modern women write

Reader's Log, stardate 15-05-24. I finished Charlie Stross's Dark State [his Empire Games prev] in a bit of a gallop just before a longish solo voyage by car. That's two down in a trilogy; but I'll need a while to recover from armageddon-anxiety before I put myself through Part Three = Invisible Sun.

Needing a new non-fiction earbook available now, I turned to Borrowbox and got a twofer. We'll Always Have Paris (9¾ hrs) by Emma Beddington (50 yrs) and The Hungover Games (5¾ hrs) by Sophie Heawood (45 yrs). If you read the Guardian, you will have read their earlier material, but as both are freelancers, you may have read their pieces in other media - not only print. These books are not entirely rom-com pink & fluffy but the troubles are bounded, normal.

I started with Paris not least because there was the promise of viennoiserie [L]. Bill Bryson realised as a youngster that he should have been born in Dusseldorf not DesMoines. Beddington reckoned that nothing she could buy in Betty's Tearoom in Yorkshire could hold a candle to a wobbly flan - pas trop cuit. She worked as a gap-year assistante in Normandie and read Modern History at University before starting work as a bilingual corporate lawyer. Along the way she fell in with a solid, reliable, lovable Norman, married him and had two children. They tried living in Paris. But she found Parisians cliquey, stand-offish, generally horrible and making no allowance for restless toddlers. Accordingly they retreated back to London but felt displaced and wrong-footed there. The collision of reality with romantic Casablancesque movie script caused poor Emma mental anguish requiring meds and almost destroyed their marriage. Even cakes couldn't make up for it. It didn't help that Beddington's resourceful supportive mother died in a freak accident at about that time. There is a happy ending which sees the family settled in . . . Bruxelles - which most would agree hasn't a patch on either London or Paris.

The Hungover Games is much funnier, perhaps because it is read by the author who knows when to play it for larfs. It is also a family story although one which is exactly half the size. Sophie Heawood moved to Los Angeles to interview celebs for the English press. It suited many publications to have an empathic body, down with popular culture, living at the heart of Celebristan. Much cheaper than flying a staffer out to the West Coast and finding on arrival that the target influencer had gone off the boil over the last 24 hours. Heawood had been in a long-term long-distance relationship with The Musician. Having just been told by her ObGyn that she'd never have children, the on-again couple had one free bonk too many (drink may have been involved) and she was pregnant.

Balking at the cost, emotional and financial, of delivery in Beverley Hills, she returned to a tiny house in the least fashionable sector of the East End of London, UK. Her family and friends are supportive, and as a free-lance she was able to WFH long before Covid opened that possibility to all-comers. The nicest parts of the book describe the close and teasing relationship between mother and daughter. 

A word of AITA advice to fellow patriarchs. If you have unprotected sex with your gfriend and she ends up preg, do not insist on a 3-way DNA test. It's disrespectful. For the rest, I am clearly not the demographic for reading articulate confessional autobiographies of much younger media women. So if I don't sound enthusiastic it's not really a useful datapoint.