8. Memoir, McNally, and The Motherload

It's all about noirish, moreish New York memoir right now

When I met the co-founder of this place, Chris Best, the other day (twice, actually, but nobody likes a braggart) I begged him to change up the categories.

I don’t think what I do, for starters, sits very naturally in “Culture” and as for “Literature” – hah! I have never once called myself a writer. I wouldn’t dare.

When I told Hanif Kureishi, who is a writer, and a friend, that Peter Straus was (then) my agent he said, “He can’t be.” I said, “oh, why not” in a prissy voice and he said, calmly, with only a slight amused twitch to his mouth, “because Peter Straus is a LITERARY agent.” (Hanif has always denied it but you only remember the slights, right?)

I wouldn’t dare call myself a writer because I’m a journalist, one, and only women like Joan Didion, Edna O’Brien, Hilary Mantel, ie those who ONLY write can get away with it; and two, because so much of writing is still gendered.

The term “bonkbuster” is only applied to women novelists as diverse and prolific as Jilly Cooper, Judith Krantz and Jacqueline Susann; the genre “chick lit” to Marian Keyes, Sophie Kinsella, Santa Montefiore and so on. All this serves to keep female authors down while elevating male authors, whose work is always reverentially called “literary” fiction and shelved in a different section of Waterstones or Barnes & Noble however unreadable it is. (Ditto newspaper subeditors and reporters calling bad-ass business women – from Jemima Khan to Kim Kardashian via Paris Hilton - “socialites,” which is not just libellous, it is next-level misogynistic and inaccurate).

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But getting back to memoir. In between me telling Chris Best about having my Tarot cards read by the achingly funny comic novelist Daisy Waugh and other random stuff, I said, “But WHY isn’t there a Memoir category?” It seemed so obvious, so I upsold it. “Look at the all-consuming interest people have in their own genealogy and DNA and family trees…” I bored on. “I think you would see EXPLOSIVE growth!” (Not that Substack isn’t already seeing exponential growth. Since I joined Piers Morgan is here, and that feels like a lot).

If there was a memoir category, just think - we could play with Keith McNally, for example. Imagine the fun! It’s not as if its “no Keith McNally, no party,” but he is just the kind of dry, unfiltered NY-LON sophisticate I want around me. The reason I mention him is he has a book out and just posted about how “I Regret Almost Everything” his new memoir (here’s the NYT review) took six years to write even though in theory he was at his desk for five hours from 5am every day. This was due to “chronic procrastination.” SIX YEARS!

Keith McNally said he’d start Googling “famous people’s birthdays, the net worth of other restaurateurs, the height of actors I’m jealous of…” I know. Bliss, right? “Anything to postpone the torture of that first sentence.” How he’d spend another 90 mins on Instagram and then nap…and so on. “The actual writing bit often boiled down to about 45 minutes every day.”

Underneath this post, the first comment about Keith’s five hours of procrastination is from THE Cressida Connolly. (What a writer she is. If a publisher called Cressida’s books “chick lit” they’d be dead is all I can say).

“In other words, you’re a born writer,” she said to Keith. (There were 261 comments but I only read hers).

I thought of Keith’s “struggle” when I was flipping through my copy of this week’s Spectator. There was an ad on the facing page to a piece about why women shouldn’t have to share the Ladies’ Pond on Hampstead Heath with men (my position on that, by the way, is that trans women have been going about their business quietly for donkeys’ years and the Supreme Court has kicked a hornets’ nest).

The ad said, “Preserve your life story in a memoir – without writing a word!” next to a picture of a silver fox in dark glasses with luxuriant, snowy facial hair. There was a QR code, inviting readers to “Scan to see what makes a LifeBook so special.”

Would Keith McNally have availed himself of LifeBook? No. Would Edna O’Brien? Nope. The point is, I think, that memory is selective and so is memoir. McNally and only McNally could decide what to say, what to leave out. It’s hard work and it’s high risk. It reminds me of that definition of a writer as “someone who finds writing harder than other people” (which definitely excludes me again I’m afraid it just comes gushing out so fast my fingers can’t keep up).

As I do a weekly podcast called Rachel Johnson’s Difficult Women, I often have to read (that sounds penitential, it’s more often a pleasure) books before we do a sit-down and this week’s guest was Sarah Hoover. I admit. I hadn’t heard of her before. I admit. I hadn’t read her book yet (the UK publication date was the day of our conversation, and she came to the studio clutching a copy of the US edition, which I have now read with awe).

Hoover was wearing a powder-blue sun dress and blonde locks cascading over slim shoulders (I’ll stop gushing soon) and had wonderful, Midwestern manners. But then we went to the studio, with my dog, and we started talking. In brief, Sarah had a perfect life as a New York It Girl. She was Met-Gala-ready at all times. She left the Mid-West and unlike so many before her have tried and failed, she actually took Manhattan. She was – and is - smart, funny, acute, articulate, hot, well-connected, and worked at Gagosian. And then she met, dated, and married a famous artist called Tom Sachs, got pregnant and then, labour and childbirth broke her.

Totally.

I thought as I had my babies so many hundreds of years ago I would find all this boring. Birth stories - meh! Babies either pop out to whale music or its a life and death bloodbath in theatre but who, apart from your mother, actually wants to know?

I worried the tech op, Sam (male), would find it boring. But - like her book called The Motherload, Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood – she was riveting. I’ve never known another woman, another writer, who has sandpapered all her epidermis off, flayed herself of ego, ripped off the plaster of every scab and wound, and presented herself like a skinned rabbit for us to inspect. “Wow,” said Sam afterwards. “That was amazing.”

Even if you’ve read Sheila Heti and Rachel Cusk, Anne Enright, Lucy Ellman, Taffy Brodesser-Akner (all of which I have, just saying) nothing quite prepares you for the emotional viscera and the bloody lochia of Hoover, and the remorseless way she details the repulsion she feels for her son and the hatred she feels for her husband. You will never be able to read the word “chunk” again without remembering certain post-partum scenes.

She writes as if she was wheeled out of hospital with the bundle who looked like a “boiled frog” yesterday. Sarah has two children now and teared up when she said she’d like another. I could tell she was still traumatised that her experience of birth, motherhood and the play-dough years (we agreed the most terrifying words in the English language were, “Mummy can we do some fingerpainting now?”) were off the scale.

For nothing – no Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale, that she did a “jillion” times - came close to her experience of becoming a mother.

Where on the questionnaire was “How badly do you want to murder your husband?” she asked her therapist, who looked like Dame Judi Dench, in “loose drapey clothing in solid neutrals from stores I did not know about.” And then, she goes on, “there was the whole not loving my baby,” she went on to Dame Judi. “I wanted nothing to do with that little fucker.”

We always play a clip of the podcast just before 10pm on my LBC show and last Friday, my producer came through on talkback at 2145pm to say she was lining up the clip.

“So what is Sarah Hoover,” she said, as she prepared the link for me to intro the clip. The producer was clearly doing an online search and Google was offering up image after image of a glamorous blonde in a succession of designer mini-dresses with a handsome dark haired older man, who had chucked in her career as a gallerist to write the fuck out of shit (as Caitlin Moran puts it).

“Is just ‘socialite’ OK?”