Backlisted - Letters from a Fainthearted Feminist by Jill Tweedie

Episode Date: June 27, 2016

Writer and journalist Alex Clark joins John Mitchinson and Andy Miller in a stormy (and then hammery) podcast to discuss 'Letters from a Fainthearted Feminist', a collection of very funny columns by Jill Tweedie, originally published in The Guardian.Timings: (may differ due to adverts)8'56 - The Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger 15'23 - A Life Discarded by Alexander Masters26'14 Letters From a Fainthearted Feminist by Jill Tweedie* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Look for new value programs when you shop at Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions may apply. See in-store for details. Two freshly cracked eggs any way you like them. Three strips of naturally smoked bacon and a side of toast. Only $6 at A&W's in Ontario. Experience A&W's classic breakfast on now. Dine-in only until 11am. I went to say where it is from a small festival saying we just have no money so being up front about it

I don't know. In any other um realm of work if you're offered something you weren't paid enough money you'd either ask for more you'd turn it down you wouldn't accept it and complain about it continue which is kind of i i feel that's what authors continually do and i can understand where that comes from is that they're desperate to promote their work and the opportunity to promote their work less and less it was so good because I thought like I said it just went beyond

yeah Alex's piece also focused binary but let's just talk about Alex's piece Alex your piece is this like the whole this is not the fat Alex title is it it's focused on the the idea that

I think the real change, I think you touched on this, Alex, is that ten years ago, say, book festivals were largely, there weren't loads of them, and they were run, as you said, John, by people who really loved books, because there wasn't a load of money in it. But I am aware that there are more book festivals, many of which are, of course, run by people who love books, but also because people begin to think, our town needs

a book festival. A book festival is the sort of thing our town would look good with. So those are the ones where you don't, where you're not reaching out to an audience that you know are bookish or numerous, where you're taking a bit of a punt that people will

come and sometimes they just don't come. I mean, I have to say, you know, 350 plus looks a little bit like peak lit fest to me. I'm not sure. I don't think that's such a thing. Really? Yeah, I think every town should have one. What, by statute?

By statute, by law. But I think there's something slightly snobbish about this kind of like the attitude that there's 350s enough or we're gonna have too many of them or that there's they're organized by people that don't love books all these new people are doing it and they're not as good as the old ones I suppose I don't I don't mean I don't mean to be I mean all I'm saying is that there are the you know getting programs that will motivate people to come and that's a challenge that's all yes exactly and one of the issues you know there are undeniable

issues about the financing of literary festivals and every time you really get close to the heart of the matter people sort of say i mean they kind of back away from it so if you say to someone but you'll only get 40 people and they only want to pay seven quid, so how's that going to work? They'll say, well, you know, the festivals should promote it better. And you think that's not an answer. It's true. There you go.

With thunder in the back of your hand, the future of... I like... I tell you what I would... I think... I feel that Germany has got... Those literature houses that they have. It's so magnificent. What are they? So you have like a place in town where, and it's essentially a place where you put on literary events

and they're there and they're fully staffed. Because it's Germany, they're really well organised and they're fully staffed and they get fantastic. You probably haven't done a book tour in Germany. No, not in the gardens. You've been in every town in Germany. There is a book tour in Germany you've got the gardens down in Germany there is a book killer in every house book house I think is what they're called

but you go and you read for an hour and a half and then everybody stops and has a drink and then you go back and read again for another hour it's like unbelievable, one author this is insane but they're just they're

very very very well i mean it's sort of well organized in the way you would expect but also they're serious i mean i love the fact that they're so serious about about literature to have it the idea of having a you know the idea that banbury would have a literature venue you know you can barely manage a library these days i was talking to a festival organizer last night and he was going through all the events he'd done over the last days. I was talking to a festival organiser last night and he was going through all the events he'd done over the last month and he was talking about one event where two-thirds of the audience left before the end.

Oh, God. And he said as they started walking out and they carried on walking out, you'd see the authors just being crushed. Being crushed. I went to a festival in Wales and I realised that on the bill was Attila the stockbroker who I thought had possibly ceased producing.

From roundabout. Exactly. They were bringing the spirit of the 80s. Decades ago. It was real spirit of the 80s stuff and I thought, I have to go. And I went and sat and saw him in this tent and there he was doing his ranty poetry. And then basically pretty much the only other event started off

and it was Charlotte Church in the next marquee, rather bigger marquee. And obviously three-quarters of people just got up and left. So then obviously I felt completely on the ground to buy this book at the end, or several of his books. And I said, I haven't seen you since I was in my 20s. I'm so excited. And he said, well, I've been here all the time.

In this kind of dour voice, I felt terrible. And to undermine my previous point, Attila the Stockbroker actually organises a literary festival. No! So that is what I'm saying. He's becoming atomised to the point where we all have our own literary festivals. Is it a ranting poetry festival?

We're trying to do an online one, aren't we? have our own literary festival. We're trying to do an online one, aren't we? Very good on hotel costs. Very good on all costs. Just enough for a glass of wine at home sitting in front of the... I suppose it's a sort of... I don't know.

Would you go? I don't know. It's interesting. Well, where would you go? On and on at the same... But go but you know look at the program well i'll check back in for that might be fun i am very intrigued though by this i mean people have talked about the celebrification of literary festivals and you know the non-literalization but i think much of it comes down to food again it's always the food stalls that you just see the massive queues for and the other day i had to go and do an interview at the south bank and i was getting dropped off in a car and i was all street food down there i was looking for the like writers and artists entrance and i couldn't between a kind of churro stall and a burrito stall and a hog roast i thought this is ridiculous

i don't have 20 minutes to go through the sandwich queues. I saw Mark Ellen last year at Port Elliot take to the stage and greet the crowd by saying, oh, it's good, Port Elliot, isn't it? Still, £10 for a lobster roll. I was there when he bought that lobster roll. He was in shock. He could talk about nothing else. I'm so going to reveal my terrible metropolitans. I think that's quite reasonable for a lobster.

It's generous on the lobster. Shall we kick off? Yes, why not? Okay. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Once more, we're gathered around the table in the Unbound offices. Unbound, of course, is the website where authors and readers come together to make great books. I'm John Mitchinson, publisher of Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously.

And joining us today is writer, broadcaster and journalist Alex Clark, former The Observer. Alex writes and talks about books for The Observer, The Guardian and TLS, and also has, in a previous life, edited Granta. Hello, Alex. Hello. tearless and also has in a previous life edited grant to hello alex hello and the book alex has chosen to uh talk to us about this week is letters from a faint-hearted feminist by jill tweedy first published in 1982 yeah 1982 and based on a weekly column in the guardian where she was for many years women's editor well obviously we'll come into it in more detail, but one of the weird things I found is it felt incredibly familiar.

I did remember reading the column, but it was sort of the years vanished quite rapidly. It survived very well, hasn't it? Really, really, really. I mean, we should explain what it is, which is basically letters written from Martha, who is a sort of slightly stuck-at-home housewife with two fairly grown-up children

and a baby by her second husband. And she writes letters to her feminist pal Mary who does things like form women against women against, no who does things like form groups called women against everything against women or as they struggle to pronounce it

we'll come on to it in a moment but as is traditional as is traditional Andy I'm going to ask you what you've been reading I have been reading, now we're going to come on to the book that you've been reading John in a minute and I'm making a plea, no listen I've got to make a plea to listeners right, the book that John is going to

talk about I've also read and I suspect is going to blow this book out of the water but I just want to give this book a fair hearing first, it's a novel that was written in 1965 by Emerick Pressburger, it's called The Glass Pearls hearing first. It's a novel that was written in 1965 by Emmerich Pressburger. It's called

The Glass Pearls. And I never knew he'd written a novel. Emmerich Pressburger was the partner of Michael Powell in The Archers. In the non-sexual Yes. He made the films A Matter of Life and Death Peeping Tom

Life and Death of Hiseping Tom, Colonel Blue, Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I'm Going, some of the greatest British films that have been made. 49th Parallel. Yeah, 49th Parallel. One of our aircraft is missing. Have you seen that? The one that's set on

the island of Fula. I Know Where I'm Going. No, Edge of the World. That's right. So, so, Faber finds The Island of Fula. I know where I'm going. No, Edge of the World. Edge of the World, that's right. Amazing film. So, Faber-Fiennes reissued this novel, The Glass Pearls, last year. It's the first time that it's been available for 50 years. It's Emmerich Pressburger's second novel. His first novel had been very successful.

This novel came out and it absolutely died a terrible death. And there's a really good introduction by Kevin MacDonald, who is Pressburger's grandson, pointing out that the book received only one review in the TLS. I'm going to read you a little bit of that review in a minute. But what this book is, I would recommend this book if you've never seen a Power Man Press Burger film or if you love Power Man Press Burger.

It's a thriller and it is about a former doctor from a Nazi concentration camp who has been on the run for 20 years and is living in London as a piano tuner. the run for 20 years and is living in London as a piano tuner and it's about the net closing in on him or rather he believes the net is closing in on him and he begins an affair with quite a gullible young woman and persuades her to go with him to Paris and as as the book goes on, you are invited to see things from the point of view of the man around whom the net is closing. Now, in that respect, it's very, very like a Powell and Pressburger film. The sympathetic German or peeping Tom, which encourages you to see things from the point of view of a murderer. The thing that's extraordinary about this book is, of course, that Pressburg was Jewish and his relatives died in the concentration camps. It is the most fantastically even-handed attempt to say that even Nazi war criminals are humans

and all humans have the capacity to be Nazi war criminals and it keeps you guessing right to the very very last line of the book I know people say that about thrillers don't they it keeps you turning but this genuinely you only on the final page of the book begin to understand the actual horror of what you've been reading and it makes you recalibrate everything you've read up to that point. It has quite a few things in common, I think, with Brighton Rock by Graham Greene, that you're seeing innocence knowingly corrupted by someone who doesn't know how else to behave or to act.

And did he write his fiction in English? Yes. Amazing. And then this is the one review that it got. This is it in full because it was very short. Emmerich Pressburger is perhaps better known as a filmmaker, remember the red shoes, than as a novelist. For someone who has made 16 films,

he seems to have remarkably little feeling for paced character dialogue or for even keeping his audience awake. The central figure of The Glass Pearls is Brown, an innocent German refugee turned piano tuner, or so we think, for all of six pages. By page seven, it's a proper 1965 snark here from the TLS, right? By page seven, his secret is revealed. He is in fact a wanted Nazi war criminal,

the notorious Dr Otto Reitmuller, brilliant brain surgeon and violinist. At this point, one feels the book could profitably end, but no. The narrative lurches on for another 200 pages as Brown Reitmuller becomes tediously involved with Helen. That she is boring and stupid would be of little importance had not Mr Pressburger chosen her to express one of the book's occasional anti-Nazi arguments. That is the most stunning failure to understand

a book since last weekend. I mean, it's such a fantastic, brave and brilliant book that I don't think could be written now, actually. I think there would be too much need to

equivocate or box clever. Interesting. Do you think it's filmable? Yes, his previous novel was in fact filmed and, although it escapes me now what the name of the film is, but was a hit and this has clearly

been written to be filmed you can see it but equally we know that this comes five years after Peeping Tom Michael Powell's film with which it has great similarities, Peeping Tom finished Michael Powell's career effectively because people didn't understand it

so for his partner to do the same thing again in a different context seems to me incredibly brave and brilliant and a wonderful act of solidarity as well. And did Powell and Pressburger work again after people? Yes, fitfully. They made a film called The Boy Who

Turned Yellow for the Children's Film Foundation in the early 1970s. And Powell made other films in the 60s. Age of Consent with Helen Mirren in Australia. And Age of Consent is problematic, but it's still pretty good. So that's my great enthusiasm for that book. I love that book. People seem not to know about it, even people who are big power press.

Haven't you ever heard of it? Big power press, no. Me too, absolutely. Fascinating. Am I right to say that that review came from the days before TLS Reviews was signed? Yes, so we don't know who wrote it. We don't know who wrote it, and there's a kind of... The braggadocio of the mild-mannered man behind the typewriter.

Quite. And, well, they got their wish because he never wrote another novel. And his grandson says it was largely because of that review. Oh, no! So, good job. softly um and john what have you been reading um i've been reading i've been reading very with with i mean real pleasure i have to say a life discarded by alexander masters uh the subtitle kind of gives you the the pitch for the book 148 diaries found in in a skip. And Alexander Masters is the author of?

Stuart, A Life Backwards, which was one of my, I think is one of my, sort of probably easily in my top ten favourite non-fiction books of all time. It's, I think, a brilliant bit of work. It's the life of a homeless man, violent. He had a violent life. It's also a murder story, which is extraordinary. Stuart reads the first

the first draft of alexander's book and says it's bollocks boring and he said why don't you make it i was thinking more of a you know you're going to tell the story of my life i was thinking more of a sort of tom clancy novel he said why don't you make it a murder story that and do it backwards so that you end the book with the murder of the child age 12 between the hours of 4 and 5 p.m on a and that was it's pretty astonishing a resting start and of course really difficult to write the story of a book so and as i talked to alexander masters in hay and he said it was writing was a bit like tacking you'd have to go to the back to the past and then come back to the future to make it work but as well as being brilliantly um technically uh great book stewart it's also the most honest complex portrayal of a person whose life most

of us would think you know homeless people the people you kind of try not to to meet the eyes of in the street it's it's it's on so many levels i think are brilliant and i think everybody ought to be whoever works with you know and I think everybody ought to be whoever works with you know in social services ought to be issued with a copy because it's capacity for fostering empathy but also for understanding without patronising

at all and one of the heroines of the book is Stuart's mum and that sort of brings you to Life Discarded because Alexander Masters is sort of mapping out a career telling strange, he calls himself sort of brings you to to life discarded because alexander masters is sort of he's kind of mapping out a career telling strange he calls himself somewhere in the book life discarded he says when i ask myself what i am he said i'm a i'm a biographer first a person second and a physicist

hardly at all he trained in physics but one of the things i think you can sort of feel that scientific training in all all of his books there was a the middle book that i have to confess i'd not even heard of it it didn't was simon the genius the genius in my basement which i've subsequently bought and started and he's just he's telling the stories i guess that don't often get told. And this is the most extreme, in a way. A friend of his, Dido Davis, who was responsible for a lot of the early editorial work on Stuart, found in a skip... Actually, it wasn't her.

She actually got them out of the skip. But it was an academic friend of his who found 148 diaries written in this incredibly small hand in a skip, maybe five million words were. And the book is his attempt... Some in a box, as he notes, the size of a human head. And he gets given them. When Dido gets ill and he gets given the box,

the diaries to look, he kind of stalks them for quite a long time and then in the end starts to decide that sort of a distraction from Dido's illness she's dying of pancreatic cancer he decides he's going to try and figure

out who wrote the book and so the little bit of it here is a person can write five million words about itself and forget to tell you its name or its sex people don't include obvious identifiers in diaries things such as what they're called or where their home is they're simply i who lives and then dies and gets dumped in a skip so the book in a way is another it's another sort of mystery it's trying to find out who this person this I is and we, Andy and I

have decided that we're not going to give the game away we mustn't say anything because it's such it's so beautifully constructed so John was I saw John last week talking about his interview with Alexander Masters and had been raving about the book anyway

and I had a copy of the book and I thought, OK, I'll read the first couple of pages and give it a look. And I had to put it down and walk away from it for a few days while I read Letters from a Fae-Hearted Feminist. I just think this is a magnificent book. Clearly about the person concerned, but a book about the compromises and contradictions of trying to pin a life to a page yeah either as a diarist or as a biographer and it made me it made me cry yeah

i think it's really amazing it's it's it's really remarkable. And again, you know, to give you a little idea of the flavour of it, one of the things that he does so brilliantly is he kind of, well, one, he doesn't, what most of us would do if it was a bit of academic research, his wife's an academic, and said, you know, why don't you put them all in chronological order and read them that way? But he can't quite do that. He sort of dips in and reads a few and then dips out again.

I mean, it's worth saying that these diaries run from the late 50s until they were found, I think, in 2011. So it's a whole life recorded. I mean, it's a remarkable thing but it's also remarkable so he doesn't do that and when again you'll find out what what happens when he does do it but there's part of him you can feel doesn't really want to um he doesn't want to know he sort of he's kind of it's like reading a novel where he doesn't want it to end too quickly so he goes for example and and talks to a private detective

who was actually a former policeman, one of the policemen who arrested Stuart, and talks about how private detectives find out identity and then is sort of quite resistant to use the techniques. He goes to see a graphologist, and there's a hilarious thing where the graphologist suddenly says, you know, well, I think this person person is you know is goes through a psychological and he's saying but and you know all this from the handwriting she's no read them yeah i know it's what she's saying

about her life she says i wouldn't i wouldn't want to be in this person yeah and masters says very drolly that's all right i've written a book about a man called stewart and not a lot of people want to be in the room well i mean i think i asked him i said you know it's as donna's go this is a pretty remarkable one i know he you know to some extent uh stewart was a was a chance meeting and um simon the book he just happened to have an autistic mathematician who lived in the basement in a way he was fortunate to find such

a remarkable not everybody's diary I guess would have been quite would have yielded quite so and he was really worried at first, he was really worried that it was going to be some really famous person like a sort of professor because it was Cambridge where the diaries were found

and I think I can say that that isn't the case but the fact is because he as you say the kind of wandering around the subject his rumination on it is fun, I mean I did earlier that day

I've done another biographer and you realise that most biography is sort of beginning, middle and end. But he walks backwards into this in such an elegant way. And as I say, his ambiguity about the story he's trying to tell

means that you, it actually works. It is, going back to the old cliche, it's a page turner. Really, you have to read it and you want to find out what happens. Can I ask whether you can be concretely convinced that he hasn't fabricated the whole thing? No. And that's another thing I like about it.

I also think... Alex, the thing about it that's so brilliant is I think there is a brilliant, clever process going on with how information is communicated to the reader, which may or may not be in the same time frame as it happened to him. But it doesn't matter. You know, it's creating an authentic fake to make you feel you're going through that same process. I think that's true. Having said that, having met him, and he was very interesting about creative writing courses, just thinks

we should all be closed down and writers should be sent into the community and to talk to actual human beings. When they were trying to make the film, they finally did make a film with Benedict Cumberbatch and of Stuart

you know there was a scene of Stuart being raped in the book and the director in the script said you know I want to linger on this for as long as possible and Alexander had objected to it and said well you know do you want to come and meet I want you know

before I can approve this I want you to come and meet judith the mom of stewart's mom and look her in the eyes and tell her why you think this is so important and the guy just said why so i really don't like to meet you know the subjects of people i'm making films about i find it interferes with my aesthetic judgment but he is absolutely alison and masters Masters is the exact opposite. I mean, I think he's a high-risk game. So while I think Andy's absolutely right, you can't be sure totally that he hasn't made it up. I think it's probably unlikely.

I think what I felt about it was not that, you know, as in literally has he kind of made this up, but was it possible to feel that element of fabrication which makes it perhaps a more interesting artwork, if you see what I mean? Yeah, and what did you think? Did you think it... Sorry, have you read it?

No, no, I haven't. I'm kind of asking you. Yeah, yeah, no. Just, you know, documentary, that would seem less interesting. I love books, and I probably have a weakness for books, that at some moment turn to the reader and say

come on this is a book and that's what this book does without ever backing off from its subject or its commitment to its subject that's why I loved it because he manages to weave that into the actual texture of the biography itself

which seems to me so so clever and funny, too. Yeah, it is funny. Again, you know, in a year of some really great books, it's going to be hard to get past that one. But we should move on. We'll be back in just a sec. Two freshly cracked eggs any way you like them. Three strips of naturally smoked bacon and a side of toast.

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end July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. Jill Tweedy. Jill Tweedy. Alex. When did you first read? Do you remember when you first

read these columns or this book? I didn't read the columns because I don't think we took The Guardian at home. I think that was not what happened. I was too young really to be reading it myself. I started reading at university in the late 80s. But it actually comes down to a kind of funny publishing thing.

I think, this is my memory, that I bought lots of books that had the picador colophon on them because god bless picador and sunny mater they just had that yeah that you should read this that's really true that's it's worth reminding uh our younger listener that um that when we were growing up uh paperbacks were called paperbacks were called two things. They were called, where are your penguins, people would come in and say, and where are your picadors? Love your picadors, you might say to someone you... The picador spinner was, until we banned spinners in Waterstones,

the picador spinner was an absolute staple. Why did, what, because, in case they took someone's eye out? To be honest, they were, magnets, that was one problem. But also it was this idea that they were somehow, it was sort of unfair, I don't know, there was some strange... Can you remember? I don't know. It was just... And it's like that that the country was culturally enfeebled because of dust.

People then didn't want to do dusting. Yes, there you go. How meekly that brings us back. But Picador were an absolute, they were the byword for... Literary fiction. For really good, I mean, and also some very cool non-fiction as well. I always think of Michael Herr as the act, Picador title dispatches him. well yeah i always think of michael hurr as the the act picador title dispatches and um but you know if you wanted to read umberto echo that was and there was there was just so many great books

on that list so i kind of gravitated towards them but i also think when i look back to my um reading then i was sort of reading things you found in the library by novelists you hadn't heard of like muriel spark um at that point but i was also reading stuff like greenham common books books about the middle east anything that felt at all feministy and this was one of those things but it's funny oh it's very funny i mean it's so funny i'd forgotten how funny and what a funny writer she was did she write did she write novels did you i'm gonna i'm gonna do the biographical thing and then we should do the we should do the blurb as well so jill tweedy was born in may 1936 and she died in november 1993 so she would have been 80 this year. She was a writer, broadcaster and feminist but more importantly

she grew up in Croydon. I thought we had to have someone who'd grown up in Croydon, I thought that was the rule. That was the thing, yeah. She wrote about feminist issues for The Guardian from 1969 to 1988, published two volumes of letters from a faint-hearted

feminist, an autobiography called Eating Children, and novels called Internal Affairs and Bliss. That's right, John. I'm going to read you the blurb from Bliss. I'm just going to show the table, the cover of Bliss.

I remember it well. Oh. There's a sort of very much a subverted lace by Shirley Conran going on there, isn't there? Absolutely there is. Was that in between Shirley Conran and Julie Birchall's Ambition? Yes. I mean...

It's 88. Ambition was 88. Beautiful Lady Claire LaFontaine marries the president of Ventura for his money and enters the luxurious and breathtaking world of bliss. But Claire's tropical paradise rapidly becomes a glittering cage when she discovers the dark and hostile side of Raoul's sexuality. And her despairing slide into drugs and promiscuity is only arrested when she is brought face to face with the exploitation and suffering of Ventura and women.

Huge, vital and passionately written cosmopolitan. Do you think it's one of those novels that you would put in the Voldemort bills to pay? It sounds to me a little bit like the same thing as Birch Hill. It's just kind of smart. Oh, Shirley Conran. I mean, there was a bit of a thing for smart intelligent

kind of sophisticated women to write blockbusters so she really publishes books a series of books in the 1980s I think that's right so she died in 1993 I'm just going to read a bit from

an obituary by Sally Belfridge that was published in The Independent. Because actually, I felt, reading the book, I found this really interesting to then read about Jill Tweedy's background. So I'm just going to read this a little. Jill Tweedy had finer qualities and worse luck than seemed possible to coexist in one person. finer qualities and worse luck than seemed possible to coexist in one person. While the qualities, her talent, emotional honesty, wit, generosity, warmth, beauty and intensity of principle were evident not only to her friends but to more than a generation of women who relied on her newspaper column spanning 22 years. The bad luck was obscured by her desire more to explore what she had in common with her readers than to inflict her exotic sufferings upon them.

But in her last book, Eating Children, published this year, she revealed with extraordinary passion the story of the cleft, her name for her father, quote, as unacquainted with love as a Scots pine, who undermined her at every step, her early exceptional promises of ballet dancer who then grew too tall. And her first marriage in Canada to an exiled Hungarian count. Who, while taking her on mad jaunts through the European castle with his relatives,

was torturing her with his insane, possessive love. Her sufferings never resulted in self-pity. In fact, she never even referred to them, publicly or privately. I began to feel that my luck was so bad, she said once, that I became ashamed of it and wouldn't tell anyone about the things that had happened. Instead, she worked incredibly hard to overcome luck's effects, and her pain helped her enter into any pain. In her column for The Guardian, she explored the tragedies of other women or the simple, ordinary miseries of all women marooned at home with small children, demanding men, and the general dreadfulness of domesticity. I think that's rather wonderful. That's great. And I think knowing that, when you...

And you're right, Letters from a Faint-Hearted Feminist is really funny, and Sandhup is really funny. But the commitment to it, and the emotional core of it, I think is really, really important as well, isn't it? Well, it's the faint-hearted bit that's the sort of key to it, because you get this impression of somebody who's in one way kind of trammeled in their domestic life, but of course likes it also, and is very cleverly satirizing their uh friend mary's more sort of outlandish attempts to to promote equality well it's not even really equality between the sexes actually i think it's the sort of um dominance of women this is what liz faulgan

says she said letters from faint-hearted feminists a series of column columns in which issues of central feminist ideology were put through the same critical ringer as the unthinking patriarchal orthodoxies that had been in her earlier columns. Could not you wear high heels with a boiler suit? Were beautiful clothes a gorgeous prison or a legitimate choice for independent women? Was monogamy inevitably a road to servitude?

Fuck with jokes. The thing is, I think that there's an awful lot of writing that you could put in this category subsequently. I mean, it's in a sense fairly ascendant at the minute. And I don't want to be one of those people who says, but it's all a bit shouty. But this is infinitely more subtle, isn't it? Yeah.

There's a great deal more of humorous subtlety. And it's so subtle. And even though the men are obviously a kind of a galere there's a great deal more of humorous subtlety and it's so subtle and so even though the men are obviously a galere of selfish absurd I mean she doesn't ever it's not angry satire

it's you know there's a sort of there's a sort of sense all the way through that Martha who's writing the letters is obviously her life is she has to put up with a massive amount of crap but she does do it with a certain amount of good good grace i mean she does end up doing things for josh that you think what why why are you really doing that you should just leave him to just do all those brilliant things about the that him and his boss you know the woman there's a terrible scene where she has them over for tea

and she's just given them a supermarket pizza so she says, oh I do love home cooking sort of patronised to it and the structure of the letters is brilliant too because I was thinking would this have worked as well as a novel

and I don't think it would No, I think the fact that she is in a fixed point, but generally when she's writing to Mary, Mary is off on some extraordinary escapade. So when it opens, she's just had the sort of, Martha's just had the kind of traditional dreadful Christmas at home, ministering to everyone. She's got a terrible mother.

She's got a terrible mother. The mother is fantastic. I love that mother comes to stay and buys clothes and then stays a whole week so she can return them within the return period at the store. She

wants Janet Rager for Christmas but she gets a spare rib diary and it's evidently supposed to be a thoughtful present but it's not quite how she feels about it. Meanwhile Mary's gone to picket the nativity scenes in Rome. And it just sort of continues like that. She's never far from adventure. And there is Martha, stuck at home.

And actually, her husband's not so terrible. He may or may not be embarking on an affair with the dreadful Irene. One thing I liked about this, and I think it is not coincidental, is that Irene, who is, it's just some kind of financial job that they work in, isn't it? And she is Josh's boss, her husband Josh's boss.

And she has hair blow-dried and hair-sprayed into absolute permanent helmetry. And she wears a nice little Jean Muir number. But by the end of the book, she is off to become an MP. That's what she wants to do.

And it just struck me that it's a parallel with another writer from around this time, where somebody does exactly the same thing, and that's Sue Townsend. In later episodes of Adrian Mole's life Pandora goes off to become an MP and of course this being the high watermark of Thatcherism there is an idea that women can do this

and are going to do this Do you want to find a little bit to read to give us all a flavour of how these go I have one right here shall i dear mary of course i understand your objection to rapists and rippers and robbers in a word men but you have to understand my position i have them in the house mary three of them well you can't quite count the baby yet though he's already very demanding wanting to be fed at inopportune moments and forcing me to drop everything and retire to the

bedroom. Jane and Ben, the two older children, had the nerve the other night to ask why I couldn't breastfeed him naturally. I told them I was under the impression that I was doing just that, and they said they meant in front of them. I was shocked. Certainly not, I said in a Lady Bracknell voice. Then they both delivered a diatribe about Mother Nature that included references to dogs and puppies, the women of Africa and the women in Parliament who did it in front of MPs. As coolly as I could, I pointed out to the kids that even women in Parliament tuck themselves under the wool sack or somewhere, and pretty watercolours of breastfeeding women with rosy toddlers gathered around their knees were one thing but doing it with two great yorks like them gaping down there's mother's

hitherto unrevealed assets and the possibility of flanagan and co-joining the merry throng was quite another besides it could wreak havoc with ben's Oedipal dilemma, if he had one, which I doubt. And if, Mary, you are thinking of taking their side, I would remind you that the only helpless member of God's creation you've ever fed in public was that baby guinea pig of yours, and it died. You know, this really reminded me of... I talked about this book a few months ago on Backlisted. This really reminded me of Diary of a Pro a few months ago on backlisted um this really reminded me of diary of a provincial lady by um delafield which is of course written for a feminist magazine

as a series of columns and then brought together as one of the series of volumes i think there are five volumes and provincial ladies but it has that same thing that it has a fascinating kind of brilliant comic rhythm drawing on whatever the issues for women were at the time it was written i think we should also say about letters from a faint-hearted feminist it's very 80s oh yes i mean well the bit i just read you know a discussion about breastfeeding the idea that she is a very intelligent woman who would but i also mean because they were written as newspaper columns, you know, there are specific references to...

The birth of the STP, it's extraordinary. Yeah. Well, Princess Diana. Yeah. Which is fantastic. I thought when I was reading that, what very heaven to be alive in 1981 when the Royal Wedding was happening. If you were a comic writer,

so much good material pouring out of buckingham she aligns on the fact that somebody in a paper or a magazine says that um that lady diana isn't really a career-minded kind of woman so that's all right she's going to fit very nicely into the royal retinue and of course the other sort of very aside kind of cultural references that admittedly are a sort of nostalgia, like when her fridge breaks down and she says it's making more ice than it would make you think it was John Curry, which just made me laugh out loud.

Again, for the younger generation. I was reading it and I realised no mobile phones, no internet. Letters. Yeah, letters. And yet the texture of life doesn't feel... I mean, you know, you could more or less publish these now. And a lot of the issues, particularly issues weirdly about men and women and women and women,

are still completely relevant. And I just thought, because she's such a good comic writer, but I love this. This is about leaks. A male who can pick out a goodly leak and process it into a Lancashire hotpot may possibly contribute more to the struggle for sexual equality than any amount of ideological jargon. You tell me, Mary, that your Bobby Joe is a truly feminist man

because he always says he and she, his and hers, men and women. Hurrah for Bobby Joe. But can he pick out a decent leak at ten paces and make of it something fit to be ladled into mankind's, humankind's, mouth? If so, full marks. If not, hot air. And answer me this one. Who cleans the lavatory at sebastopol terrace

no don't fudge it with ifs and buts who mary and it's like actually still it is still the big that when you're talking about domestic life you know the a lot of these things are so they're still absolutely kind of precise and and and she gets it so she captures it brilliantly and what she does brilliantly is also the fact that she has uh you know this not particularly attentive husband she has a son who she likens to a stick of celery a little bit inert uh and uh she has the baby who's who's rather kind of delightful and doesn't cause very many problems but exactly the women who are really getting on to her it's mary who's constantly telling her she's not being feminist enough it's her daughter

who she wears a pair of high heels that she's absolutely thrilled it's the first time she's been out of the house for ages and she buys some new shoes and her daughter essentially gives her a lecture on how she's letting down the whole of womankind and her mother her appalling mother who just is constantly on josh's side thinks he's been terribly neglected it's really reminded me of a thing that thing you're talking about really reminded me a bit of when i worked it uh for waterstones like 20 years ago i ran the fiction section at waterstones in kensington high street and uh fiction it was great it was great. It was a privilege. And so we had within that a women's fiction drop. Of course you did.

Okay. And we had the women's fiction drop. And one day in 1994, a female customer came in and said, why have you got that women's fiction drop? came in and said, why have you got that women's fiction drop? They should be, women's fiction should be integrated with all the fiction. And I went, yeah, actually, yes, perhaps you're right, we should do that. Did you really say that, or did you say, get out? The next day, I reorganised it, and I put all the Viragos and women's press books into fiction.

It took all day because you had to rearrange the whole thing, right? The following day, a different female customer said, where's your women's fiction section? I said, oh, it's mixed in. She went, no, it shouldn't be mixed in. It should be on its own. It's retail, mate, isn't it? I asked the comedian Bridget Christie what she would say,

and she said, well, the obvious answer is they should be in both sections. What, double-stocked? Yeah. How's that for me? But the point being, what I like about this book very much is the idea that she can adopt, through different characters, different points of the feminist argument right? Yeah I'm not sure she entirely adopts Mary's

but she knows possibly the women's sub-orgasmic therapy group which I think would go a bomb if re-founded I love this bit I haven't laughed as much for a long time as it, by the way where on earth is mo and why i got a card from her last week it showed a scrubby sort of desert being

pecked at by some large sinister black birds the stamp was obliterated by squiggly marks and all it said in those scratchy red ink capitals mo uses when she's about to flip her lid was we know disgracefully little about the kurs in pan-arabic sisterhood mo well as it happens I do know disgracefully little about the Kurds and I'll bet they know disgracefully little about me do you think she's using some kind of code all that leaps to mind is a way of double entendres in a is a dreary kind of cheese is she is she a prisoner in a factory farm please reveal all in your next or i shall have to table a question in the house but i just i just it is that thing of of misp that

kind of like i mean the curds you know this is 1982 it's it's something that that whole sense of us being kind of little england and inward looking yeah but all of this stuff is being played out even though it's done in a very amusing and light-hearted way in this book but you what surprised me is that maybe i think for a lot of the generation who grew up in the 70s and i would agree with myself we thought actually yeah we know women it's it's all going to be fine it's all going to be fine it's all you know we kind of and this book was it was in a way a kind of a high i sort of see it almost as a high watermark feminism was was confident enough uh to be able to to poke fun at itself yeah and yet that i almost

i almost read with a sort of sickening nostalgia realizing that a lot of this a lot of what we thought was going to change hasn't really changed. And the, you know, when you look at particularly the American election, the horrible, the trolling on the internet of every significant female figure who's prepared to say anything, you suddenly feel actually things haven't really improved. I'm just going to counterpoint that with, uh, on the other hand, on other hand. On the other hand, you know, there are books being published at the moment and selling in significant quantities by Bridget Christie, who I just mentioned, but also Sarah Pascoe's got a book out now, Caitlin Moran, which deal with these issues and are funny about these issues

in a way that probably are reaching far more people, and I would argue younger people, than Jill Tweedy did in that era. I'm just wondering, I've got Bridget's book here, it's called A Book for Her. I'm not that old. I read it in 1982. No, you're significantly younger. Bridget, in her book, A Book for Her, she says this. After I did my show on feminism, everyone then started calling me Bridget Christie, the feminist comedian. I was asked to write a show on feminism, everyone then started calling me Bridget Christie, the feminist comedian.

I was asked to write a book about feminism, which was a very good idea of my publishers, especially after Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf, Susan B. Anthony, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, Naomi Wolfe, Kat Banyard, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Natasha Walter, Caroline Criado-Perez, Laura Bates, Susan Faludi, Ariel Levy, Bell Hookwood, Natasha Walter, Caroline Criado Perez, Laura Bates, Susan Faludi, Ariel Levy, Bell Hooks, Alice Walker, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Kate Austin, Dora Montefiore, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone,

Adrienne Rich, Susie Allback, Eve Ensler, and Millie Tant all made such a mess of it. I'm a feminist. I hate all men. I even hate Ban Ki-moon. It's one thing to try to eradicate female gentle mutilation and forced marriage, but Mrs Ban Ki-moon told me she can't remember the last time her husband put the hoover round.

Or sprayed his own soiled pants with pre-wash banish. Feminism begins at home, Mr Ban. Not at the UN. Ban Ki-hypocrite, banish. Feminism begins at home, Mr. Ban. Not at the UN. Banky hypocrite, more like. I also learned that feminists hate being complimented, praised, or having our lives improved or enhanced in any way by a man. A feminist would rather be dead than have her life saved by a man. Feminism is the sole cause of recession, global warming, terrorism,

pandemics, cancelled flights, volcanoes. You can't have hot drinks at work now because of feminism. You can't eat a lobster without safety goggles now because of feminists. You can't even open a door now because of all the feminists. All feminists wear glasses and look like Velma from Scooby-Doo circa 1969, Olive from On the Buses or Elton John from the the Gay Community, and Princess Di's Funeral, etc. Yeah, very good. Very good. Very funny.

Why isn't this book in print? Well, quite. I've done my best. I mean, you know, in a quite half-assed way. But I think it would be great back in print and I would like that to happen. And I'd like it to happen, you know, for obvious reasons, because I think it's a great book,

but I think it would bring a moment of, exactly as you said, John, a little bit of self-satirising to what is occasionally... ..occasionally a slightly humourless debate or set of debates. Yeah, but, but I mean for me I always like finding writers that I haven't read before who were funny right and because there's not that many funny writers are there

well I don't think so I've said before on Batlisted that I think funny writing is often about rhythm you know about where to land a word not just a joke a word and she's a joke, a word. And she's so good, Jill Tweedy. She's so good at this.

Can I read another bit of it? Yeah, do, please. Because it gives the answer to, it's the kind of response to John's earlier reading. Dear Mary, thanks for the snap you sent me in your last letter of you and Mo in Chadeau's outside Sebastopol Terrace. You're quite right. I can't tell which is you and Mo in Chadeau's outside Sebastopol Terrace. You're quite right. I can't tell which is you and which is Mo.

But why is my bewilderment merely a predictable bourgeois individualist reaction? Even a duck-billed platypus might become a trifle disorientated if it couldn't pick out its pal in the next burrow from any duck-billed platypus that happened to wander by. I know, I know. I wrote that Shadoors could have their advantages, but this is ridiculous. Very good.

Matthew, do you have a tenuous publishing link? I have got a tenuous publishing link, and it's a very simple one this week, and it's simply to recommend a book that I really love by another former Guardian's women's page editor, which is Mafia Women that Claire Longrig wrote in the late 90s. It came out in 1997. It's a book about the kind of... She went out to Sicily and interviewed women

that were involved in the mob. And it's a fantastic, wonderful piece of kind of a portage. I was saying earlier that i thought some of the some of the references were very 80s but there is other there are other things in here as alex was saying as john was saying which seemed to me you could write now there's a little bit here about going to the supermarket there isn't a good fairy about waving her wand and hey presto baked beans and bunches of bananas there's just just me, making lists, slogging down to the shops and slogging back again. All they know is they go out, come back and the cupboard's full.

Magic. Probably that's why I came home today from the supermarket with a hot toothbrush. I don't believe in the property stuff. I just have this very deep feeling that the world owes me something. Even if it's only one yellow toothbrush medium bristle what i feel is the supermarket ought to reward me for working so hard on their behalf and since they don't i'm forced to reward myself hence the toothbrush they pretend they're doing us a favor having everything self-service and all the time it's us doing them a favor trekking around their noisy overcrowded food hangers so we can stick our

week's housekeeping in their tills and pay for their plastic bags covered with their advertising. There was this old lady in there today doing it her way, not sticking toothbrushes up her jumper, but quietly awarding herself consoling swigs of whiskey while struggling to buy whiskers

for her cat. By the time she arrived at the checkout, that old lady was feeling no pain and the bottle was tucked neatly back on the drinks shelf, a little bit empty. I gave her an admiring grin as I passed her. Bottoms up, she said, bless her OAP heart. What supermarkets ought to do, if they had any imagination beyond fleecing you, is give each worn-out trolley pusher a prezzy at checkout a pair of tights a

bag of sweeties a toothbrush free it costs them less than shoplifting and cut down on that too oh do you know what that bliss makes me think of i didn't really think about when i was rereading that this blissfully comes before the hideous era of people having to do posh cooking at home yeah do you know what i mean when she goes shopping she's stocking up and she's telling you she's getting kind of bananas and oranges and she's getting a bit of fish she's got to get the spuds and the leeks as we are but it's not she is not sitting there trying to you know make her her souffle as she knows souffle is too 270s make something with quinoa my my favorite line in it is just when she says about

them her and josh going on holiday to their place in france i lieutenant which is fantastic fantastic little one night i mean it's full of them i was there was a food bit that i'd really liked as well which is the um ben's departed for school leaving notes saying it was not me took the cream off the milk and jane's departed for college leaving empty empty tins of oxfell soup behind her can oxtail soup be called a proper breakfast what is what is an ox surely they don't grow in england the poor creatures are probably shipped from india or somewhere tails and all in ghastly freighters mooing or whatever oxes do the baby is down on the floor with the cat eating whiskers

he's particularly partial to the lamb's heart flavor and josh banged the door quite loudly as he went off to the office saying all you ever wanted for breakfast was one bowl of sultana bran and why was there never any or was that too much to ask of a liberated wife i want to add at this point as well just before we come to the end that this book although it's not in print it is widely available from all 1p stockists

well no it's good because we've had a problem a couple of times now with books that people have not been able to get hold of because they're very expensive fortunately this seems to be uh widely available there isn't an e-book but there is a picador edition and there was until recently an

edition published by robson as well so if you want to read it you should be able to to pick that up uh quite easily um should we um should we bid farewell um yeah i, there was just one little other bit that I just thought because it's about Ben, the teenage boy. Once you start, you can't stop. When she discovers, Martha discovers his girlfriend is 38 and the girlfriend is 36.

There I was, with the birds and bees all planned, ready for Ben's first whisper of romance. A motherly man-to-man chat about responsibilities and courtesy to the opposite sex and always using the necessaries and now i'm locked in combat with a female pederast it's too much how am i supposed to mother an innocent babe and a sex crazed teenage clown all at the same time morning spent sticking heinz chicken dinner in a small mouth, one for mummy down the little red lane.

Evening spent embroiled in a May to September saga of mismatched lust. No one woman can bridge such gulfs, and Josh is no use. He coarsened before my eyes when told, and clapped Ben on the back for the first time since he's had his five times tables. I love that he calls such a good word picker yeah and you're right you're right rhythm andy you're quite right it's always it always comes down to just the inflection on a word to make it funny you know obviously

ideas yes obviously commitment to a subject, yes. Also, the word. I think she's, like we said earlier, I think she's every bit as funny a writer as Sue Townsend. And I kind of agree. I think this is a classic. It ought to be in print. That seems as good a point as any on which to stop.

Thanks to Alex Clark, to Matthew Clayton, to producer Matt Hall. And thanks once again to Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter, to Matthew Clayton, to producer Matt Hall, and thanks once again to Unbound. You can get in touch with us on Twitter, at BacklistedPod, on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash BacklistedPod, and on our page on the Unbound site, unbound.co.uk forward slash Backlisted. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with another show in a fortnight.

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forward slash backlisted, where you also get bonus content of two episodes of Locklisted, the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks.