Jenny Turner

Most writers she knows, Maggie Nelson writes, ‘nurse persistent fantasies about the horrible things – or the horrible thing – that will happen to them if and when they express themselves as they desire’. Everywhere she goes – ‘especially if I’m in drag as a “memoirist”’ – such fears appear to be uppermost in everybody’s mind. ‘People seem hungry, above all else, for permission, and a guarantee against bad consequences. The first, I try to give; the second is beyond my power.’ But why the fear of writing the thing you really want to?

Pride, Vision, Ambition, says the pop-up video that recently appeared on the website of Park View Academy in Birmingham. On it, there’s netball, djembe drums, electronics, football, textiles, computing, plus a couple of dissolving-in-hopeless-giggles blooper shots, one with pupils in it, one with staff. ‘I’ve been at Park View for many, many years,’ one staff member says. ‘Happy times, elation times, difficult times, and most recently, challenging times … But I think now with an inspiring leadership, we can look forward to a bright, bright future.’

Chapter​ 6 of Rachel Cusk’s new novel takes place round a large square table at a creative writing course in Athens. The narrator asks each student in turn to tell a story. The fourth is told by a girl called Clio, who believes that every person has a ‘story of life’ with its own ‘themes and events’. Clio uses her contribution to the exercise to prove her...

What​ do you spend your money on? Do you like buying stuff for others, or yourself? Do you resent paying income tax? What’s the most you’ve ever spent on a dress? Who were you closest to as a child? How often do you phone your mum? What would you normally be doing at this moment, if you weren’t doing this? What do you do on your own in a hotel room? Why?

Questions like...

Penelope Fitzgerald was 62 when she won the Booker, a widow and the mother of three grown-up children, and although no longer in straits as desperate as those she had drawn on for the novel, she was accustomed to making do on very little. She lived on the ground floor of her married daughter’s house in Battersea. She made her own clothes from material bought in the sales, and seemed never to acquire a handbag: acquaintances remember a trusty William Morris carrier, and she took a spongebag to the Booker dinner.