This episode is dedicated to the writer and journalist Deborah Orr. Deborah chose the book for us to discuss but died before we were able to record. Her powerful and widely acclaimed memoir, Motherwell is published by Weidenfeld in January 2020 and is available for pre-order here.

In Deborah’s place, John and Andy are joined by two writers: John Grindrod, author of Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain, and Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt which the FT described as ‘a lucid, evocative book, suffused with sadness and anger’. He has also co-written and edited a book about TV, Shouting at the Telly, and contributed to a book on music, Hang the DJ, and most recently a book for Batsford called How to Love Brutalism . He runs the website dirtymodernscoundrel.com and his previous appearance of Backlisted was back in 2016 when he joined us to talk about Memento Mori by Muriel Spark. John is joined by the novelist and performer, Karen McLeod. Karen is the author of In Search of the Missing Eyelash published in 2008 by Vintage and which won a Betty Trask award. She is the creator of comedy character Barbara Brownskirt ‘the worst living lesbian poet alive and performing today’ and has written for the Guardian, The Letters Page and the Independent, but most importantly she is writer-in-residence at Bookseller Crow in Crystal Palace, host of tonight’s live recording.

The book that Deborah chose is Edith’s Diary by Patricia Highsmith, first published by Heinemann in the UK in 1977 and then Simon & Schuster in the US later that year. It was the seventeenth of her 22 novels. Before that Andy enthuses over Alfred Hitchcock’s Three Investigators series ( The Case of the Stuttering Parrot, in particular) and John shares some stories of how women writers approach their writing drawn from Mason Currey’s Daily Rituals: Women at Work.

Books mentioned:

Patricia Highsmith - Edith’s Diary; Strangers on a Train; The Talented Mr Ripley; Carol; Deep Water; Eleven; The Animal Lovers Book of Beastly Murder; Little Tales of Misogyny
Deborah Orr - Motherwell
John Grindrod - Concretopia: A Journey Around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain; Outskirts: Living Life on the Edge of the Green Belt; Shouting at the Telly; Hang the DJ; How to Love Brutalism
Karen McLeod - In Search of the Missing Eyelash
Alfred Hitchcock - The Three Investigators: The Case of the Stuttering Parrot
Mason Currey - Daily Rituals: Women at Work
Alison Walker - The Colour People
Andrew Wilson - Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith
Erich Fromm - The Art of Loving
T.S. Eliot - Collected Poems
Ronald Blythe - Akenfield