Galley Beggar Advent 2023

DECEMBER 21

SUSANNA CROSSMAN’S CULTURAL HIGHLIGHTS

Much of my reading in 2023 has been research for my memoir Home is Where we Start, about my childhood in a utopian commune. Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin is a book I’ve returned to many times, a non-fiction exploration of trauma. From suicidal teenagers to Holocaust victims it achieves the rare balance of being unsentimental while also digging deeply and lyrically into what scars and damages, and how we live. It is, I would say, a decidedly beautiful, hopeful, and human book. My copy is now bedraggled, stained, and bent, stuffed full of post-it notes and marginalia.

To be honest, I do like culture to startle me, and this was also the case for the Marina Abramovic exhibition that I saw with another Marina (Benjamin) in October. It was an extraordinary journey through the artist’s work, from her early deeply disturbing performances through to gentler, healing pieces. I loved it because it was never quite what you expected, and I stood on a transitional perch object for twenty minutes absorbing what the artist calls “the shifting states ». On the home screen of my phone, I’ve kept ‘The Current’: a woman lies on the frame of a metal bed, her hair drifts in the wind, ice melts. As Abramovic writes ‘The Spirit in any condition does not burn’. It’s been a 2023 vibe.

Speaking of Marina Benjamin, I loved her book, A Little Give, the Unsung, Unseen, Undone Work of Women, a brilliant flight through the politics and experiences behind care and domestic work. It is currently in a stack in my office, with the excellent Women in Dark Times by Jacqueline Rose, Lily Dunn’s beautifully written Sins of my Father, the heart-wrenching The Last Days by Ali Millar, Hannah Arendt’s The Life of The Mind (which has changed the way I think), Teju Cole’s profound and moving collection of essays Black Paper, the oh-so-good Photo, Phyto, Proto, Nitro by Melissa McCarthy and The Good Story by Coetzee (a total must-read for anyone questioning how people and post-colonial societies choose or avoid telling their story/history).

In-between all this intense reading, novels have appeared – phew – am currently engrossed in the family saga The Most Fun We Ever Had by Clare Lombardo. Also read the haunting Heaven by Mieko Kawakami, Paul Auster’s 4, 3, 2, 1 - a feat of literary prowess and American social history. On my Kindle, when I’ve fancied some gentle reading I’ve much enjoyed the Japanese writer, Toshikazu Kawaguchi and Before The Coffee Gets Cold.

Secretly, I have a penchant for trash TV - any dramarama - and in 2023, my youngest daughter and I developed an obsession for Chinese romantic Netflix series with amazing Noh-theatre-esque sequences, delicious food, slow-burn love stories, rebellious daughters and furious mothers. I recommend: The Rational Life and My Sunshine.

Last but not least, the past few days, I’ve been watching videos of Shane MacGowan’s funeral and the band playing the wild and wonderful ‘Fairytale of New York’.  As the year draws to a close, also thinking of Sinead O’Connor and Benjamin Zephaniah, carrying their spirits into the next year to keep fighting the fight while ‘the bells are ringing out For Christmas day’.

SUSANNA CROSSMAN has recent work featured in Aeon, Paris Review and Berfrois. She is the author of the novel, L’île Sombre, La Croisée. Her memoir Home is Where We Start: Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream, will be published by Fig Tree, Penguin in August 2024. Her novel, The Orange Notebooks will be published by Bluemoose Books in Spring 2025. You can read more about Susanna here.