Hello St Marks

I barely knew who Amy Schumer was before reading her memoir, 'Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo', as this was a random read delivered to me by Hello St Mark's whimsical magic. Amy Schumer is a very, very famous comedian, actor, writer, producer, director and social justice warrior (you knew that already), and quite fabulous. She was a joyful child, a happy teenager, miserable in her 20s and brilliantly herself in her 30s—and in this memoir she tells all of it. She's smart and sexy and savvy; very rude, very frank, quite fearless and an incredibly hard worker. It's exhilarating and exhausting spending time with Amy. 

Garry Disher is my new crime crush; he's 72 and has written 40+ books, so I'm late to the party. His latest, 'The Way it is Now', is fabulous; the story of a suspended cop pulled taut by grief and regret, investigating the 20-year-old disappearance of his mum in a coastal town south of Melbourne. Disher writes Australia without cliche or overstatement. Bone dry but warm. 'The Way it is Now' is a stand-alone novel so an easy introduction to Disher's universe. If you love it—you will—go find the Hirsch series. 

Easy, warm and kind. Sophie Green is the perfect antidote to a crappy day or the icecream on the cake of a good one. The Australian Women's Weekly says it's "as Australian as a lamb roast and full-bodied shiraz" and who am I to argue with The Weekly? Three women's lives intersect at a yoga studio in suburban Melbourne; enough said. It's lovely. 

Woke horror. Like COVID novels, it's a product of now. 'Reprieve' is set in a haunt—an extreme 'full contact' haunted house renowned for terrifying the bejeezus out of its paying players who exit traumatised and injured. The Quigley House is in white-than-white rural Nebraska, an uncomfortable new home for teenage Kendra, who is Black, goth-ish and cranky. Thai student Jaidee is equally out of place. White hotel manager Leonard wants more than he deserves. As 'Reprieve' begins we know someone has died at the haunt, and each character's topical backstory is revealed in parallel with a re-telling of the players' progress through a gruesome series of escape-room-style 'cells', each more horrible and viscerally confronting than the last.  This is all very clever and memorable, but the cover claim that 'Reprieve' is "an eventual American classic" is just silly. 'Reprieve' occupies the same territory as the brilliant '...

'The Midnight Library' has a lot of passionate fans, and I can see why. Nora Seed tries to commit suicide and so arrives at the midnight library, offered the opportunity to re-write her life, erasing her regrets and living alternate editions of herself. Nora married, Nora the glaciologist, Nora the motivational speaker, Nora the rock star. It's a cool concept, for sure. What's maddening is that as she awakes in each new life, she's still her current self, invariably sabotaging each new reality through lack of context. She can't be a new Nora, only the old Nora faking it. Haig's heavy-handed moralising is evident from the beginning, and the ending is inevitable. 

I'm not usually a fan of Irish 'chick lit' (a term Keyes dislikes as pejorative) but Marian Keyes can write a cracking story. In 'The Woman who Stole my Life' Stella Sweeney has a car accident, gets sick, becomes famous and loses her way. There's a dreadful husband and a lovely new man. It's Marian Keyes, so we know it'll end well after a cleverly plotted, emotionally rewarding rollercoaster ride. Jojo Moyes calls this one "a brilliant, unusual, brave, sexy book" which is nonsense, but fair play to Keyes. 

'Small Acts of Defiance' had made its way through three satisfied readers before me and will be gone from my street library within an hour, guaranteed; it's exactly the kind of popular historical fiction that does well without anyone feeling embarrassed for having enjoyed it. Sixteen-year-old Lucie arrives in Paris from Australia in January 1940; she's painfully naive—of course she is, she's 16—but step by step she finds the small acts of defiance that are within her power. Others choose differently. Australian author Michelle Wright's debut novel is a winner. 

Comparisons with Oliver Sacks are inevitable and right there on the cover. 'The Nocturnal Brain' is 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat' for sleep disorders. It's gripping, naturally, with that Sacks-esque (Sacksian? Sacks-like? Sacks-adjacent?) combination of neuroscience and intimate storytelling. There's the teenager with Klein-Levin syndrome—bouts of extreme sleepiness combined with hypersexuality and morbid hunger. The bloke sent to jail for attempted rape, later diagnosed with sexsomnia and having to deal with the horror of realising he had actually committed—while sleeping—the crime he had vehemently denied. Sleep-related eating disorders. Extreme sleepwalking (and, memorably, sleep-driving). Sleep paralysis with hallucinations. Life-threatening insomnia. 'The Nocturnal Brain' is a very nicely written cornucopia of sleep-related horror stories, with few happy endings. As Leschziner says, "sharing a bed with someone is an act of deep trust...

Happily I have a wretched memory, so reading 'The Power' for the second time was a perfect combination of familiarity (to new characters: I love you already) and surprise (good god, I can't believe that just happened). There's too much to say about Naomi Alderman's provocative feminist dystopia. In a time about now, across the world, girls electrify—literally, not metaphorically—delivering electrical shocks with their hands. It's weird, it's shameful and playful and then almost immediately deadly, and the balance of power between men and women is fundamentally shifted. What do you think would happen if women had real power? Read it, then read it again.

This is Deborah Rodriguez in memoir mode, not author mode (see review of 'The Little Coffee Shop of Kabul') but it's absolutely the same voice. 'The House on Carnaval Street' begins as Deborah flees Kabul with her son, leaving a wannabe warlord Afghan husband and a beauty school. Completely shattered, she lands in Napa, falls into another relationship (his mother dumps her) and finally catapults into Mexico. It's exhausting spending time with Debbie—she's scatty, erratic and often infuriating—but her life is full, really just exploding with people and colour and mad moments, so we love her.