Em Hogan

Ididn’t​ plan my first tattoo. A few weeks after my mother died, I was in Mexico City in a bar owned by a female mezcal maker with whom I was having an ill-advised fling. There were only a few people there, including the tattoo artist from the studio upstairs. He had his kit with him, and as the evening wore on, and the mezcal continued to flow, people began inking ‘Oaxaca’...

Early in​ Playboy, the first book in Constance Debré’s trilogy of novels about a woman whose life closely resembles Debré’s own, the narrator describes the feelings of intense boredom she began experiencing at a young age:

I gave everyone the shock of their lives when I was four. My great-grandfather the medical professor they named the hospital after insisted on me...

Three​ decades after meeting the American heiress Natalie Barney, the ‘impératrice des lesbiennes’ in Paris, Truman Capote still sounded starstruck. In the years just after the Second World War he went regularly to Barney’s weekly salon at 20 rue Jacob. Inside the house, a cross between ‘a chapel and a bordello’, with a domed stained-glass ceiling and a...

Towards​ the end of her life, Tove Jansson wrote a novel about two women in love. In Fair Play, Mari and Jonna, two artists, live together but apart. They have separate studios, connected by a corridor. They eat dinner in silence, their books propped up next to their plates. Each night they watch a film, often by a well-known director – Truffaut, Bergman, Visconti, Renoir, Wilder...