What This Week #12

Back at the laptop after our Edinburgh adventure and trying to recalibrate to ‘writer mode’.

It feels like we’ve been residing in a post-holiday/pre-back-to-school liminal space these past few days.

A feeling only exacerbated by the fact that my lifelong sleep-averse daughter is suddenly permanently snoozy—early nights requested (what?!), later morning risings (certainly not complaining). She emanates softness and bed-warmth, and life feels muffled, lived inside a bubble—a place we’re enjoying while we can, before it’s burst by the rude alarms of Monday morning. Time for us to shake off hibernation and hope the weather catches up with the calendar.

Thank you so much for all the kind birthday wishes last week. Edinburgh provided a proliferation of art and cake, experiments with boba tea (50% success), the delight of seeing ourselves on the Zoo’s panda cam, and suitcases heavier with books for the homeward journey. Perfect break.

Without further ado, here are my reading and watching recommendations for the week:

Reading:

Right at the start of 2022, I fell down a Daphne-du-Maurier-shaped rabbit hole. I’d read a couple of her novels before, but last year, starting with an unexpected Christmas gift, I jumped from memoir to novel to documentary to letters and back to novels (and accompanying screen adaptations, naturally). She will most definitely form the basis of a(t least one) deep-dive newsletter in the future.

The Scapegoat was added to my tbr shelf late in the year, and needing something that would easily capture my attention without requiring too much of me (it’s the school holidays, after all), this fitted the bill perfectly. And I thoroughly enjoyed it. DDM is such an accomplished storyteller. On holiday in France, John bumps into a man he is identical to. Jean, Comte de Gué, is rich, entitled and entangled, and decides to disappear leaving his ‘twin’ to live his life. John is carried along in the deception, but takes his perspective and his heart into the other man’s world, and accidentally and purposefully begins to unpick problems and right wrongs. The plot sounds so unlikely, but du Maurier ably takes you on a wild ride and you trust her completely.

Watching:

The Scapegoat (Netflix)—Obviously, I watched a screen adaptation of The Scapegoat the evening I finished the book! I had actually already seen and enjoyed this 2012 film adaptation last year—rare for me to do film before book, but in this instance I’m glad I did as (although I didn’t know it at the time) the storyline veers significantly from the original. The film has a great cast of excellent British actors—Andrew Scott, Sheridan Smith, Eileen Atkins, Anton Lesser and Jodhi May—helmed by the magnificent Matthew Rhys in the leading role(s). Again, the implausibility of the plot isn’t at all an issue, here thanks to Rhys, who brilliantly inhabits the role of someone carried on a wave of misunderstanding. He tries to tell the truth, but no one wants to hear—everyone wants so much of him and yet expects so little, he can’t make himself heard or believed. This adaptation is set in England rather than France, in the run-up to the Queen’s coronation. In currently finding ourselves in the same in-between situation, I was drawn to this train of thought that dodgy doppelgänger (Johnny) shares with his unsuspecting mirror image (John):

Don’t you think there’s something special about [us meeting] now? This moment between the death of one monarch and the coronation of the next. Anything’s possible. The throne is empty. No one’s in charge.

Tiny Beautiful Things (Disney+)—This is the new fictionalised adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s book of the same name, based on her Dear Sugar online agony aunt column. I wanted to love this more than I did. On paper the combination of Strayed’s words and experiences, brought to life by amazing actors Kathryn Hahn and Merritt Wever, with the weight of Reese Witherspoon’s production company behind it, sounds pretty unbeatable. But somehow it didn’t quite hit right for me. Kathryn Hahn plays Clare, a woman whose life is falling apart around her. She never fulfilled her ambition to be a writer, and as she hovers close to rock bottom, she’s given an opportunity to write an internet advice column. She starts to dig deep into her own experiences, which enables her to reply with a rawness and honesty that is both beautiful and genuinely helpful to her readers and herself. Clare’s life has been shaped dramatically by the loss of her mother before she graduated from college. The episodes flit between her life now and the time around her mother’s death—this dual timeline storytelling reminded me a lot of (a slightly grittier, grubbier) This Is Us. Worth giving a go, especially if you read and enjoyed the book I suspect.

Honourable mention for this week’s episode of Succession (NOW). I’d not intended to review or mention this week-by-week as I watch Season 4, but I just need to log for posterity what an OUTSTANDING episode it was this week. A gut-punch. So well-written. All the admiration for a juggernaut of a show that can still truly surprise and take the wind from the audience’s sails. Create shock in having a huge event happen off-screen and leave us witnessing and sharing the confusion and reaction of those finding out. Outrageously expensive baseball caps off.

So come on, apart from chocolate eggs, what have you been sinking your teeth into this week? Any good books or films or TV shows I can add to my list?

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Extra reading credit:

My wonderful bookstagram friend, Kathryn (@_the_book_bug_), always finds interesting, beautiful and quite different books to share. Recently she recommended this gem—Four French Holidays by Anne Hall. We all love a book about books, and here Hall focuses on four novels that were inspired by their author’s French holidays. The Scapegoat is one of them. Here’s Kathryn’s review: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CqvmDQoA0cC/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y= This is absolutely going on my library list.

And as Kathryn references in her IG post, here is a link to du Maurier expert, Dr Laura Varnam’s in-depth review of The Scapegoat: https://www.dumaurier.org/menu_page.php?id=109

Lucy Mangan in the Guardian concurs with my disappointment in Tiny Beautiful Things (perhaps slightly less diplomatically): https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/apr/07/tiny-beautiful-things-review-kathryn-hahn-cheryl-strayed-disney

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