmal conceit: all expressed in two succinct choruses. No wonder the song wouldn't leave me be.

That's where I was when I abandoned this again, to go to Bristol for In Between Time, four intoxicating days of impeccably curated performance and art and theatre and live art where I was the writer-in-residence who hardly wrote a thing, and when I did it was in the old mould, the broadsheet review (albeit longer). So that was another gloom of failure in which this didn't get written. A week later I snuck off to the cinema to see Django Unchained and OH THE RAPTURE of Quentin Tarantino, idiosyncratic and scurrilous; of fearlessness in storytelling, myth-stealing, narrative pace, characterisation, political attack: the kind of devil-may-care brashness that says yes, in this story of America in 1858 I will give my lead character a brushed suede jacket and round sunglasses that make him look like a character from Superfly, and yes, in this soundtrack homage to 1960s spaghetti westerns I will inject blasts of rap. Unfortunately, I've just wasted about 30 minutes failing to track down various tweets I vaguely recall reading, along the lines of: I wish more theatre were like this. Which made me think: theatre IS like this – maybe you're just watching the wrong theatre. Or watching it in the wrong way. I watched Django Unchained in a huge room in Brixton Ritzy with maybe 30 other people; in the theatre, that sort of low attendance would trouble me, but here I didn't care. There is such self-consciousness, such insecurity, such a need for validation in theatre; I'm as guilty of it as anyone else. Let's not waste time justifying ourselves: let's use it to be courageous, fierce, and brilliant.

None of which is what I set out to say here. This started life as a post about Martin Crimp and Polly Stenham and the London international mime festival, by way of Nick Cave, Patti Smith and chocolate cake. Now it's spiralled out of control, tugging me into its vortex. Why don't I just bin it? Why do I bother? My cynical side says I'm just suffocatingly beholden to the people who have given me free tickets for stuff. X Last night on the tube, after watching Laura Mugridge's Watery Journey of Nereus Pike, a joyful piece of romantic storytelling and child-like playing in which the audience get to participate in the most delightful of ways – for happy instance, using glowsticks to create the effect of bioluminscent fish in the depths of the ocean, to a pounding soundtrack that made me wish I'd not been scared to go to raves as a teenager – I finished reading John Berger's And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos, and had a little moment with this passage about poetry:

Poetry's impulse to use metaphor, to discover resemblance, is not to make comparisons (all comparisons are hierarchical) or to diminish the particularity of any event; it is to discover those correspondences of which the sum total would be proof of the indivisible totality of existence.

I'm no poet, but I recognise that impulse as my own. So hey ho, let's go:

In the republic...

Just as I'd decided not to bother writing about In the Republic of Happiness, I belatedly caught up with Dan Rebellato's astute account of it, and recalled that no one seems to have seen it in quite the way I did. So I came back to this, only to read, three days later, Catherine Love's meticulous review, which is not only formidably good but says almost everything I'd intended to say, only better. Since then, I've just been dithering. Still, mustn't succumb to wounded pride. Plus, there are at least three minute details in which I differ from Catherine. And I've done a lot of complaining on Deliq about the Royal Court: the least I can do in return for the tickets they give me is write about the shows I love.

And I did love the Crimp, passionately – the more so because I felt awful going in. The crowd in the bar and the auditorium seemed gallingly well-bred and I just didn't fit. I listened to Nick Cave's No More Shall We Part when the new one came out and was reminded by the line in Darker With the Day – “The streets groan with little Caesars, Napoleons and cunts” – of David P's work-of-genius Mojo review of the album: “There speaks a man who lives in west London.” THAT'S how it felt in the Royal Court: everyone around me privileged and proud. And then Martin Crimp took a skewer to them. Repeatedly.

So yes, this is a reductive reading, but I see the three republics of the title as family, celebrity and online. See is the key word there, not reading: the interpretation is primarily a response to Miriam Buether's set designs (which Andrew Haydon has dismissed as not her best, so that's another confidence-booster).

I saw Republic a few days after The Architects, and because thoughts on one show inevitably infect another, Family felt like another articulation of the argument I saw in Shunt's piece, interrogating what we think we're worth, what we think we deserve. There are two daughters in this family, both teenagers; Debbie is pregnant, and – to the fury of her sister Hazel – the parents have bought her a car and diamond earrings for Christmas. Does she need them? But of course: a pregnant woman needs to be reassured of her own value – and surely can't be expected to use public transport. (We're not told where they live, but the implication is that it's not a lack of buses that's the problem, but Debbie's inflated self-importance.) You'd assume from the gifts that the family is wealthy, but Crimp implies that they're struggling financially: Dad rations their use of electric bulbs, not because he's concerned about climate change, but to save money: “electricity's got so expensive”. This is partly why the grandmother's confession to a love of taxis (or, in another bit of David P brilliance, “slipping into something more comfortable”) has such a frisson about it: she keeps it a secret because the family can't afford it.

Remember the Squeezed Middle? This is them: not rich enough to feel comfortable, not poor enough to merit sympathy, grasping at luxuries they cannot afford. Priorities skewed, the parents are raising their daughters to be spoiled, demanding and self-regarding, care-less women for whom the height of ambition is to marry for money: “I'll make him pay for my meals/ I'll strut and fuck him in heels.” When Mum's errant brother Bob and his wife Madeleine materialise and begin puncturing the family's vanity and complacency, it's exhilarating – because every word feels like an assault on the audience, too, on their own nothing-is-too-good-for-my-children attitudes that keep inequality unchecked. No wonder the claret walls of the set cave in.

We shift to what looks like a bland grey TV studio, the highway to 21st-century celebrity. The particularity of this celebrity is two-fold: it's more intimately connected with the promise of money and luxury than the light-entertainment competitions of the past (or is that simplistically nostalgic?); it's also, with the dominance of trash media and its predatory impetus, more intimately connected with self-exposure. (I talk about this like I'm not part of the problem: recently I interviewed Rebecca Lenkiewicz knowing full well that the work itself – an adaptation of The Turn of the Screw which I didn't even make time to see – was a flimsy excuse to probe into a life that fascinates me. Fans of Crimp won't be surprised to hear that when I interviewed him for the National revival of Attempts, he was not only resistant to any questions about his family life but perplexed that I should even ask.)

Celebrity confession now happens in a context of increased awareness of pop psychology, a lucrative self-help industry, and the dominance of me journalism, in blogs and broadsheet media alike. This is the landscape of Crimp's second republic, and he dissects it with microscopic precision. Again, what makes this section so piercing is that every word feels as though it's addressed at you, yes you, sitting in the auditorium demanding space for your voice to be heard in the cacophony of the world. You with your mitherings about what-life-is and how-it-should-be, you convinced that you're different –

I am the one – yes – writing the script.

… Nobody looks like me. Nobody speaks the way I do now. Nobody can imitate this way of speaking.

No way.

No way can anyone speak like I do. I make myself what I am: I'm free – okay? – to invent myself as I go along.

… I've got my own voice: I don't repeat what other people say.

– and that what you say is worth hearing. As Sylvia Plath noted on twitter (ha!) while I was writing this: We all like to think we are important enough to need psychiatrists.

On the page, the final part opens with a quotation from Dante's Paradiso: “Thou are not upon earth, as thou believest” (thanks, google translate). For a lot of people, that encouraged an interpretation of the three republics as hell/purgatory/heaven; for me, it confirmed what I thought when watching it: that Miriam Buether situates Bob and Madeleine inside a computer. The backdrop – nine panes of glass opening out to a flat vague wash of green and blue – looks like a pun on Windows Vista. The gleaming white of the room is like the pearlescent white of an Apple laptop. The fetishism of thinness that you get in new-technology adverts: it's there in Madeleine's language when she describes the world she and Bob will inhabit as “Hard. Clear. Sharp. Clean” and “thin … as a pane of glass”.

Online, we transcend earth, and in doing so enter a realm where all the mess of human existence can be avoided if we wish. Mulling over the Crimp took me back to a TED talk by Sherry Turkle, in which she mourns the effect of social media on our ability to communicate with each other, to engage with argument or criticism, to respond to deep feeling. Or, as Bob sings in the 100% Happy song:

It's a new kind of world

and it doesn't come cheap

and you'll only survive

if you don't go deep

It made me think about the way I/we use twitter, the way I/we use blogs, our disorienting oscillations between snippish little aphorisms and monolithic monologues; the way both allow us to impose ourselves on people we've never met, even as we fail to talk meaningfully to friends we've known for years. A few days after I saw Republic the Suzanne Moore storm raged through social and traditional media and it felt like the new world in action: on the plus side, I learned that there is a generation of feminist thinking I want to catch up on, in which I'm cisgendered and there's a word (intersectionality) for that awareness you try to keep as a white western university-educated working middle-class heterosexual feminist, that individuals are oppressed in multiple ways – but for a couple of days I felt terrified by all the anger and emotion and verbal abuse and all but withdrew. It's the attraction to leadership in that world that Crimp interrogates, the inanity in the spaces between the intellectual arguments that he satirises. Click on my smiling face and you can install a version of this song/ that has no words at all.

I talked about that Sherry Turkle thesis with a friend after seeing David Parkin's Good Friday at BAC: she contested it, and told me about another TED talk, on choice and its concomitant regrets. In turn I told her about the quiver in the heart I felt reading this in Berger's And Our Faces:

… death was [once] thought of as the companion of life, as the precondition for that which came into Being from Non-being; one was not possible without the other. As a result, death was qualified by that which it could not destroy or by that which would return.

That life is brief was continually lamented. Time was death's agent and one of life's constituents. But the timeless – that which death could not destroy – was another. All cyclic views of time held these two constituents together: the wheel turning and the ground on which it turned.

The mainstream of modern thought has removed time from this unity and transformed it into a single, all-powerful and active force. In so doing it has transferred the spectral character of death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all. …

Man now becomes condemned to time, which is no longer a condition of life and therefore something sacred, but the inhuman principle which spares nothing. Time becomes both a sentence and a punishment.

And yes, she and I are all about the big life crises, so we talk about this stuff anyway – but Parkin's show shifts the context, by saying one possible subtext out loud. Parkin barely discusses the roots of the depression that led him to attempt suicide in a lay-by in Croydon in 2009: little more specific than a brief reference to a broken heart. It's a smart move: without the imposition of personal biography, his experience communicates more widely. You think that sounds bland (and calculating), but in a moment of transition within the show, from the viscous murk of self-hatred to the tentative brightness of recovery, Parkin asks a question of the audience: who has, or knows someone, with depression? Almost all hands go up. I felt the same choke in my throat seeing them raised that I feel on train journeys through the outskirts of London, gazing through mud-splattered windows at the dense network of suburban streets, house after house after house: so many people, so many stories, not waving but drowning. Parkin doesn't tell us if what we drown in is affluenza or the inevitable by-product of capitalism or the anguish of souls wrenched from communion with the earth: he just clears the path to a place where we can think these things through ourselves.

Rather than causes, Good Friday is concerned with one individual effect. Essentially, it's a gig, in which Parkin performs beginning to end the concept album he wrote while teaching himself to play piano in the aftermath of the suicide attempt. It's is a funny little show, because for all its craft – the exquisite undertow of cello, the rhythmic tick of an antique clock, the allure of velvety shadows – it feels artless. It wasn't until Parkin contacted me on twitter that I realised he had experience as a theatre-maker (15 years with metro-boulot-dodo): he comes across like an earnest big kid, doing his best for his parents – although perhaps that's partly because his parents were watching the same night as me.

That gawkiness infuses his songwriting, too, which is why if Good Friday actually were an album, I don't think I'd like it much. Running through the decades, the mood it conveys has generally found me here:

here:

here:

and, dear god hold me and don't let go, here:

Although it did occur to me watching John Grant play Pale Green Ghosts live last night that he and Parkin share songwriting DNA (autobiography, lacerating honesty, colloquial turns of phrase), a connection most apparent in this song:

It wasn't the music but the performance of Good Friday that absorbed me: its careful expression of emotion, its solicitude towards the audience, its understated bravery. And one line in particular will stay with me, the way a paraphrased reflection of Jenny Diski's has stayed with me, that people who commit suicide are paradoxically consumed by hope, the hope that everything will be better on the other side of death. Parkin's was the sober observation that we all go out and do battle with the world – but people who are depressed come home and do battle with themselves.

...of happiness...

When I was a kid I thought I'd never grow out of going on the swings. See-saws, merry-go-rounds, even slides I could give or take, but not the swings. The discovery a few years ago that I'd grown out of them to such a degree that going on them gave me motion sickness was a melancholy one. And then the kids were born and pretty soon it seemed wrong to go on the swings, or roll down a grassy hill, or do any childish thing. Somehow, I let myself stop playing.

And then last autumn, in a moment of topsy-turvy, transcendental happiness, I reclaimed the playground. I would deliberately get to school too early so I could clamber with my son on the climbing frame and listen to him laugh as I swung with my feet stretched high and my head tipped low. Giddy times.

That was the rapture I felt watching Ockham's Razor's Not Until We Are Lost in the London international mime festival. The five performers scamper across the scaffolding set like an Enid Blyton gang, scrabbling up hills and swinging in caverns. The show is full of dares and double-dares: when one of them is unhappy, two others rally round, tipping her, swinging her, nudging her off balance, until her smile is no longer begrudging but wide and real. There's romance, too, particularly when the performance moves to a tall perspex box in which a man is trapped, and an impish, playful woman climbs up to lead him out. And so much beauty: in the opening scene, with a woman in the perspex box alone, surrounded by tissue paper, pulling it down around her like a bridal veil; in the use of a choir, a large group of local singers who emerge from the audience as though we too could fill our lungs and join in; and, throughout, the elegant glimmering sound of a harp.

It wasn't until I read the company's notes in the programme that I appreciated what a big thing it was for them that this show was promenade: I enjoyed the proximity to the performers, seeing the curl of their feet around scaffolding poles, the stretch of their muscles as they swung – but proximity is a habitual thing for me. It was a useful reminder of the importance of seeing things on the makers' terms, not only your own: a central tenet of the Dialogue project, and something I failed to honour in writing about our September residency at BAC, as pointed out by Caroline Williams (writer, director and illustrator of Puffball) when she emailed to say that I'd misapprehended a crucial aspect of her work. In the same 24-hour period as receiving that email I made this year's marmalade, which took several hours, required ignoring my son for most of a day and left one of the pans burned. It's now so solid you can't spread it. A day of flailing, in which once again it seemed necessary to reassess every single choice I make in my haphazard life. What made everything better that time was cake: specifically, making a decent chocolate porridge cake. The idea came from my son: he loves chocolate, he loves porridge, so in his imagination this is manna. For Ben:

Chocolate porridge cake

150g butter

50g dark chocolate

100g milk chocolate

3 eggs

150g light muscovado sugar

75g fine ground oatmeal

50g plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

1-2 tsp vanilla extract

Melt the butter and two chocolates; meanwhile beat the egg yolks with the sugar, then stir through the melted stuff. Add the rest of the ingredients – not the egg whites – and beat it all together. Then whisk the three egg whites until stiff and fold them through. Bake it in a square 20cm tin, lined, for about an hour at 180/gas 4. It comes out like a chocolate-flavoured parkin, chewy and slightly nutty.

I spend most of my life convinced I'm making the wrong decisions X. One of my favourite shows at In Between Time – that's a stupid construction, nearly everything I saw there was a favourite show – was Sylvia Rimat's If You Decide To Stay, because it recognised and took blessedly seriously this constant sense of dilemma. What intrigues Sylvia isn't just the why of choosing but the how: she talks to a neuroscientist about what happens in the brain during decision-making, a mathematician about probability, a therapist about the tangle of childhood experiences that might have influenced her path through life. There are moments of awe at the fathomless power of luck in people's lives (Sylvia wouldn't exist if her grandparents, as intended, had boarded a cruise ship that later sank); and moments of playfulness, when she attempts to disrupt the audience's own decision-making, or influence it through the power of suggestion. Watching it, I felt very moved by its attempt to see choice as cause for celebration rather than self-reproach and regret; later I appreciated something else, a subtle contribution to feminist argument in a note from the neuroscientist. Emotion and cognition, he said, are intimately entwined, so it doesn't make sense to talk about them in separate terms. We imagine that decisions are made in the cognitive part of the brain, but emotion is involved, too – and mood is integral to our ability to make good decisions. What interests me about this is the case it makes for instinct, emotional response, as a valid basis for decision-making: so often denigrated compared with the cool, rational reasoning prioritised in a patriarchal culture.

...and the radiance of the imagination

Since having kids, I've been consumed by the anxiety of choice: whatever I'm doing, I'm sure I should be doing something else. I want to give them everything money can't buy: stories and escapades and the wild beauty of autumn and spring. Instead I spend most of our time yelling at them to stop fighting, use a fork, get a tissue, go to the toilet, a tedium so unrelenting, demoralising and exhausting I haven't the energy for the fun stuff. This is partly what drew me into Polly Stenham's No Quarter: in the relationship between Robin and his mother Lily, Stenham depicts a different kind of motherhood, a romantic version in which childhood is an adventure. The argument that the mother's eccentricity damages the child, makes him incapable of functioning within society, is strong. And I understand why people would find Robin unbearable: “a pretentious, pompous, self-regarding, colossal prick”, to quote Dan Rebellato. Possibly I'd think Robin were all those things too, except that he was played by Tom Sturridge, and I'm not sure I could find anyone played by Tom Sturridge unbearable.

Truthfully, I've found it difficult to remember what I liked so much about No Quarter since reading Dan's review: he objects to it with irrefutable authority. I remember thinking that Stenham's writing was like a fireworks display: a plain black expanse disrupted, with variable frequency, by lines that glittered and sparked. I remember thinking that much of the political argument between Robin and his older brother Oliver felt schematic, but that the secrecy surrounding their mother's suicide, the assumptions cherished by each sibling, the complicated ethics, the impossible question of whether lies within a family protect or corrode, was more involving. That said, I remember being struck by one accusation Robin hurls at his brother: “It's a twisting irony that after so many years of people trying to ferret their way up the socio-economic scale, you would like nothing more than to slither all the way down it.” Around the same time as I saw No Quarter, Alex Andreou began an extraordinary conversation on twitter about poverty, and I felt ridiculous taking part in it because I was mostly protected from my parents' experience of poverty, and because even to talk about it makes me sound as though I'm engaging in that slithering Robin speaks of so scornfully. But just as the psychotherapist Sylvia Rimat interviewed argued that everything in Sylvia's life today can be traced back to a childhood experience, I'm sure my life has been shaped by my family's hand-to-mouth existence in a flat in Hackney with an electricity meter my parents occasionally couldn't feed, from which we were evicted when I was about nine; the brief period in which we were homeless and refused to stay in a Bayswater hotel, instead filling the crevices of my granny's flat; and the two years spent in short-term council accommodation. It made my already ambitious mother bloody-minded in her pursuit of middle-class security – and has given me a deference for that security that I can't control.

But there was something else I sympathised with in No Quarter, which I might have read differently or as negatively as Dan Reb were it not for the coincidence of finishing Patti Smith's Just Kids that week. I'd been working up to Just Kids for a while, wary of being disappointed out of my adulation of Patti Smith, reluctant because I have a reflex antipathy to the entire genre of autobiography – yes, I do wince at the irony. A fair bit of Just Kids confirmed that prejudice: much as I love Patti, I'm not that interested in her cheese-sandwich dinners, no matter how shrewdly she punctures the romantic-poetic image of poverty; similarly, there's a part of me that reads her encounters with this or that famous person as little more than name-dropping. But mostly it was everything I'd want a book by Patti Smith to be: electric with strength of character, inspiring in its politics, a manifesto for the life to which I aspire. The brief description of her relationship with Sam Shepard alone made it worth reading:

“I can't do this,” I said. “I don't know what to say.”

“Say anything,” he said. “You can't make a mistake when you improvise.”

“What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?”

“You can't,” he said. “It's like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another.”

That, and a tiny phrase at the very beginning, where she describes her burgeoning appreciation of language, in the form of prayer, as: “my entrance into the radiance of the imagination”. Looking at the whole of that passage again in Just Kids, I realise how close it is to a note by Berger on language and poetry in And Our Faces: “One can say anything to language. This is why it is a listener, closer to us than any silence or god. Yet its very openness can signify indifference. (The indifference of language is continually solicited and employed in bulletins, legal records, communiques, files.) Poetry addresses language in such a way as to close this indifference and incite a caring.”

Where Just Kids connects with No Quarter is in Patti's cogent argument for rejecting the conventional mores of society while embracing the social responsibility that makes art worthwhile. She waited until she was 28 to sign her record deal (offers before that “came, I felt, too easy”), because she wanted the music she made to be reverent and relevant. When the time eventually came to record Horses, she walked into the vocal booth thinking intently of:

The gratitude I had for rock and roll as it pulled me through a difficult adolescence. The joy I experienced when I danced. The moral power I gleaned in taking responsibility for one's actions.

Of her band, she says:

We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone.

Stenham's Robin is a musician, too, a pianist, but in rejecting conventional society he also rejects human responsibility. Oliver is a politician with an overweening appreciation of his own social engagement. Stenham – and I bet Dan Reb would scorn this – attempts to steer the middle path with No Quarter: celebrating the value of words, or art, for themselves while using them to articulate our shared responsibility for the planet and the future. Even if she didn't pull it off, that's what made me like it.

So this is now 5500 words long: anyone who has made it this far, I don't know whether to kiss you or pity you. This postscript is for David Peschek, who called me today and read me the introduction to a biography of Elizabeth Smart by Rosemary Sullivan, with emphasis on the lines, “she knew how the role assigned the mother emptied the writer's ego”, and: “she had a rage of will: she bashed on regardless”. That, too, is why I'm still here.