Books I Read in February 2024

A Life of One’s Own by Joanna Biggs is a blend of literary criticism and mini biographies of eight female authors and how they carved out creative freedoms for themselves, alongside Biggs’s personal reflections on her experience of going through a divorce in her 30s and losing her mother to early-onset Alzheimer’s disease a few years ago. In this book, she examines the lives and works of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante. Biggs demonstrated her skill at pen portraits in her 2015 book All Day Long about people at work and she is astute and concise in her analysis of how their hard-won independence is reflected in their work.

The chapter about Simone de Beauvoir in ‘A Life of One’s Own’ led me to At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell which has been on my shelves for a few years. Starting with the early influence of phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, the usual charismatic suspects in the form of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus are all here, along with lesser-known figures such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I mostly avoided existentialism when I studied French, but Bakewell’s enthusiasm for the subject and unfussy explanations of philosophical ideas combined with biographical details of the key figures in the influential movement makes this book very readable and much less daunting to tackle than the famous texts themselves.

Original Sins by Matt Rowland Hill is an extremely candid memoir about his evangelical Baptist upbringing in south Wales and substance abuse as an adult. Following a scholarship at a famous boarding school, Hill started to question his faith and first took heroin while studying at Oxford University as he tried to unravel the impact of having very religious parents. Hill is frank about his shortcomings and the selfish lengths he often went to in order to feed his addiction. The book follows some familiar arcs of addiction narratives – the awful event which culminates in a lengthy stay in a mental health unit followed by repeated attempts to get clean – but told with a wry eye for pathos and dark humour. The episodic and novelistic style allows for some particularly memorable set pieces including the opening chapter where Hill attends a friend’s funeral and his attempts to score drugs in Palestine. This is an excellent memoir and the unflinching depiction of addiction is one of the best I have come across.