Valerie Grove
The Voice of Everywoman
Memoirs of a Not So Dutiful Daughter
By Jenni Murray
Bantam Press 320pp £14.99
Fanny Burney’s famous account of having her breast cut off without anaesthetic in 1812 was recently read out on Woman’s Hour, a programme whose unflinching and trustworthy ethos is personified in its presenter, Jenni Murray. Whether listening to harrowing tales of pain and loss and human indomitability, or beadily interrogating devious politicians, or confessing to idolising interviewees like Joan Baez, she is the voice of Everywoman. A mother, a daughter of aged parents, a tidy housekeeper, a wife (marrying her children’s father after twenty years together), she is a fallible modern woman who eats too much, smokes too much and approaches the age of sixty with a thinly veiled air of chippiness, the residue of being ‘the working-class girl from Barnsley’ who has always feared being found out.
Murray undertook this book, a memoir of childhood injected into a diary of the year in which both parents died and she was diagnosed with breast cancer, in order to set down and sort out the inescapable, guilt-inducing mother–daughter relationship. Hence the title, reminiscent of her heroine Simone de Beauvoir’s
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm