For money, I’m writing teachers’ guides for an NPO, Class Act. They’re partnering with the Department of Basic Education so kids can get their hands on some...basic education. It’s a step in the right direction, and I enjoy this kind of work. Technical writing is the hardest kind – like haiku.
...which are what I’m working on for love. I’ve just printed a notebook for creative types, called ‘As above, so below’. (Anyone who’s interested in alchemy will have heard that line before.) The notebook also has fifty of my unholy haiku in it, plus a fantastic cover by Alex Latimer. They say you ought to write about what you know, and what I know is the Bible, and the Biblical sense. I’ve combined them.
I’m the better half. So it feels awesome. I think Alex [Latimer] is okay with that.
If the massive American Brontë-saurus fan base is anything go by, then for sure. We still crave the wit and stability of that literature, and the knowledge that women have always been fighters – of all stripes. Those women are our literary ancestors. We owe them. My local old-lady fave is Pauline Smith – those Karoo short stories are up there with Bosman. And sci-fi counts as classic, too: Octavia Butler; Ursula le Guin, Atwood.
Atwood. She can do it all. That poetry! And she has clearly just run out of f#%!s to give.
(Now or then? Female role models are thin on the ground at the moment. Our politicians aren’t exactly covering themselves in glory.)
Back then they were doing it all, but wearing horsehair weaves and corsets and long skirts. It’s nuts. Maybe physical discomfort makes you cunning.
When I was younger, people like Camille Paglia, Juliette Lewis, PJ Harvey: cultural theorists who weren’t pompous about their wisdom. But I’m over role models now. I’m forty-three, and being me is a lot of fun. I like ’em but I wouldn’t want to be ’em.
Famous people aren’t as much fun as I used to think. The thing is that they’re hardly ever doing the thing with you that made them famous: you can’t really tell why they’re special when they’re eating. It’s like being a rock star groupie: you might be bonking that singer in a hotel bed, but there’s no guitar between the sheets.
I’d like to have dinner with the three women I’m planning to retire with. It’s been a while since we were all on the same continent.
I would just financially incentivise not having children while you’re still in Pampers yourself. That’s it. Do whatever you want, but don’t have a baby until you’re thirty. End of.