📚 A girl’s guide to getting through chemotherapy: book edition! A pick and mix of moods from the summer. The books I thought would force me to ruminate on my own mortality just made me feel more alive. Victorian Psycho, a delicious, unhinged m*rder festival. Death and the Penguin, darkly funny despite its hitmen and obituaries. Richard Osman describes All The Colours of The Dark as “a wonderful book” which makes me wonder if he really read it, a plotty crime novel with a beautiful, love story soul. The infusions make my eyes hurt so sometimes I listen to chapters on Spotify. Miranda July narrates her own All Fours and delivered the s*x bits with a joie de vivre more than I could have read them to myself. I went nostalgically back to the 90s with Slags and sent a copy of Lion to friends who know what it is to be the daughter of a father more than most and I thought would feel something. Now I’m three rounds of chemo down out of four and halfway through Audition. It promises instability and illusion which is right on cue. My therapist told me this morning that she thinks I live my life as if it is the plot of a novel and I took that as a compliment. At least half of the books I read over summer are memoirs or autofiction. In my experience if you don’t write your own chapters someone else will do it for you. One day someone will describe you as wonderful and you’ll think, I’m so much more than that, I am full of multitudes. If you don’t live that out loud, how is anyone supposed to know?