Dear reader,
Here’s a piece of fiction in part inspired by a conversation I had on how much people change, over the years, and if true change is even possible.
L makes her days go by in a haze of indecision. All the doors open for her, but she chooses none, forever flitting past them and moving restlessly through the hallway, lantern in hand, her spirit guided by oscillation.
A keeps secrets - buries them inside of his body, swallowing them whole, letting their bones gut his insides, making him bleed. He keeps quiet, obfuscating his feelings and disguising his intentions. A thousand fierce interrogators threatening to unleash the worst cannot get him to reveal the inner workings of his mind, or the true texture of his emotions. He keeps everything hidden.
V soaks in everything around her; a sponge. She is a collection of everything she sees, a collage of the places she visits, a puzzle still being pieced together. The things people say haunt her, and their opinions form hers. Is she impressionable and naïve, or merely deeply sensitive? Is she herself, or all of us?
D will not apologise. He refuses to make amends even when he accepts that the blame lies with him. He refuses to, even when you wedge a knife into his thigh, his stomach, his chest. You drive it into his heart. The blade goes in and out, drawing blood but no apologies.
Q asks the universe for signs; so someone can take those decisions for him; so someone can guide his hand and his feet; so he doesn’t falter yet again.
T texts with stringent punctuation marks: intended to remind you of your place in their life; designed to let fear and worry flood your mind as you read, and re-read their words, stopping at least twice to wonder where the emphasis lies, and what the subtext is. You wonder if you’d be able to better grasp their meaning were it not a text, but something tells you the answer is a no.
R is radioactive; the one who everyone shuts the door on, and her phone lies blank, twiddles its thumb as it waits for replies to texts sent. But she’s radioactive. Even a text to her could infect the sender. So nothing darkens her doorstep, or lights up her phone, and her powers of destruction grow stronger, fed by her loneliness.
C can’t seem to ever figure out the right thing to say. Will you forgive him?
M and N are sisters by birth. But whilst one inhabits the world of optimism, waking up each morning manifesting a beautiful day, the other simply expects the worst of everyone. How long can you expect people to hurt you, before they actually do? And how long can you hope for people to love you, before they actually do? So the sisters wander through rooms, in search of a seat at the table, and one walks away disappointed and the other satisfied.
K lies at every step, at every fork in the road. Even when he doesn’t need to, the lie spills out of his mouth, unforced, and effortless. It’s a second skin that drapes his being, an icing made of sparkling sugar, enticing and gorgeous. He’s loved by everyone, even once they see through the lies.
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING:
It’s been a slow start to the reading journey this year, and while I usually tend to get serious reading done whilst travelling, 2024 has proved to be quiet the opposite. Here are a few highlights:
Piglet by Lottie Hazell
In Piglet, we meet the protagonist Piglet, two weeks before her wedding, when a confession from him interrupts their idyllic life together. Her journey, and the book is as much about this betrayal as it is about the choices she’s made, and the ones she’s yet to. The descriptions of food in the book left me ravenous and it’s impossible to understand how a book can straddle comfort & tension, be both soothing and nauseating.
Piglet is Hazell’s debut novel, but not for a moment does it read like that. Her deft touch makes this book riveting and leaves you tense and anxious throughout. It's a glorious examination of hunger - both for food and for acceptance, exposing what it means to be a woman today. So I raced through the book in a day, barely aware of my surroundings or the conversations people were desperately trying to have with me.
We attach so much importance to the way our bodies look, and to the way our lives look, wanting one to appear small and the other larger than large. And books like this are the need of the hour to force us to take a step back and look at what we're doing to ourselves and to each other. Piglet makes me want to be a better, a more honest, person.
Favourite quotes from the book:
“There were some things that you could not tell your friends. She knew that truths, once spoken, had the power to strip her of the life she had so carefully built, so smugly shared.”
“What could she say? What sentence would pierce him while leaving her intact? She had built her life so carefully around him. To say something, to do something, to feel something, would be to self-destruct.”
“She was proud, in a way, that she could still smile as the delicious life she had been savouring turned maggoty in her mouth.”
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
I’m very late to the Yellowface party, I know! I determinedly stayed away from it for it seemed to have wowed the entire literary world, and a few writers I follow on social media posted about eventually being disappointed by the book, given the hype around it. Ultimately, I read it earlier this year. And Yellowface is a tricky book to review or rate.
It’s stunning in parts - poetic, thought-provoking, deeply insightful. A true study of human character. And in other parts, the book seems to fall apart - too intent on making a point rather than following the story to its natural conclusion. The ending is unexpected and a bit of a letdown, but I can forgive that, for the questions this book asks, are necessary.
This is yet another book that superbly illustrates our dependence on social media and the way it’s ruining our lives - something I don’t think we talk about or acknowledge enough in our daily lives.
Favourite quotes from the book:
“Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic.”
“I wonder if that’s the final, obscure part of how publishing works: if the books that become big do so because at some point everyone decided, for no good reason at all, that this would be the title of the moment.”
“The truth is fluid, there is always another way to spin the story.”
“Who has the right to write about suffering?”
The Veronica Speedwell series by Deanna Raybourn
There are 8 books in the series at present, with the 9th releasing this month, and I am a woman obsessed. These books are feminist and fun, and they make me sigh with happiness.
Veronica Speedwell is a lepidopterist in London in the 1800s who solves mysteries. Need I say more?
If you enjoyed this newsletter, you can support me by forwarding it to your friends and family or sharing it on your social media. Leave a comment here on Substack or write back to me, I’d love to hear from you! 💛
Love,
Sukriti
Such evocative imagery in this peice