Sara & Cariad's Weirdos Book Club - The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore with Nell Frizzell

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

This week's book guest is The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore.Sara and Cariad are joined by journalist and writer Nell Frizzell - author of The Panic Years, Holding the Baby and Cuckoo - to discuss public transport, fear of men, victimhood and swimming in the Thames.Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you!Trigger warning: In this episode we discuss domestic abuse, war violence and colonial genocide.The Lost Wife is available to buy here.You can find Nell on Instagram @nellfrizzellCariad’s children's book The Christmas Wish-tastrophe is available to buy now.Sara’s debut novel Weirdo is published by Faber & Faber and is available to buy here.Cariad’s book You Are Not Alone is published by Bloomsbury and is available to buy here.Tickets for Sara's tour show I Am A Strange Gloop are available to buy from sarapascoe.co.ukFollow Sara & Cariad’s Weirdos Book Club on Instagram @saraandcariadsweirdosbookclub and Twitter @weirdosbookclub Recorded and edited by Naomi Parnell for Plosive.Artwork by Welcome Studio.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Pasco. Hello, I'm Carriad Lloyd. And we're weird about books. We love to read. We read too much. We talk too much. About the too much that we've read. Which is why we've created the Weirdo's Book Club.

Join us. A space for the lonely outsider to feel accepted and appreciated. A place for the person who'd love to be in a real book club, but doesn't like wine or nibbles. Or being around other people. Is that you? Join us. Check out our Instagram at Sarah and Carriad's Weirdo's Book Club for the upcoming books we're going to be discussing. You can read along and share your opinions.

Or just skulk around in your raincoat like the weirdo you are. Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you. This week's book guest is The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore. What's it about? An American woman on the run becomes familiar with the Sioux tribes during a massacre. What qualifies it for the weirdos book club? Well, the central character, your classic oddbaud,

fate name, dysfunctional upbringing and deeply empathetic. In this episode we discuss, Public transport, motherhood, fear of men, victimhood, and swimming in the Thames. And joining us this week is Nell Frizzell. Nell is a journalist and writer. Her books include non-fiction holding the baby and the panic years and Kuckoo, her first novel. Trigger warning in this episode we discuss war violence and colonial genocide.

Nell Frizzell. Here's my confession. The book, The Lost Wife by Susanna Moore, is the book that we're doing. Someone in a broad sheet had said it was very, very interesting. And I had read your book Holding the Baby. and I thought, this is going to have such a crossover. This is a woman who's like unhappy with her lot and now has written this sort of polemic about, you know, maternity, paternity,

what are we doing as a society? How is civilisation making really basic biological things so much harder, da-da-da-ta, we'll get Nell on to talk about it. And then I started reading the book and I was like, oh. There is not as much overlap as I was expecting. There is a lot more about the Sioux Indian tribes and the war in Dakota than you'd expect from a Nelfrasel book. Yes.

Yeah. I didn't fight in that war as far as I remember. But actually postpartum I could have done. Yeah. I remember... You went for a run, postpartum, didn't you? Yeah, postpartum, I went for a run, I should say, not to the jog. How postpartum? Six months after I did a half marathon.

But I wrote, I wrote on my back, I gave birth six months ago because I wanted everyone to know. How awful is that? But the postpartum run I'm thinking of is I used to run along the River Lee in the dark. It was all sort of misty. And this guy was running towards me, who I subsequently found out it's a boxer. This huge boxer running in the dark towards me. And I remember thinking, I had a 50-hour labour, you can't touch me. It's like insane postpartum sense of physical invincibility, which is slightly worn off now.

Oh, it's amazing, though, because, I mean, your body going, you need to be alive to get a baby alive. So sorry, boxer. Yeah, you're going down. So, yeah, we are talking about the lost wife by Susanna Moore. So it's set in the 18. 60s. But published in 23. Yes, it's her most recent book. She's also the author of Miss Aluminium and In the Cut.

Yes. Did you know she's a former model, Susanna Moore, who was once Warren Beatty's assistant? And did you hear about what he did in her job interview? No. She was planning to be a script editor and he said, just lift up your skirt so I can check your legs. And she laughed and he said, you've got the job. Wow.

Women laughing to diffuse her verse. I know. And they're working for them. They don't teach you that. Secretary of College. Yeah. I just remember being 18 working in a pub and going. Oh my God, all the time.

All the time. But you know, we were saying laughing to diffuse perverts. She, I listened to an interview with her with an Australian literary festival. She said, in writing this book, I wanted to create no victims. I thought that was really interested. So it's a book where terrible things happen to people, but no one identifies as a victim at any point. And I thought, like, in a sort of, you know, In our current feminist moment, what does it say to not allow victim status to be sort of placed upon you or to choose it for yourself?

To be so many things happening that are wrong. Yeah, to be the sort of the butt of injustice but not see that as victimhood is really interesting to me. It starts in, just to give context, starts in 80-55. Sarah Brinton is our character's name and she's an abuse. Or is it? Or is it? Yes. She's an abusive relationship with this horrible husband, Ank, who burns her and everyone knows.

And that's dealt with so sort of deftly because we're not, again, we're not given buckets and buckets of description of the trauma. But yet we absolutely, it absolutely vibrates from this very, very young woman escaping. She goes west to a small frontier

post, which is currently claimed by white settlers and in the book described as Native Americans. She finds a new husband. And she's looking for her best friend. She's looking for her best friend Maddie. Yeah. She grew up in a mental asylum. Yeah. And then her mother was a, I mean, it's so interesting.

There's so much stuff, isn't there? Got put in an asylum. We have a little bit where she kind of is leaving. And then the majority of the book is her with this new husband in this land where the Sue are also living alongside them with the white settlers. And her husband is a kind of doctorish figure. And then war breaks out between the Sue and the white settlers, which is a well-known, horrible, horrific war with much genocide.

It's something I knew absolutely. I know nothing about. And she, Susanna Moore found, so there is a real... Yes, it's based on this real book. Six Weeks in the Sioux TPs, a narrative of Indian captivity by Sarah Wakefield, which is what is loosely based on a real life story. This woman was captured with her two young children,

abducted by, I'm going to say this wrong, decouartan warriors during the Sioux uprising of 1862. And this uprising culminated in the hanging of 38 Dakota, which is the largest mass execution in American history, which was authorized by President Lincoln. and himself. Again, to come back to that victims and victimhood, there's never a time in history where this hasn't been true.

You have people who settle in a place that isn't their land and then fight, torture, oppress the people who are already living there. The people who are living there, they're trying to protect their own families or not starve to death, fight back, and are then seen as the evil ones by the people and who are also, our families,

to jump to completely different things. So my husband is a sort of European, Australia, His grandfather is Greek and went to Australia at 11 and has dementia. So it talks a lot about Australia as the promised land. Australia is the safety because he came from a civil war as an orphan. This country saved me, this country's been a thing. And to have that going along exactly on side the, you know, the indigenous people of that country struggling for everything

because it's all been taken away. And that that history is so sure that you can have the one-voice referendum whilst there is still someone living with a kind of recollection of it being a promised land, it's really interesting. Yeah. Yeah, it's recent. It's super recent. My dad's family are all from New Zealand and I talked to my auntie about why she's just

got this insane sort of work ethic and sort of, I think, vivacity and she was saying, well, probably we're the ones who left, so there's probably just an urge to keep moving. And Susanna Moore said there's a lovely quote in the book where the thing about running, about impermanence and transients aside from the simple relief of moving on is that you don't really have time to think. And so there is something really appealing about being that person who just keeps going and keeps going, keeps going. But you're absolutely right, so that's the sort of fear of reverse colonialism.

It's the thing in Dracula, like, oh, we're going to get penetrated by the other, by the outside when we are, we were as a British empire, the ones that were penetrating and exploiting the rest of the world. And so that fear, that sort of frontiers fear of being, you know, there's a bit later in the book where some of the Sioux men are wearing napkin rings around their neck and they're wearing watches on their ankles and they're making this sort of terrible parade of European quote unquote civilisation. Because that is the great fear of the settler that we will be made to look ridiculous

because what we are doing is in itself. It's apporrent, but also ridiculous in its own way. Seen from the outside is a ridiculous thing to do to turn up in a new country. And the things that you cling to because stuff is safety. It's a really sort of like animal behaviour of like my nest has got stuff in it. she describes, doesn't she, the house that she's making with the doctor, the child that they have and like the napkins that the mother-in-law sent and the good tablecloths and all this stuff that is in the middle of nowhere. And that civilization resides in like satin drapes and china bowls and that's what civilization is.

So later when those things are smashed or repurposed, where is civilization? And then there's that very telling moment at the end where she says about the doctor, her husband, that he doesn't sort of ask her what she did when she was in the camp because he is civilised. And it's like, oh, so civilisation is this she and we put over everything that basically means ignorance, denial, the sort of justification after the act. That's what civilisation is. So she did an amazing job of this character, Sarah Brinton. Like she's a fascinating character to spend time with.

she observes her husband she's aware that he's addicted to Lordnum she sort of sees through but she also learns to speak Sue and she's talking to these women who trust her up to a point but so she's right in the middle of this you know like you said white settlers and the Sue she doesn't belong in either place

she doesn't belong in either place yeah yeah she doesn't consider herself above them which means she was not she cannot be part of the white settlers you know it also means that her observations of them aren't uncomfortable as a yes a reader I'm not thinking, oh God, this is a colonial. But yet she still causes damage constantly.

And that's what I found really interesting. Even when she's not, she's like, well, I'm not judging you. I speak your language. And here I am, still ruining your land. Destroying your children. At the moment, she's caught by them. She endangers everybody. But she's sort of the good settler, isn't she?

I'm trying to learn the language. I actually thought that's what's so interesting about her as a mother, or maybe like the motherhood urge, right? Because there are lots of pleasant things. And I guess they're the things we think about, you know, nurturing things. But actually there's this other side which is you will, you are hardwired to do whatever you can to protect your children. And that is dangerous. Oh, that can be dangerous.

But she's a trick. So she is a very complicated, ambiguous figure. From the beginning, just to think sort of in terms of how she looks and all the questions about race and what it is to pass and what it is to, you know, quote and assimilate. She says this great line about her mum said, whoever has the strongest orgasm, that's who the baby will look at. Yeah. She says, maybe I am Greek or Turkish. And you get this idea very early on that she is sort of living in a state between any sort of recognisable visual ethnicity. And then later on she says, my life is half like a fairy tale and half like a news report.

So she's halfway between. So she exists again in this sort of anyone who's on an English degree liminal space between the true and the imagined. And so when big things happen, that's why I found the stuff with children really weird because we know that she's. He's got this abandoned daughter, and we also, there's a bit where her son gets taken away by a man on a horse. That was the worst thing I read. But Weirdo's Book Club, you've got to stop picking books where babies get killed. It's awful because it gets dropped in and then all my anxiety is heightened. That moment where she's like, where's James?

But where's James? Someone's like, don't worry, he's ahead. He's up the front. I was like, oh, God. He's sort of been adopted by another woman. Yeah. He's trying to steal him. She's trying to steal the son.

And there's the implication we're giving. I just thought, oh, she loves him. I mean, yeah, but she is also trying to take him from Sarah, the mother. But then there's also that man with the horse. He's like, I'll carry James off for you. And the bit of me is like, hell. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I even just said, I said that's the worst bit of the book.

And actually, there's some really horrific books. But it's the bit that made me feel sick in the kind of like, you can feel the child is not where it's meant to be. And as a reader, you're like, what's going to happen? Well, actually, right at the very beginning, the journey, like her commute. Oh my God, her commute. When I look back, that's only like a quarter of the book.

Yeah, it's just a set-up. And it's so vibrant. And it's, for me, that I really love that Susanna Moore says she had this character, this woman, real-life woman, and then she just made up the beginning of it. She just made up this woman's story up until the point that she knew about. But the bit that she makes up is almost for me that it was a novel I could, have stayed in for the rest of them. Yeah, I was like, surprised that it's

brilliant it is. But that first bit where she's just eating bags of carrots and someone, there's a preacher on the boat who says, would you like me to preach? And a woman says, oh no, I'm prone to seizures. She's like, nah, I'm all right. Yeah, she's getting steamboats down the river. She sort of starts in Boston, Chicago. And sort of sleeping

on a train carriage before the train goes. And that's when I started to feel like, oh, no, she's in danger because she was a woman alone, a young woman, with no money and is constantly in danger. That's the other thing she's telling you at this time, a period of history, a woman is constantly endangered. Could be husband, could be new husband, you know, the settlers who are trying to kill you, like... And I don't want to be flippant, you're right, when her son goes missing, that is awful. But another point that really stress me out,

she falls asleep on the train. Yes. And that really stresses me out when everyone's asleep on a train in a novel, I think, well, that's that then. You've lost everything. Yeah, yeah. You're basically going to get stolen and you're now living in Innsbruck. She does lose some stuff and she does, like, she's, like, she's, so vulnerable, but as she said, but she isn't ever a victim. She's never like, well, even when she gets to where she's searching for this friend Maddie and she gets and she finds out, she's told really awfully, oh, Maddie's dead, she got cholera, she's chucked in the river. Let's hope there's not a low tide, someone says to her. And it's her whole reason for being

has been to find this friend that, and it's just taken from her. And I thought, well, here we go. This is where she falls apart. But she doesn't. She does. But can I and I want to ask you. She lays in bed for days and days and days. Do you know what I mean? She then carries on and makes a new life, is what I mean. I did ask you as a grief expert, when she goes into this cot, literally, and she's surrounded by a curtain and she doesn't get changed. I thought, is that an attractive state? Is that there something about sort of returning to your infantile state of helplessness? Is that relatable?

Is it attractive to just absent yourself from your life? Or is it actually horrific to be in a room full of men behind a curtain with no one giving you any sense of empathy or compassion? I don't think it's a great. Coming at the end of that journey, you've got the exhaustion and the emotional exhaustion sort of, it made complete sense to me that someone would be catatonic. Because she's got nowhere to go. All of that momentum of moving is you've just talked about, that busyness, that you're going towards something. And she's also kind of aggressing to life in the asylum, isn't she?

Where she describes that they don't have anything to do, they're stuck there, her and Maddie, and they just kind of sleep and then muck around. So that's what it kind of did for me. It was like she went back to where she was with Maddie, lying next to her and a filthy, disgusting circumstance. But then that would kill a lot of characters. That would make you go, well, I've travelled all this way. I've ran away from an abusive husband

because I believed in a better life. There isn't one. And then suddenly she sees someone as like, I'm going to need to marry him. Survival. Yeah, survival. There's a Rose Tremaine book called Lily, which is about a young woman in a sort of orphanage and her constant trying to escape. And that is much more sort of, and it's a novel,

but much more of a kind of victim that sort of, you know, being trapped. In this book, that doesn't seem to happen. I mean, I just assumed her and Maddie were lovers. Yes. They loved each other. And they got told off from rubbing up and lying on top of each other. Also, as anyone who lost their virginity to a man, that she plays being a man who

just lies on top of her and doesn't move. Yeah, that's how that goes. She doesn't like being described as a women's writer. She likes to write about sex and flowers and children, but she doesn't think that that should be considered women's writing. I thought that was really interesting because there is a lot of

description of flowers in this book. And she has to sort of explain it by saying that at the asylum there was a book of of American native plants. Yeah, because no one knows this stuff. Yeah. But this character knows. And there's descriptions of periods and there's descriptions. You know,

all this stuff that would get you sort of classified in a certain area of fiction. Yeah. Well, that's one of the areas. Because I read Cuckoo thinking, I'll find what the parallels are. Yeah, sure. your characters have periods. When you're writing, is that a conscious decision or is it just what your brain does when you go, no, I want the reader to really know what's going on in the body?

I think at this particular point in my life, it's something that we talk about every month because every month, a woman I know, or someone with a womb, is saying, I could either be premenstrual or perimenopausal or pregnant and I don't know which it is. And that is such an insane situation to live in every month. Maybe I'm pregnant. maybe I'm never going to be pregnant. Maybe I'm not pregnant this month. You know, that, of course it drives you insane.

And so I think if you write a book about a 39-year-old woman and don't include that, it's not very true to life. Whereas here we know that they get moss and they put it in a sort of little stack. I thought that sounded nice and always part. I thought that sounds quite good. And also that the character is scared about menstruating for months of the book

because she would have to go to a heart alone and not be with her children. So the other thing is that that separation and the danger. Yeah, I thought that was really... Interesting. Because I think when you hear about women being taken to menstruation hunts,

which happens in some cultures, that's something I'm familiar with. I've never considered that means the children you already have are now vulnerable. It's always like, oh, you're just going because you're bleeding. And I've never been like, oh, as a mother, that means you, the primary carer,

the one who stops people attacking them or taking them away or doing anything horrible, are forbidden to protect them. And also, so there's double vulnerability. we are told a story about a young woman being sick while she's menstruating and the male doctor isn't allowed to visit her and she dies. And the women there are alone. I thought what you're just saying now is really interesting

that she doesn't want it to be a women's book and it's called The Lost Wife and actually it kind of isn't that because there's a war in it. So because the last third is a war. Well, if you said I've just heard a book about the sort of Frontiers Life of the sort of American West and there's a, war with the Sioux Indians, that sounds like, you know, the rest is history fodder. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Middle-aged white men would be like, oh, yes, that's my family. Yeah, and then, ha-ha, they're going to be bleeding into moss. Yeah, I think, and she's also doing that amazing thing of, it's a perspective you've, you know, you don't come across of like they are the women in the camp waiting for what the battle is. So when they come back with how many white scalps they've got or how many people are, sues are injured and bleeding, that's how she knows whether. her side, inverted commas, are winning or losing, even though she doesn't know where her husband is

because he's a doctor, so he's gone away. And she's forming her in corpses of neighbours and people that she knows from society in inverted commas. And she's in a tent with a Sue family, somehow she's involved, but the rest of the white women are very separate, screaming and throwing shit at her for being in this tent, and she's also falling slightly in love.

Oh, she's sort of a romantic sexual infatuation with a man. And it's her first bit. have expressed sexual design. Yes, yeah. Because there's amazing, her first sex scene with her husband, which I thought was brilliantly done. We know that he has got marks on his penis from having the clap. Yes, and that he has to dip his balls in some green liquid made of cardmen.

So, like, yes, there is discussion of periods, but there's also, like, very visceral description of male genitalia at time. Yeah. But it's really interesting. Then she has this moment with Chaska, where he basically looks at her and protects her and doesn't try to have sex with her and she doesn't recognize the feeling. She doesn't recognize what is welling up in her and she feels untrustworthy of it. And she later on she reflects because she's so close to death, I mean, but she does reflect

on at least I know what a vows always like. Yes, because that was the first time. It's so interesting to have a character who, as we said, to come back to this colonial idea of like she is white, white, she's one of the white settlers, whatever she may, and the children are compared to the Sioux. She speaks some of the language. She's been kinder to them than some of the other women who have, you know, think they are the devil incarnate.

So she's, when war breaks out and there is this horrific genocide. And the only reason it breaks out is because the white settlers lie and do not give them the money that was promised. So they are starving and they have this shed full of like pork and everything. And I thought to you, they're so starving that they're eating their horse's ears. And I thought Sarah's not going to like this. Oh, we call with that. I didn't like any of it.

I mean, it's a horror. And there's something about choosing a right and wrong side, which makes it easy. That's what I can say, yes, you're not allowed to write a wrong side. Good one, bad person. This is the person I'm rooting for. A bad thing happened to my good hero opposite. Or my hero did a thing, but they had to survive. The uncomfortableness, the constant uncomfortable from the minute she started commuting.

Commuting. I would not cope in a war. I would not be able to protect my family. I don't want to forage. I don't want to have to befriend. I find it really interesting because it's, because she's talking about people who are lost. The urge to survive is actively aggressive.

It means that you will, to defend, you will attack. But she couldn't. What's interesting, she would have been like this in the asylum. She would have been like this if she stayed in Boston with the abusive husband. She would have had to survive. She's just moved herself to a different position where she has to survive. And that's what I think she's like, who does. goes go west, who go where there's nothing. There's no law and there's no society and you're

living with like 20 people. But also Susanna Moore does sort of, by telling us about what other characters are doing, the reason people do is because the land is incredibly cheap. And these are the people who nowadays have incredibly wealthy families. Yeah, if they survive, because their relatives went there and basically staked their place. Yeah. And if they survive the disease, the war, the famines, the massacres, like what you have to do, obviously I'm not praising, It just sounded like I was like, well done then. You know what? They did it. The thing you've got to do, there's no way around it.

I think it's really hard for us as sort of British people born now to understand the significance and role of land in history. When people talk about land, and I get a small insight to it when I talk to refugees and they talk about their feeling about land and what land signifies and what land means to your family and how long you've been on a particular bit of land and how land changes. But actually,

personally in my heart, I don't really understand it. And for this, in this book, there's so much about going in and out of the landscape and where you belong. And she sort of doesn't belong anywhere. But there are characters who seem very embedded. You know, they know what herbs do and they understand how to keep water clean. And, you know, that sort of role of land, I think is in all of those frontiers narratives and migratory books, I think about in Salman Rushdie, You know, it's that, yeah, why would you travel across? Like, why did my family go to the other side of the world with like a beehive and nothing else?

Because they needed land. Like land was the thing that they, and it's so funny that in like 1700, they thought they were running out of land in England. Like plus a shange, everyone's scared, we're running out of land. But it's very hard for me to, I can understand about babies and blood and sex and fighting, but I don't really understand that hunger for your own. stake in land. It's a scene I completely love where she walks out in the after, she just walks out of the house and she walks out into the, I think she calls it the prairie as the sun is setting. And it feels like this very transgressive act. It's before the war was broken out. She just

walks out. And she's left her small children at home. She's left her husband at home. She's just walking out in the countryside. And you know there are wolves and you know that there are Indians, as she says, but this and possibly poisonous plants, but she just walks about and she can feel that air getting cold. And it really, after my son was born, I started going out, I'd put him to bed, I'd breastfeed him to bed, and then cycle out of the town that I live in,

up the river, and sleep out in the woods overnight on my own, and then come back at like five in the morning, and I'd be there when he woke up. It was like the perfect crime. And I thought that, the maternal, we have a really complicated idea with maternal freedom. And we always have. We don't think women should want to leave their children ever,

but we also force them to leave their children earlier than they want to. So it's like this very weird sort of double bind that we put ourselves in. And she has this very, I think her sort of walking out of the house and walking away from an earlier child and walking away from her marriage and being ready to pick up a new life. There is a romance to that that I can't deny, even though it makes me feel sad and anxious and protective of my own situation. It fits into the romance of Wild West.

or front-tier life. Like there is like this strength that you need to just leave everything. And like there's so many times when we think she could have stayed. She could have stayed in this life. She could have stayed. There was a daughter. She's left a daughter with this horrible husband and horrible mother-in-law. Like, and she has chosen.

And there is, we see that. It's hard not to romanticise that in a way. Freedom. Like, yeah, she's chosen herself. Yeah. But she's not not affected by it. It's not like she doesn't, you know, she still thinks of that daughter a lot. Yeah.

realize and it's we see the consequences of those choices. We fill in a gap for her. We project onto her. Yeah. When it comes up in those spaces, you feel that loss. To me it's the great magic trick. Elizabeth Strout does it too in a completely different way where you think what you're reading is actually quite a bland literary style.

It seems very straightforward, simple spas. It's just an account of things happening. That's all that's happening. And then you're feeling things and magic is happening. And if I could write like anyone, it would be the ability to do. I think Dylan Thomas is amazing. And, you know, there are writers that have this huge, grandiose use of language. But to do that in a novel, I think is incredible.

And I don't know how they do it. George Saunders in Swimming a Pondon to the Rain, which is what I'm all banging on about all morning. Talks about Tolstoy. And he's breaking down a Tolstoy story story. And he says, actually all Tolstoy is doing is pointing out very clear, boring things, but he's doing them in the way that your brain notices them. and he's adding just the tiniest amount of like,

woman brings samovar over to table, but he's like, oh, she flipped her apron over, lifted up the samovar and led it down with a sigh. And it's like the way the order he's doing it is the way our brains notice things. And he's adding just enough for you to go, oh, now I see her red cheeks and I see the hot kitchen and I can see, like, I'm seeing much more. And he was like, that's the genius of Tolso when you break it down.

He's just telling you facts, but he does it in a way that, you suddenly go, this is truth, these people are real. And the moment someone does it in the wrong order or gives you too much detail, you clanks with your brain, you go, I don't believe it, and he's not really. Yeah, and he said the reader is always constantly

every sentence, is this true? Is this true? Is this true? And when a writer lets us down and doesn't, you go, and it can happen in a book, even if you really like a book, just a couple of sentences. A couple of sentences. Like you said, she just leaves this space and the commute, which you're so wonderfully calling,

the hell journey. It's because I kept thinking, I don't think I could exist in another time. And if the world becomes more dystopian, which presumably, unless you sort of that was going on, the climate, it's going to, I'm just going to have to opt out. I can't do with it. But in 100 years now, 100 years from now,

that's what someone will see our life as this absolute hellhole. I was thinking that because... Oh, do you think? I think that every technology will make you go, how do they do that? They're going to be like barbarians looking back at the Romans and thinking like, what? They had underfloor heating?

Why are we in mud? What did they do? agency written. And so they have this thing which was called a thunderbox as like a joke and it's a movable commode. And so if you,

us three, we were in a carriage going somewhere. When we needed to go, we would just use the commode under our skirt and pour it out the window. And for me to read that, I think I don't have to be friends

with people. Whereas they might feel that about how we go to the toilet. They're like, you just wear one after the other. Yeah, yeah. I know. And on trains.

I just want to pick up on this. I read Anna Karenina by red, I mean, listen to it. And it got completely ruined because my friend Darth had said, have you noticed that all the women's faces just change colour all the time?

Because he does say like a greenish palette and then a red face. And I was like, oh yeah, there are all these like rainbow-faced women. That is a bit weird. Yeah, he's not great with women. It's not great, unfortunately. In Russia though, I bet you would have a scene

talking about would you survive in another era? There's a scene where, I mean, who knows what he's called because they've all got eight names and I don't remember them anyway. But he goes, and does the harvesting with the peasants then lies down on a sort of bail and looks up at the sky. And I read that thinking, oh yeah, I could do that. Yeah, I could do that.

I think you'd be okay now. Like you are like it. You sleep outside. You see outside. You run, you cycle, you're right outdoorsy, you swim in rivers. Are you scared of insects? No, I'm not scared of insects. And I have to say, and this makes me very unpopular, I'm not really scared of men.

Oh. And I think this is, when I can, when I speak out. Spiders. Yeah, maybe men. No, I'm fine. You know a lot of them are poisonous. Yeah, with hairy legs. No, when I sleep outside, like lots of my friends and family get very upset with me for doing it because I think it's dangerous.

And I always have to say, I'm not dangerous, men are dangerous and actually I'm not scared of men. And I think, I don't know why that is because I'm a fairly rationalable person who's fairly engaged with the news. Why am I not? I should be. And I've done this. I've slept in a cottage with no electricity and no running water in the middle of nowhere on my own. And I thought, if a man comes to the door with an axe, I'm going to have to talk to him about it. But if a Victorian baby floats up at the window, bathed in light, I'm going to just jump out of the window and die. I cannot handle that.

Anything supernatural, I cannot bear. Oh, that's interesting. So I'm scared of going mad and the sort of, you know, the realm beyond. Yeah. This is so interesting. Actually, if I was going to analyse you, I'd say you've got this rational part of your brain that can cope. But then imagine the side of your brain, you're like, okay, that's terrifying. My own brain is by far more.

frightening than any man I've ever met, I'm afraid to say. I think men can smell that on me. They know I'm scared. Oh, this one would be a right. Next cottage goes. The things that stressed me out this beautiful, brilliant book. Which I love so much.

Where I got terrified was the idea of having to look after my children in a difficult situation because there's so low, but there's the anguish and pain, and this is on so many characters in the book, feeding your own children. Yeah, when there's nothing. Your children's safety, your children's comfort. This is such a small, pathetic example, but I was once stranded in another country

because the last plane was cancelled. And what you do in that situation is the airport put mattresses out. And so, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, it was, it was, it, it was, and then I, it was, I, as long as I, as I, he was on my lap, he was safe, and I think it was mattered. And it was my really overwhelming, um, and, um, and it was my, um, and, and it was my, learning about what it was to be a mother because the plane the next day was full of lots of parents,

but I mean moms, talking about what they'd done, and there was a mum who'd stayed up. So she had teenage children, and she was just too scared because everyone was scared of being robbed. And, you know, you're in a public place with all the lights on, all the announcements. Horrible.

She'd stayed up and just had a hand on each child, and there was one mum who'd managed to get an Airbnb. It only had one bed, so her kids had been in a bed, and she'd been on the floor. It's like, this is what moms do. Yeah. Thanklessly. And thank God you only find out when you become a mum or a parent. I shouldn't say mum.

But, you know, like, and so that's what stressed me out. It's quite bad. You could have read it before you had children. I would none of that. Yeah, I wonder about that. Well, it's really interesting because I've started retraining as an English teacher and I'm reading books that I last read at sort of 15. Yeah.

I reread Animal Farm. Oh, wow. It's a very different book. But what is interesting is you remember in your body who you were when you first read it. I didn't realize that would happen. I thought I'd have a time travel, the power of time travel that books give you. I thought I'll have a new perspective on this novel, which I obviously do because I've been to Russia and I've been to council meetings and I've been, I've been in socialists meetings. I know, and I've, you know,

been on farms, which I don't think I had really at 15. What was weird was turning the page and feeling almost like my braces back in my mouth and doing that. And I think that's why occasionally it is worth rereading books to see, to remember who you were when you first read it. in a way wish I read this before I had a baby. Or what the bits that spoke to you. Yeah. It's so odd to read back and go, that's not, right at the beginning of this podcast. Oh, yeah, we read Iris Murdoch under the bed.

Oh, my God. And at university, we had said. Oh, I had said. She writes such good men. She wrote such good men. And the fact is I didn't know any men. Yeah, not in the way. And the only, because I listened to her episode,

the only bit of that whole book and I did read it is the bit where they go swimming at nine. In terms of the jumps, the only. It's the only, I remember. It's them swimming in the river. The rest of the book genuinely could have been about, like, people playing dance dance revolution. I'd be like,

no, I don't remember. Like, yeah, sure. Well, when I read it, we had the same thing.

It's like, what? He goes to a theater. It's running. Who's his house is here? I remember. Because the bit of the Thames is so, I think it's well growing up in London.

People did not swim in the Thames. So when you're, people are just getting in the Thames without being like, you'll die. It's full of diseases. It was like, wow, again,

what a world are we living in? I have swam in the Thames, though. The clean bit? Oh, you've done the London bit? No, in London. And I felt... It's cleaner, though. I reverted to my rat self. It was really weird.

I swam... Sorry, this is too much of a diversion. No, no. I got in sort of near Hammersmith, and I swam... You can swim up against the tide, and then the tide turns, you have to come back down.

Big group of us, men and women, swam up, everyone was chatting, throwing balls, lovely, lovely. And then we turned around and started swimming back, and I noticed a couple of the men started doing front crawl and one man even put goggles on and the rat bit of me was like

is this a race because I'm gonna so I... Chinese New Year, let's begin. So I suddenly head down like swam the whole way back and I was, they were like crisp packets on my hands

shit probably floating past me but I was like well if the men think that they're going to be the fastest swimmer they're not I'm a really fast swim so then I got to the end stood up and was

that everyone was back there still enjoying laughing And I thought, what's wrong with me? What is wrong with me? This is my one chance to swim in the river 10th and swim past City of London parking meters. And think about Wordsworth standing on this bridge and Queen Elizabeth throwing prisoners into it.

Like this river is so intoxicating. And I've hooved through it because I want to be the first. But this is such a beautiful metaphor for life. Because actually, no, it will surprise you. London is always there. But we don't have to enjoy. And we, none of us never do because there always feels like there's a reason to do something really quickly.

I'm still proud of you. I'm still proud of you. Carriott's an incredibly competitive woman. Oh, good. Okay. Carriette is? I'm not anymore. I've rebranded.

Oh my God. I won't play board games with you because you get so competitive. I haven't played the board games since probably 2008. I'm very mindful now. Yeah, because you were so competitive. You're worse than me. But I've dropped it. Okay.

Now I'm not anymore. And it's not in your career. It hasn't moved into your career. No. I've plateaued. Towards the end of the book, and she says, oh, we just accept now that we don't love each other,

but it's a contract, I mean, this. And then on the very last page where she has finally revealed the truth, and there's so much in this book about lying. And who has power when you're lying? And then right at the end, Dr. Brinton says, you're the most trustworthy liar I know, and that counts for something. I'm like, what does that mean in a marriage to say,

effectively? Because I only got married a couple of years ago. and, you know, it hasn't always been easy, but I do remember thinking, if I did something awful, and I told my husband, he would cover for me. I know he would.

And that is sort of, when everything gets really bad, that's what I hang on to. It's a pretty huge thing. Yeah, it's a massive, and I actually wouldn't be able to put that on my own mother or a friend or anyone, but he is the man in the world that I could say,

like, I've actually, like, you know, crash stuff. You know that man with the axe? It was me. That was actually me. And so that final scene, which feels again like everything else in this book, like a very nothing simplistic.

They just walk upstairs to put their kids to bed. But he's made this sort of expression of something, and I don't know if it's love or resignation. And also what we know is it's not the ending. Because there's a point in the book where we think this marriage is over, this relationship is over. Actually, in real life, she came back, this court case happened. There's some things I won't say now in case they're spoils, because I'd love people listening to read this book.

Oh, yes. It's brilliant read and a sort of time in history. that we all need to learn about and I want to know more about. But they went on to have two more children. Wow. So Sarah Wakefield and her husband had two more children. So that was an ongoing relationship. It must be a big of a lot of cardmen.

Guys, tips for you in these books. And also, I think intimacy does involve a lot of assumptions of truth. And maybe that's what the trustworthy liamend that in her fictions, he knew exactly who she was. He knew her. Yeah. He knew her or being seen. I felt it was like he had lied as well. He hadn't lied as clearly as she had

of like, there was a child I didn't tell you about. But, you know, we know he's addicted. We know that there was all this other stuff going on. Like, I think it was like game recognized game for me. Yeah. They were on a similar survival path, but they also did love their children. And it was kind of like you realize you're on the same team as somebody. And I think sometimes with marriage, people don't like the team they find themselves on.

Yes. And I think that's where sometimes there's problems. If they're like, well, I don't want to be on this team. I want to be over this team and you're like, that's not true though, is it? You are, you are this, but this is the right person for you. You might not like that. There's a question mark really deftly sort of insinuated about his fidelity. Yeah, yeah.

The relationship to the Sue women. Yeah. There's one where there's a man looking for a woman that he, I guess, sort of imprisoned or sexual abused or something. An indigenous woman he has an affair with. Yeah. But it's very unclear what the power dynamic is. I mean, when those kind of things are set up, it's both things at once, isn't it? And I think also, they're.

But he asks where she is, and the doctor says that, so Sarah knows that her husband has seen her, but he says he doesn't know what she is. And then she does have to question, oh, so does he visit native women? But I think they're both good, bad people, and that's what makes really interesting fiction. It's like Sarah Brinton and Dr. Brinton, he's a doctor. He goes away to help. He doesn't go and join the horrible white settlers to fight. He's trying to solve this awful problem. She is trying to help the sue people, but also not as much as she can within those confines.

And it would be a really boring book if they just loved each other and she was a good person and she was trying to, like, that's not the truth of why people move across the world to crazy places that don't have law. And that's what I think, why they're on the same team. And that's what I thought he meant by that, your trustworthy liar is like, we're as bad and as good as each other. I see you, basically. I see you for the truth of who you are. It's a very positive ending. I found it quite romantic. Really?

Yeah, I did. Because I sort of thought. It's a really big gift to give some of the day. It's very honest. Yeah, very honest. And again, we should say, like, you're caveatting this feeling of like, oh, I'm sort of glad they are with each other, knowing that this massacre has happened. That is real. It did happen. They didn't pay them. These indigenous people weren't unreasonable. They just wanted the fucking money for the land that they had stolen for them. And isn't that American history? Yeah. And our history. And our history, yes, of course. It's interesting to regret it being quite a romantic ending. I thought about whenever, I went and worked in a, school for refugees for a little while and I remember thinking because these were like teenagers who'd gone through like for me unimaginable trauma but they all spent their whole time talking about who fancied who who was messaging who who liked who who was looking at who and I remember thinking

that's what we have really as people like that in in the face of all our worst behaviors and consequences of our actions the thing that keeps us going Love of your family, obviously, but actually is that like little twinkle of romantic connection and intimacy and sometimes sex and sometimes understanding. But basically it's the kind of flirtatious energy. What Freud called libido, which is hunger for work and sex, it's that that keeps us going. That's the primal drive. You have to eat to survive, but you have to eat so that you have the energy to procreate.

And you have to practice it as a teenager with flirting and fancying so that you're ready for adulthood. It's bang in time. Let's make some more people. And it's so protective of your psyche sometimes. You know, when you are in a state of loss or grief or trauma, you can sometimes just put that to the side and think about who you fancy. That's so great. And that's the ultimate hope, right?

Yeah. About something else. And that's what she has in that tent with Chatska, isn't it? Yes, absolutely. Well, maybe my husband is dead. And my children might die and I'm far from home, but this man has got his warm arm around me. I think I might fancy him. Yeah, maybe it will be all right somehow.

And you can see that's what Sarah Brinton has spent her life doing of like, well, maybe if I go there, it'll be better. And that's sort of intriguing as a character that doesn't give up, that doesn't just go, well, this is it, this is awful. She's always like, well, maybe I could, maybe somehow I can find my way through this. And there's devastating consequences to that for the man, the Sue man that she has this connection with.

But it's a very interesting character to spend time with, apparently. Also quite reassuring, she says her first three novels, which are called the Hawaii Trilogy, are all very autobiographical. And I know as women who write, we all have this problem where we don't like all of our books to be read as autobiographical. But when someone does say, yeah, like my early novels were based in my life, I sort of think, fine, that's fine. That's creatively fine. And men have been doing that for hundreds of years. My memories that everyone's first novel is basically a crypto autobiography. She have to get it out of your system first, and then you can write about other things.

Yeah. And maybe eight books down the line, you're right. writing about wars in Dakota. Oh no, thank you so. My pleasure, thank you very much. Wow, what an amazing chat that was. Thank you. Thank you for listening to The Weirdo's Book Club.

Nell's most recent book, Cuckoo, a novel about family and motherhood, is available to buy now. Sarah's novel Weirdo and my nonfiction book, You Are Not Alone, both out in Paperback now, and my children's book, The Christmas Wichitahthiefie is also available.

Great for a stocking, guys. You can find out all about our upcoming books we're going to be discussing on our Instagram at Sarah and Carrie Adds Weirdo's Book Club. Also, I'm going on tour. If you'd like to come and see my stand-up comedy, it's called I Am a Strange Gloop. It's going all over Britain,

and you can go to sarahpasco.com.combe. Thank you for reading with us. We like reading. We like reading.