Simon appleby

‘Eileen Myles’ essential poetry is the hip kid leaning against their locker secretly burning with intensity, the smartest boy in the class who doesn’t care he has a scar down his face, the thing you just wish you’d said’ – Lena Dunham

We totally agree with Lena. Eileen Myles is the cult New York poet you may have heard of, and will never forget if you haven’t yet. Her poetry is thrilling, alive with wit and perception, funny and fast-moving. You might recognise her from a couple of recent appearances in hit US TV series ‘Transparent’. 

Watch Eileen read ‘An American Poem’, one of the poems featured in the new collection I Must Be Living Twice, out in August.

Follow @eileenmyles & us @serpentstail  on Twitter 

The Essex Serpent came out two weeks ago to amazing reviews and tears of joy from enraptured readers. Sarah Perry takes us on a tour of the fictional Essex village in which much of the novel is set, and shows us her original sketch of the location.

Have you read The Essex Serpent? Is it on your TBR pile? Let us know on Twitter @serpentstail and Facebook @serpentstailbooks. 

Aldwinter is the Essex village on the edge of the Blackwater marshes where much of The Essex Serpent is set. Some time ago, I was asked precisely where Aldwinter is. Instinctively, I did what I always do when I am unsure of the facts: I Googled it. It was several moments before I remembered that Aldwinter has only ever existed in my imagination – and in the imaginations of my readers.

I suppose it’s not entirely surprising that I’d convinced myself Aldwinter is real, since I spent two years looking at a map of the village pinned up over my desk. I drew the map late one night when The Essex Serpent was in its earliest stages, using Google Images to look at the curves of the Blackwater estuary, and to locate a village no further than ten miles from Colchester.

The difficulty with placing an imagined village in a real setting is made even more complicated when the geography is in a state of flux. The Essex coast once had tens of thousands more acres of marshland than it does now, since sea defences have made it an altogether drier county at the edges.

Unable to visit Aldwinter itself – to see how the water lapped at the saltings, or how the setting sun looked against the flint tower of All Saints church – I stitched it together from Essex places I knew and loved. I took a boat around the eerie Mersea island, and saw the withy-sticks rising out of the water to mark out ancient oyster beds. I remembered walking through sedge-grass that reached up to my waist from St Osyth towards Clacton, with the marsh on my left and the sea on my right. I spent an afternoon with my parents in a bird hide on an Essex RSPB reserve, and later made notes of precisely which flowers were blooming in the hedgerows on a late June day. I recalled begging to be taken to Maldon as a child, where we’d watch the oxblood sails of the Thames barges go up and down the horizon. All these memories, old and new, created a village that seems to me so real I am surprised I can’t go for a walk along the High Road.

I’ve taken the Aldwinter map down from the wall, now that my imagination has moved on from Essex. When I look at it, I see that the village changed as the book was written: the church is no longer St Saviour’s, and I am not at all sure that Traitor’s Oak is quite where I thought it would be. But all the same I can almost persuade myself I can see Cora and Will: two little black dots walking away from the church, and down to the Blackwater shore.  

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When I Love Dick was first published in the 90s, it was called ‘confessional’, which its author Chris Kraus has argued against. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Melissa Broder’s So Sad Today, both published this year, are also examples of autobiographical writing by a woman that challenge literary convention. But are they really ‘confessional’? Marketing manager Flora Willis explores what these authors are saying, and how.

‘Of course my dirty secret is that it’s always been about me’ – Eileen Myles

Two weeks ago, I took fifteen copies of I Love Dick to a hen do and put one in each place at the lunch table. After the hoots had died down and blurbs were beginning to be read, I found myself repeatedly announcing to the party that, yes it was a novel, but it was all based on reality. Why? Because I wanted them to understand something I find essential to the impact of the book: Chris Kraus’s defiance in telling her story to a society unused to, and uncomfortable with, hearing the reality of being a woman, from a woman. And I Love Dick is ‘brazenly, unapologetically about being a woman’ (Emily Gould).

Twenty years later, a new wave of frank, self-aware and funny female voices thrives. On TV, we get an eyeful of Lena Dunham’s pubic hair on Girls, now a mainstream comedy-drama. Through music and video Beyoncé’s Lemonade explores the effects of infidelity, asking ‘What’s worse – looking jealous or crazy?’ In literature – specifically, in Melissa Broder’s So Sad Today (Scribe) and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (Melville House), both published this year – we are allowed access to the darkest recesses of the writers’ lives and minds in books that, like Dick, disrupt traditional genre.

In the two most recent books there is no third person to be found, though plenty of second: romantic infatuation, and the vulnerability that accompanies it, is examined with a familiar sense of irony. Each author, like Kraus, ‘marches boldly into self-abasement’ (Eileen Myles). In a chapter reminiscent of I Love Dick, Broder tells the story of a past relationship through a combination of narrative, sexts and texts, interspersed with definitions taken from different sources of the words ‘love’, ‘lust’ and ‘infatuation’. She has been ‘swept away’, but not without doing her research. She is able to conclude: ‘Love, lust, infatuation – for a few moments, I was not sad.’ On page one of The Argonauts, Nelson writes, ‘[A friend] suggests I tattoo the words HARD TO GET across my knuckles … Instead the words I love you tumble out of my mouth the first time you fuck me in the ass’. Any sense of Nelson’s loss of emotional control is undercut by her lyricism and calculated visceral impact.

I Love Dick charts a woman named Chris Kraus’s infatuation with an art critic, Dick, through a mix of letters and third person narrative.  It has been called a ‘confessional’ novel; something Kraus has argued against: ‘Confessional of what? Personal confessions?’ she said in one interview. Kraus felt the ‘straight female “I” can only be narcissistic, confidential, confessional,’ and I Love Dick was created to challenge that. As Leslie Jamison writes in her New York Times review, ‘She uses the materials of her life to seek this “a-personal” meaning – something larger, more universal. Her work isn’t an expression of narcissism so much as a pre-emptive challenge to anyone who might read it that way.’

‘Naturally’, said Kraus in an interview, ‘this writing was very physical, and I was terribly shocked when it was widely perceived at face value, as a cheap confession.’ ‘Confession’ suggests lack of control, but these authors are not splurging. And if they are letting go, or ‘falling’ (Nelson fears ‘falling forever, going to pieces’, while Broder is wary of her ‘usual habit of falling’) it’s because they’ve chosen it. To Leslie Jamison, ‘describing positions of pain and longing isn’t an admission of powerlessness but act of assertion’.

In fact, there is an exquisite paradox in seeing emotions that seem beyond the writers’ control being crafted into striking, funny, moving – and published – works. In the 90s, Kraus edited two hundred pages of love letters she’d written and yet ‘the book was more than anything an attempt to analyze the social conditions surrounding my personal failure’. Two decades on, Broder’s @sosadtoday Twitter persona that preceded her book helped to structure her emotional expression: ‘I was mostly tweeting into the abyss. But there was something about the visceral impact of sending what I was feeling out into the universe that felt different than just writing in a journal.’ In high school, Maggie Nelson noted her abundant thoughts in the margins of notebooks, ‘marginalia I would later mine to make poems.’

Both inside and outside the text, our writers (artists, poets, academics) find limits imposed on them: by language, self-doubt, critics of them and their lifestyles. But here is yet more mastery: our authors work around, within, and outside limits of traditional literary form to create forms that are all theirs. So Sad Today is a colourful collection of transcripts, texts, lists, diary entries. Nelson’s book has no chapters and there are so many tangents and asides that you’re never on a straight narrative path, and even the page looks unfamiliar, with quote sources noted in the margins (a nod to her high-school marginalia?). Kraus’s epistolary novel/memoir was, as are the other two books, ‘some new kind of literary form’ (Sylvère Lotringer, I Love Dick). None of the books is strictly chronological; they start in the middle, they loop back and forth, underscoring Kraus’s view that ‘To organize events sequentially is to take away their power … Emotion’s not at all like that’; and Jamison’s vision of Kraus’ works: ‘It’s all lumpy. It’s all performed. It’s all real.’

‘Emotion is “just so terrifying,”’ Kraus writes, ‘the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form.’ We can applaud our authors for being the most fearless out there – for confronting emotion head on, with humour, with frankness, and grace, and with flexibility. Femaleness is not one thing, it is moving and shifting; just as the parts of Nelson’s Argo ‘may be replaced over time but the boat is still called the Argo’.

Two weeks ago, at a traditional celebration of a woman’s forthcoming marriage to a man, I photographed fourteen ‘hens’, each holding a copy of I Love Dick, the bride-to-be sitting astride a giant inflatable penis. Varying expressions can be seen above the covers. We are once tough and vulnerable, at once out-of-control and assertive, at once infatuated and self-obsessed: and what’s wrong with all that? In the end, there is nothing to confess.
 

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Pete Ayrton, founder and former publisher, and Ruth Petrie, long time managing editor, look back on thirty years of books and bedlam with these anecdotes, ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Subcomandante Marcos & Paco Taibo and the donkey.
In 2006 we published a crime novel which was a collaboration between Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos and the Mexican crime novelist Paco Taibo II. It was written in alternating chapters. As Marcos lived in hiding in the hills of Chiapas, and Taibo in Mexico City the novel would travel back and forth between the writers on the back of a donkey. Each would add
their chapter and send the donkey on its way.

Christening the carpet
We published John Agard, the poet, and held a recital at Waterstones Earls Court. The shop had just been renovated, and had a new carpet. Agard was born in Guyana and in his speech, glass in hand, said that it was Guyanese tradition to bless a new space by pouring red wine on the floor, as the staff looked on in horror …

Pelecanos comes to town
George Pelecanos came over for his first UK book tour. I put him up in a shabby chic Greek Cypriot hotel on Mornington Crescent which had a restaurant on the ground floor. He spent a night there and when I picked him up the next morning he was horrified – ‘there’s no fucking lock on the door and no ensuite!’ He did his events or whatever press was scheduled and I took him back to the hotel. Next day when I went to pick him up again, he was sitting in the restaurant, with the hotel cat on his knee purring away, as the matriarch of the business fussed over him and fed him yoghurt with honey. After a shaky beginning, he loved every minute of it.

Jimmy Boyle’s launch for Hero of the Underworld
Jimmy Boyle was was a convicted murderer (he maintains his innocence) turned sculptor turned novelist. He had a sculptor’s affliction caused by dust in the eye and the story goes that his doctor told him he had sculptor’s eye (?), and could only drink champagne. Anyway at some point he’s at a dinner, where another guest is a champagne producer and over the course of the dinner, Jimmy wangles sponsorship from this champagne producer. The book is launched at Bookmarks socialist bookshop and Jimmy phones up his sponsor asking if they can supply champagne – which they do, along with waiting staff in white aprons and monogrammed glasses. Literally champagne socialism.

Meeting Jelinek in Munich
Elfriede Jelinek lived in Vienna but her husband was based in Munich – they spent a week a month together and when I needed to see her on business, she was due to be in Munich. We met for lunch at an open air restaurant frequented by Munich business types. At one point I noticed two goths standing in the restaurant staring at Elfriede. They approached the table. I was starting to feel somewhat nervous when they said they wanted to thank Jelinek – ‘if it hadn’t been for your wonderful plays and books we’d have gone fucking crazy.’

Translating Catherine Millet
At Catherine Millet book events, the audiences were predominantly women and I would often have to step in to translate her French into English. I’m no prude, but her audience asked very personal questions which really stretched my vocabulary. And then occasionally a man would turn up and ask Catherine – do you not remember me? I’m the German Student on page 73!

#ST30

We’re excited to be publishing The Accusation by Bandi, a collection of short stories by a North Korean writer, a man who is still living under the regime and writing under a pseudonym.

Deeply moving, and written with pathos, unexpected beauty, and precision, this book transports the reader to the world of 1990s North Korea. Like all good fiction this collection is full of characters with real, tough stories: from the wife who struggles to make breakfast every day during a famine, to the factory supervisor who does his best not to denounce a family friend while staying on the party’s good side, to the mother who brings up her child in a world filled with frightening propaganda. These are profound and eye-opening stories that recall aspects of some Soviet writers.

The Accusation will be published in spring 2017.

Hannah Westland, Serpent’s Tail publisher, said: ‘There’s such an informational black hole around North Korea that anything that slips across the 38th parallel deserves attention. But The Accusation isn’t just a book with a good story behind it: in fact, it’s a collection of perfectly crafted novellas that, like Solzhenitsyn’s work, speak with the dissident’s authority and truth-to-power directness. They have a classical construction that makes you think back to the great early practitioners of the form – Gogol, Maupassant, Chekov even; an absurdist approach to satire that recalls Ionesco’s Rhinoceros; and a biting wit that reminds you of that other great Russian literary dissident, Mikhail Bulgakov. Of course, the fact that Bandi has almost certainly never had access to either of these two latter writers underlines the quality of his own work. We look forward to working with Grove in the US and Bandi’s international publishers to ensure this groundbreaking book is one of the major publishing events of  2017′.

Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, first published in 1997, is essential reading; as relevant, fierce and funny as ever. We’re very proud to be publishing it in the UK for the first time. The original Semiotext(e) edition included this brilliant introduction by Eileen Myles, ‘What about Chris?’, which we’re lucky to be able to print here. 

What about Chris?

During a foreign movie moment after college, I went to see Adele H. On a date I think. We got stoned before the movie and I remember a panicky depressed feeling flooding me as I watched Truffaut’s romantic female lose her shit over a man, getting dumped—and that turning into the end of her life— her sanity, everything.

I was just like a 25-year-old but watching I felt she was me, even though the guy I sat next to, Bill, was kind of a friend and didn’t evoke any of those same feelings. I just knew in a quiet way I was ruined. If I agreed to be female. There was so much evidence on the screen and in books. I read Doris Lessing in literature class and that depressed the shit out of me too. I just hated reading work by women or about women because it always added up the same. Loss of self, endless self-abnegation even as the female was trying to be an artist, she wound up pregnant, desperate, waiting on some man. A Marxist guy, perhaps. When would this end. Remarkably, it has, right here in this book.

I Love Dick is a remarkable study in female abjection and in its fashion it reminds me of Carl Dreyer’s exhortation to use “artifice to strip artifice of artifice,” because it turns out that for Chris, marching boldly into self-abasement and self-advertisement, not being uncannily drawn there, sighing or kicking and screaming, but walking straight in, was exactly the ticket that solidified and dig-nified the pathos of her life’s romantic voyage.

In Chris’ case, abjection (not stolen from the long-dead girl’s diary by some of her famous father’s friends…) is the road out from failure. Into something bright and exalted, like presence. Which is heaven for a performer—which is what this author is.
Chris’ strategy is both martial and sublime. She stands on the cliff of her life. It’s approximately the same one, Jack Kerouac warned Neal Cassidy to not go over “for nothing.” Which for those guys (fifties, alkies) was 30. For Chris it’s 39. A female expiration date. And why? Chris’ powerful account makes me wonder if all those bible stories that warn women not to turn around are just ’cause she might see something. Like her life.

Chris ( I keep typing Christ. Is Chris our girl on the the cross?) both plays Adele H. and forces the handsome soldier/scholar “Dick” to listen to the story of Her and miraculously, instead of the narra-tive ending with us in a movie balcony watching Chris’ decline, she actually manages to turn the tables—not on a particular guy, “Dick,” but on that smug impervious observing culture. She forces it to listen to her describe the inside of those famous female feelings:

I clasped the phone, regretting this entire schizophrenic project that I started when I met you. I’ve never been stalked before, you said in February. But was it stalking. Loving you was a kind of truth drug because you knew everything. You made me think it might be possible to reconstruct my life because after all you’d walked away from yours. If I could love you consciously, take an experience that was so completely female and subject it to an abstract analytical system, then perhaps I had a chance of under-standing something and could go on living.

That last note (“and go on living”) is why I Love Dick is one of the most exhilarating books of the last century (and one of the first books of this one.) Her living is the subject, not the dick of the title, and while unreeling her story she deftly performs as art critic, his-torian, diarist, screenwriter of an adult relationship, performance artist. Even her much vaunted “failed” filmmaking career bequeaths her one mighty tool. Chris really knows (like Bruce Chatwin knew) how to edit. Which is the best performance of all. To go everywhere imaginable in a single work and make it move. All at the service of writing an entirely ghastly, cunty exegesis.

In passing Chris refers to the male host culture. It’s the sci-fi-exactly of our state. If it’s entirely his world, if that’s the consciously acknowledged starting position, then isn’t I Love Dick a kind of ecstatic mockery, performed in front of a society of executioners. Isn’t it intolerably and utterly brave, like Simone Weil’s self-immo-lation, but so much cooler, like a long deep laugh from behind a wild and ugly mask.

Chris’ ultimate achievement is philosophical. She’s turned female abjection inside out and aimed it at a man. As if her decades of experience were both a painting and a weapon. As if she, a hag, a kike, a poet, a failed filmmaker, a former go-go dancer—an intellec-tual, a wife, as if she had the right to go right up to the end of the book and live having felt all that. I Love Dick boldly suggests that Chris Kraus’ unswervingly attempted and felt female life is a total work and it didn’t kill her.

Thus when I Love Dick came into existence a new kind of female life did too. By writing a total exegesis of a passion, false or true, she is escorting the new reader into that world with her. Here we go…

—-

Eileen Myles is the author of nineteen books including I Must Be Living Twice: New & Selected Poems, and a reissue of Chelsea Girls, both out in Autumn 2015, from Ecco/Harper Collins in the US. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in non-fiction, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital art writers’ grant, a Lambda Book Award, the Shelley Prize from The Poetry Society of America, as well as being named to the Slate/Whiting Second Novel List. Currently she teaches at NYU and Naropa University and lives in Marfa Texas and New York.

Copyright © Eileen Myles. This introduction appears in the US edition of I LOVE DICK, published by Semiotext(e)

Adrian McKinty’s top 5 flawed detectives, to rival his own drinking, smoking, cocaine-taking, speed-limit-breaking Sean Duffy.

Of course, one man’s flaw is another man’s gift, and the more flawed the detective the more interesting they are as a character. Make a detective too flawed and they become an anti-hero, which may or may not turn your readers off. Rachel in the recent best seller The Girl On The Train is a very flawed detective indeed who gets drunk every day and has black-outs – but she’s dogged enough to solve the case and I for one liked her a lot.

Here are my top 5 flawed detectives in literature.

5. Sherlock Holmes: chilly, aloof, rude, asexual, snobbish and racist, the Sherlock Holmes of the Conan Doyle stories has a lot of issues. But we like him because he gets the job done and his intelligence and powers of observation are always surprisingly effective.

4. Miss Marple: is Miss Marple flawed? She’s just a harmless little old lady who sits quietly in the corner and takes everything in. Everyone ignores the frail old dear but this is actually her greatest asset, because she’s got the best mind in the room. No one can outthink or outgeneral Miss Marple – many have tried and all have failed.

3. Christopher Boone is on the Asperger spectrum. He doesn’t really understand human emotions that well and he has trouble with closed in spaces and open spaces. Less promising material for a detective there couldn’t possibly be, but he solves the case in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time with resilience, determination and aplomb.

2. Bob Arctor is really a drugged out undercover cop called Agent Fred who has been assigned the task of spying on the notorious drug dealer Bob Arctor. This is the premise of Philip K Dick’s classic: A Scanner Darkly. Arctor/Fred loses his sanity and his identity as he not only tries to solve the case but tries to figure out who he actually is.

1. It’s hard to top Philip K Dick’s weirdness but Charles Willeford somehow manages to do it with his very flawed detective Hoke Moseley of the Miami Police Department. In a series of novels Moseley contrives to offend his colleagues, lose his false teeth, alienate his family, never clean his apartment, crash his car, annoy just about everything but still solve his cases in a hilarious dead-pan manner. My favourite flawed detective of them all.

Follow @adrianmckinty on Twitter

Joanna Biggs is the author of All Day Long, a fascinating exploration of 32 different working days, from that of a ballerina, to a care worker, to a giggle doctor, and everyone in between. Her editor Rebecca Gray finds out how on earth you go about writing a book like this.

In your introduction you talk about how what we do for money seems like the dull but essential part of our lives. What drew you to write about work and why do you think it matters?

When I first came to London for a job after graduating, I shared a flat with two other girls and most evenings we would sit together over a plastic bag of prawn crackers and talk about work. We dissected the workplace like a new world: who sat where, who drank what, what our bosses were like, how often we checked our email. I remember the intensity of that first encounter with the workplace. What we do all day is often mysterious to those we love and live with, but it is how we spend a third of our lives and it deserves attention.

The spread of people you spoke to in the book is very broad – how did you choose your interviewees, and how many people did you speak to in your research?

There were some professions I knew I wanted to talk to from the beginning – a mother, a CEO, a rabbi, a footballer – but the book also grew as I spoke to people about the project and they mentioned a profession they’d always wanted to know about, or a friend who did a worthy or, more often, fantastical job. I also wanted to say something about how work has changed: if we’re now a post-industrial service economy, what does that feel like to its workers? What sorts of jobs are service jobs? What kind of life do they allow us? I was also in the habit of striking up conversations with my window cleaner, hairdresser, taxi driver – they must have found me insufferable . . .

The process of tracking people down is interesting – could you tell us about how you went about finding people to talk to you?

I wrote hundreds of emails, unashamedly Twitter-stalked, talked to charities, unions and organisations, tried to charm friends, friends of friends and friends of friends of friends. I would get tip-offs: did I want to be introduced to the person who composes music for Call the Midwife, or the man who patrols a hawk through the tunnels of the London Underground to discourage pigeons, or the gay porn actor who once worked in a chicken factory? I still regret not following that one up …

Your reviews have been terrific, but tellingly, the Guardian briefly suggested you could have been more political, while the Daily Mail commented that you could have been less so, which we think means you got it exactly right. Could you tell us a bit about how you positioned yourself as an interviewer and a writer?

I’m not an anthropologist or a sociologist, but I did have areas of inquiry that I covered with everyone, and the idea wasn’t to traduce those who spoke to me, but to create a portrait of their working life at that moment in time. I didn’t pre-interview (which is why there was so much waste) and I didn’t censor. I wanted each person to speak for themselves in their own voice, and I was just there to give context or history or to describe their demeanour for the reader.

Did you get a sense that some people still feel a sense of vocation? How does work give our lives meaning?

Very few people in the book admitted they worked purely for money. We are living in an odd time, when theoretically there should be less and less work to do as technology advances and compound interest stacks up, but in reality we now work pretty much constantly. Under those conditions, it’s very hard not to take some of your identity from your work. I didn’t very frequently end up talking about vocation exactly, but I was startled at how often people told me they loved their jobs. Of course, it’s very hard to speak honestly about work when it’s also your livelihood; I constantly admired my interviewees’ bravery.

Who seemed the happiest or most satisfied in their jobs from the people you interviewed?

It felt to me that the people whose jobs had an obvious purpose – the careworker, the rabbi – were most satisfied. The things they do all day have mostly immediate and tangible results. The ballerina, the footballer and the clown, all of whom had achieved their childhood dreams, were happy and sometimes incredulous to have done so, but they saw the downsides to their profession more clearly. The footballer had had to hide from the Sunday papers many times; the ballerina said she would discourage her daughter from following her onto the stage.

From the people you interviewed, which is the job you’d most like to do?

The book is in some degree a record of all the jobs I’ve fallen in love with since I was a child, and I sort of wish I had enough lives to do all of them. In thinking about our work, we’re often thinking of all the things we can no longer be. I work at the London Review of Books and recently one of our contributors teased us when we asked him to check his biographical note: he would have loved to be a black belt in Karate who was revolutionising 21st-century visual art, living in Istanbul, but no, he was still teaching at university.

Did writing the book change the way you feel about your own work, both as an editor at the London Review of Books and as an author?

It made me grateful for good colleagues and good work, but it also made me more wary of letting my job encroach too far onto my life. Wasn’t it Amy Poehler who said recently that we should treat our careers like a bad boyfriend? I think that’s good advice.

Was there anyone who you weren’t able to interview but you wish you were?

This book could have gone on for ever. I became interested towards the end in private companies such G4S who have effectively taken over many of the functions of the state. I would spot the navy and red logo in a courtroom and wonder what these private security guards really thought about what they were doing.

You had to ask some really difficult questions. How did people respond to being asked what they earn?

The people who earned the least knew what they had coming in and going out to the penny; the people who earned the most were reluctant to name a figure even. But that said, more interesting to me than the actual figure was the conversation, which I tended to begin with the question ‘Do you think you earn enough?’ Money is a way of thinking about – the obvious way, admittedly – the worth of our work.

Were your conclusions at the end of the project any different to what you’d expected going into it? Did it change your views politically at all?

It made me more leftwing personally. I see so much that’s wrong with the current system and I feel cheered by the rare unions and people who manage to change things. The only conclusion I came to was that there’s more to life than work, which is odd, I know, for someone who’s thought about work so much for the last two years, but it’s true.

Follow Joanna Biggs on Twitter: @joannabiggs

Find out more about All Day Long