The Holloway Arts Festival closed with a talk by A.L. Kennedy at Platform. She turned up looking comfortably uncomfortable, the uncomfortableness of someone who is used to feeling uncomfortable and doesn't mind it any more.
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| I copied this photograph from her website. I hope she doesn't mind. It is a good photograph. |
I don't know what she's going to be like because I haven't read any of her books. My bias against novelists that are still alive defeated my bias in favour of people with initials instead of names: E. Nesbit, LBJ, WH Auden, AJ Raffles. I like her face though, and how she wears her hair and have decided that doing a review unprepared is brave rather than incompetent. You may disagree, but it's my blog and I'll dress up shoddiness as elán if I want too.
She starts off being funny and talking about stand-up then something shifts and she starts talking about not being able to speak clearly, how bloody difficult it is to stop mumbling, and how once as a child she got so angry that she started shouting and everyone turned round in shock because they didn't expect loudness from her; and she makes me remember being fourteen so clearly that I can see the classroom and hear my own voice shouting out louder than it had been or would be for years and how it should have felt liberating but didn't.
Next time I'm in the Big Green Bookshop I'll buy her latest novel, Blue Book. It's about a fake medium.
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