rosahesmondhalgh's reviews
8 reviews

The audiobook of this is a masterclass in audio performance but the rest didn’t grab me. 

Sorry to this man
I don’t care about you William Ainsworth! And I care only a tiny bit more for Mrs Touchet and Bogle. Zadie Smith is a writer I truly love. I’ve read On Beauty twice, her other books once and marvel at the way she can effortlessly switch between characters and locations and sometimes points in time, and I’m fully on board and addicted to the writing. I started off thinking the reason it wasn’t working with the Fraud was because I’m generally not super keen on historical/period fiction, but I just think this book is too full of stuff. The amount of historically accurate stuff Smith clearly found interesting and felt like she should get in totally overtakes the genuinely interesting stuff about Jamaica in the mid 1800s. The navel gazing literary stuff went over my head a bit. The comparisons that could be made about politics then vs politics now were simply meh. Usually when I read books based on true stories I am all deep in the google afterwards but I truly won’t care if I never hear the name Ainsworth again 

If you end up reading this - trigger warning for sexual assault, rape, abuse, domestic abuse, emotional abuse, coercive behaviour, drug abuse. Unsure where I am with this book. Written in 2011, but looking back at a six year full time porn career from 2001-2007, when the adult film industry was not internet centred. It's an honest and unflinching look at that time in porn, but as the author is a hardcore/gonzo porn actor, I couldn't help but be enormously triggered and disturbed by the treatment she received from men in both her personal life and the industry, most disturbingly her long term boyfriend. Which brings me on to my next issue - this books biggest content warning should be domestic abuse, as well as the many clear examples of sexual assault that happen. Whilst I definitely got the impression that the author had autonomy and a real love for her work and art, it is ultimately her awful boyfriend who forces her into so many situations, including her career in the first place. I felt so furious at nearly all the men in this book - and then unsure of how the author felt about them when a hasty epilogue assures us at how much fun she was having! I also found an interview of the author spouting some pretty horrific anti-Islamic sentiments, and once l'd watched that I found it pretty hard to return to her first person narrative.

I was SURE I was going to devour this book and it was going to leave me full and satisfied. A Japanese book about food/murder/patriarchy sounded so good! But whilst there are moments and themes and nuanced parts of this book that are definitely interesting, the execution was unsuccessful for me. I found it so slow and boring, and the writing left me cold so often (maybe a translation issue?). It was like how Rika felt about Makoto - everything was there to make something brilliant apart from all the things that were missing.

What set this book apart from other griefy memoirs was it was about losing a best friend, and the hinterland that is when seeking grief support. The writer’s best friend and ex boss dies by suicide exactly one month after he comes over to support her after her flat is burgled and all of her jewellery taken. I felt fairly skeptical about how the two traumatic life events were going to play out and be compared, but it really hooked me eventually. This isn’t a perfect book, and there’s this weird bit where it feels like the writer feels a type of way about a college graduate lodging a complaint against her ex boss is lalalaaaaa a sign of the times! Which felt odd. But some of the parts about her grief and how it felt were very poignant and accurate and other bits that made me laugh out loud in the street.