Bethan Roberts In the last couple of years there has been a shift in confessional writing from the craze for tortured self-absorption (from Elizabeth Wurtzel and Andrea Ashworth, amongst others) to the impulse to torture a friend/relative/lover, preferably a famous one. Joyce Maynard’s book, along with the du Pre siblings’ A Genius in the Family […]
Susan Maushart: The Mask Of Motherhood
Bethan Roberts Often witty and certainly subversive, The Mask of Motherhood is, as the blurb puts it, not a ‘how to’ book but a ‘how it really is’ book. I’m not sure what this cliché actually means (how it is for who, exactly?), but it’s true that Maushart quickly gets to work, debunking all the […]
Meera Syal: Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee
Bethan Roberts It’s a relief to find that once you get beyond the mouthful of a title, this second novel from the fantastically talented author of Anita and Me, Bhaji on the Beach and star of the rightly acclaimed BBC2 comedy series Goodness Gracious Me more than lives up to Meera Syal’s reputation. It tells […]
A.L. Kennedy : Original Bliss : Blissed Out
Bethan Roberts talks to A.L. Kennedy about weird sex and the problem with women’s writing I recently went to see AL Kennedy give a reading at the Sussex Arts Club. While the atrocious lighting made her look as if she were about to burst into a rock anthem or become involved in some sci-fi nonsense, […]
Jeff Noon : Automated Alice : Fairytales From The Future
Bethan Roberts talks to Jeff Noon about his new novel Automated Alice What’s really nice about Jeff Noon is that, firstly, I can use a word like “nice” about him (not, I expect, a word most cyberpunks would be comfortable with), and secondly, beyond the street-level-city-techno-punkiness that precedes him in the form of his […]
Francis Ford Coppola : The Godfather : Saturday Night Fever: John Badham: Sex And Spaghetti
Bethan Roberts watches the transformation of the American-Italian man, from The Godfather to Saturday Night Fever With The Godfather recently re-released in a new print, Don Corleone and his family are back on our screens, shovelling spaghetti into their mouths, screaming at their wives and shooting other Mafia families – all with excessive amounts of […]
