Show Notes
In honour of the fact that a lot of our friends are suddenly becoming parents, this minisode is dedicated to mothers in literature. The figure of the mother is seriously heavy with symbolism - whether she’s the perfect mother or the monstrous mother, the mother we’re supposed to long for or the mother we’re supposed to fear. Then there's motherhood as an experience in all its complexity, with all its ambivalences and sacrifices and joys, and the politics that surround these choices and identity shifts. There's a lot to talk about! We definitely don't get through even half of it in a single show, but if you’d like some book recommendations about mothers and motherhood (or want to find out which of us would rather be a dad!) then this one’s for you.
More from Literary Friction
So it turns out, we missed talking to each other about books, and we missed you! And thanks to some vital sponsorship from our friends at Faber Books, we are BACK, baby, for this extra long one-off Year in Review episode.
It's time for our usual Year in Review show, but seeing as this is also our last EVER episode (sob!), we're shaking things up a little to bring you a bit of a decade in review as well, so we can look back over our highlights from ten wonderful years of Literary Friction.
What does it mean, to pursue a life of your own? And what is art and literature's role in figuring out what that might look like? This month we're delighted to be talking to writer and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo, whose latest book Radical: A Life of My Own is both a personal lexicon and a memoir, which thinks deeply about what it would mean to truly forge a life of one’s own.
Our theme this month was suggested by our patron Maral, who asked us to do an episode about our friendship, because she’s interested in how our (very!) different personalities align. We thought it might be a little self-indulgent to spend a whole episode talking about us specifically, so we’re also going to return to the theme of friendship more broadly, and talk about some of our favourite books about friends.
How do the people and things we desire shape our identities? And how do you render the physical intensity of desire on the page? Author K Patrick joins us in thinking about desire this month - we spoke to K about their debut novel Mrs. S, which tells the story of a young Australian who arrives at an elite English all-girls boarding school for a job and ends up having a life-changing affair with the headmaster's wife. It's a sensual portrait of queer desire, and the transformative power of lust and longing, which is why we wanted to revisit the theme of desire in this show. So, listen in for all the usual recommendations, our favourite writing about desire, and why desire is crucial to the act of reading itself.