Relationships

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 9 November 2017

Rules for romance Sir: Lara Prendergast describes a floundering generation desperate for reliable love but with no real idea how to find it (‘Sexual reformation’, 4 November). Our culture has forgotten the basic principles of forming successful relationships. My daughters apply three simple guidelines on choosing boyfriends wisely. One, does he fight for you? Men’s commitment is linked to willingness to sacrifice. He needs to show that he will put himself out for you. Two, is he marriageable? I’m not saying marry straight away. But he needs to have characteristics such as kindness and generosity. And three, can he make decisions? Commit to things and stick at them? Does he decide, rather than slide?

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 5 October 2017

Q. We have moved from London into a rural area where we are preparing for the first visit of a lifelong friend who has become a self-invented countryman. I know that he will insist on foraging for mushrooms, but none of my family wants to go on kidney dialysis machines as a result of being forced to eat them. None of us (including him) are mushroom experts. Much as we love our friend, he is something of a bully. What should we do Mary? — Name and address withheld A. Buy in a store cupboard supply of dried chanterelles, ceps etc, and rehydrate them prior to his visit. Feign enthusiasm for making a risotto or omelette using his foraged harvest. Knock this up while his back is turned and present it as a fait accompli, after hiding his foraged mushrooms.

Thursday

Houman Barekat

A choice of short stories

It can’t be easy to switch between editing others people’s fiction and writing your own: how do you suspend that intuitive critical impulse? Gordon Lish, who is best known as the editor of Raymond Carver’s short stories but has also written plenty of fiction in his own right, is familiar with this dilemma, and in White Plains (Little Island Press, £18.99) he has fun with it. These stories are replete with parenthetical um-ing and ah-ing over synonyms, punctuation and grammatical solecisms — a prolix testament to the agonies of prose composition: ‘Losing tone here, not retaining purchase on stance here, falling to pieces with the coward’s frolic along the phraseological here.

Wednesday

Elisa Segrave

Neighbours and strangers

Margaret Forster, who died on 8 February, excelled at writing about complex relationships between women. Even old friends, she demonstrated, can experience jealousy, disapproval or dislike. Here, ‘Sarah’ has changed her name to live incognito on the west coast of Cumbria, in a town chosen at random. When she gets locked out of her house, a bond is formed between her and her elderly neighbour Nancy — whose deceased friend Amy once owned Sarah’s rental and left Nancy a key. Although Sarah is ostensibly the one with ‘a past’ (prison), it was Nancy whom I found most interesting.

Thursday

Alice Cockerell

Is there still a place for single-sex schools?

NO I am pretty sure my all-girl school turned me into a delinquent. All right, I might not have peed in phone boxes, graffiti’d on trains or spent time in a state penitentiary. But for all of this, I definitely think a strain of delinquency was bred into me by single--sex education. Just outside a sedentary market town in the West Country, my boarding school had presumably been chosen by my mother to instil in me a measure of gentility; it certainly wasn’t for the academia. Old dames, many of whom had been at the school themselves during the Boer War, made up the teaching staff. It is hard to express how sex-obsessed we were; no gardener went unharassed, no teacher not featured in some revolting ‘Would you rather?’ scenario.

Thursday

Deborah Ross

Great expectations | 13 August 2015

Trainwreck is a romcom as written and directed by Amy Schumer, the American comedy prodigy whose Comedy Central sketch show is properly hilarious and transgressive, from what I’ve seen. Indeed, if nothing else, I beseech you to watch one particular sketch, as viewable on YouTube, where a group of famous Hollywood actresses gather to celebrate one of their number’s ‘last fuckable day’, explained as follows: ‘In every actress’s life, the media decides when you’ve finally reached the point you are not believably fuckable any more....’ So my hopes for this film were sky-high. My hopes were that it would take the standard, misogynist romcom tropes and give them the pitiless thrashing they so deserve.

Thursday

Julie Burchill

The rise of ‘living apart together’ – and why I’ve stopped doing it

I’ve never lived with a man I didn’t marry: Tweedledee, 1979–1984, and Tweedledum, 1984–1995. (The names have been changed to irritate the pair of them.) So when I left my second union and moved to Brighton to chase the man who is now my third (and hopefully final) husband, I was keen to establish and keep separate households. I was quite pleased to find that not only was I having a blast seeing Daniel while maintaining a maverick social life (he didn’t want to be in a swimming pool full of drunken, shrieking girls’n’gays any more than I wanted to be in a room full of game-playing, beer-drinking men) but was apparently part of a growing social phenomenon.

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Bookends: Wasp without a sting

‘It may be hard to accept that a chaste teenage girl can end up in bed with the President of the United States on her fourth day in the White House.’ In 1962, 19-year-old Mimi Beardsley (pictured above) landed ‘the plummiest of summer jobs’, an internship in the White House press office. On day four, she was invited for a lunchtime swim in the presidential swimming pool. John F. Kennedy was, not surprisingly, ‘taller, thinner, more handsome in person than he looked in photographs’. The affair lasted 18 months and involved a lot of waiting around in hotel rooms, like most affairs. Amazingly, no one found out until 2003, when a newspaper finally named her.

Saturday

Cressida Connolly

Finding Mr Wright

The film When Harry Met Sally may be infamous for the scene in which the heroine mimics orgasm in a crowded café, but the real point of the story is a question: can a man and a woman ever be true friends, or must sex always get in the way? Jack Holmes and His Friend poses the equivalent question about a straight man and a gay one. If it’s made into a movie, the working title will surely be When Harry Met Gary. Homosexual writers seem to be much better than straight ones at combining high literary style with vastly enjoyable descriptions of really filthy sex. Edmund White is a master of both. This novel is like one from the French 18th century, where passages of intricate social comedy alternate with carnal episodes of Baroque detail.

Saturday

Molly Guinness

Chagrin d’amour

The horror of love: Nancy Mitford’s first fiancé was gay; her husband, Peter Rodd, was feckless, spendthrift and unsympathetic, and her great amour, Gaston Palewski, was endlessly unfaithful. She met him during the war in London and was in love with him for the rest of her life. Palewski was Charles de Gaulle’s right-hand man. He organised the French Resistance in London and commanded the Free French forces in East Africa. After the war, he was appointed De Gaulle’s chief of staff and he became known as the sinister éminence grise behind De Gaulle’s presidency. He and Nancy shared a love of France, beauty and jokes.

Victoria Glendinning

A man who quite liked women

It is noticeable that the kind of young woman that a clever public man most likes talking to is intelligent but totally unchallenging. This is pleasant for both. She gets to pick up useful knowledge, while he can hold forth, happy that she doesn’t have the inclination or firepower to disagree, argue or interrupt.    Dr Johnson was a bit like that. He wanted women to be equal ‘but not too equal’.  Hannah More, a successful playwright young enough to be his daughter, had too much natural self-belief for him, and he did not admire her dress sense. He was wary and in awe of the confident poet Elizabeth Carter, who knew more Latin and Greek than he did.

Saturday

Cressida Connolly

The death of laughter

If you were stranded on a desert island, Ruth Leon would be the perfect companion. She is plucky, resourceful, funny, bright and indomitable: you can see just why the late theatre critic Sheridan Morley fell in love with her. And indeed he did find himself alone with her, on the mental-health equivalent of a desert island, when an otherwise fairly mild stroke seemed to ossify his pre-existing depression. For four years he spent as many hours a day as he could asleep. When he was awake he was either weeping or complaining. I lost count of how many times the word ‘whining’ appears in this book. By her own admission, Leon does not carry ‘the Mother Teresa gene’.