The Obsessive Diary

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Each morning I wake at 5:03am. If my brain knows why it’s not telling. 5:03am and the dread of what’s the point yet I must because what else is there when you’re this deep in? I can’t go back. I am more than a year and 44,000 words lost in the forest of this book. It is dark. I can’t see my way except this one directive, to get up each morning and meet it at my desk, at my fingertips, as the sky t...

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He said he wasn’t very good and he’d filled in the crease where his nose met his cheek with the felt tip pen he was using to annotate his sheet music but this kid could play. St Pancras International. A humid Saturday. Arrivals dotted with the peculiar mix of expectation and love that marks it out as my favourite theatre. The train from Paris delayed. A piano and a boy. It took me three goes to fi...

I’ve come down to the farm for a few days. The silence is sweet music. When I arrived on Thursday afternoon I stopped on the stairs, listening. Nothing. No sirens wailing. No speeding BMWs down Ladbroke Grove. No warning of lorries reversing or sigh of the number 52 outside my door. No shouts. Five months into London life and my nervous system acclimatises to the insistence of noise with energetic...

* I will never belong (in my family). I will always be shut out and rejected. I’ve been listening to Tara Brach (god I love her) and thinking about the stories we tell and the importance of saying them out loud. A few weeks ago I used the L word (loser) and a beautiful wave of friends broke on my shore in all the ways that speak of love as well as an excellent telling off by MH which, were it not...

So the story goes I danced on his feet. Did I? There comes a point in childhood tales when fact and fiction merge. They are flash cards; nothing before, nothing after. I remember a room full of adults, I remember light brown brogues, the pattern of indentations, an invitation to stand on them, his hands held out to me. I remember being lifted into a waltz. Did I know it was David Bowie? Of course...

He came to the door looking for the key to the electrics box. Actually I heard the ship’s bell clang on the gate and looked out through michaelmas daisies to see legs and a body moving through long grass so I went to the front door and waited. He was slight. Short hair gathered in a knot on the top of his head. I’ve been through this before with the key and I said so, inviting him in to search the...

I can’t read anything since. My eye slips over other people’s words like butter, as if they are coated, I cannot stick. It is a double spiral: no matter where you start, as long as you circle to the same place it will make sense. I understand the structure, but not how to do it. The God of Small Things has changed me. Later the same day… It’s taken three days for us to settle, but now we are one a...

Thank you Chloe Hope , Pandora Dylan Gorman , Francesca Bossert , Marc’s Burning Bridge , Shari Field , and many others for tuning into my live video with Vicki Lesley ! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

I have noticed. I’ve noticed how I miss the morning chats, coffee in bed together, not talking about you but talking about them, our guests, the dramas and scandals and characters. The deconstructing and unpacking, the judgements (loving) but also judgements that two people make cosied up in bed as the sun rises. Content with each other. Their superiority of togetherness. (Ha). I’ve missed having...

Glasgow airport alive with Scottish lads off to the game in Boston. I’m assuming it’s Boston. I’m assuming it’s football. I’m not really keeping an eye on these things. Pints and short haircuts, dads with sons nervous to be with the big man now, go on son, get yourself a drink . Young, red hair. Glasses as thick as bottles. Edgy as hell. Foot tapping, fingers twisting under the table. He’ll be thr...

The beautiful and the damned at Electric House on Tuesday night where I got dinner before the kitchen closed, I sat at my favourite corner table from which I can see most others, they were on the banquets through the arch. He looked like Jim Morrison, it was impossible not to stare. His companions an inch less stellar but with that jagged razor of wild that would see them step too close to the edg...

Kimberly Warner is one of the best interviewers on this platform, she’s also a marvellous writer in her own right and a great friend. So who better to spend an hour with talking about Fallout ? We recorded this LIVE when I’d just got back from a whirlwind trip to the US promoting the novel in Boston and NYC; for those who missed it, here it is in full. And why not order your copy today? One runawa...

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Home to the farm as Solstice approaches, I left London on Friday after breakfast with J, H and others; in those morning hours as the market crowds with candlesticks and ragged chairs, we meet up the top where they having been meeting for over a decade. Every Friday, that’s where they’ll be, and now me, too. It’s exactly why I moved back to the city, this easy connection, no phone calls or train ti...

Thank you Sara Santa Clara , Angie Browne , Francesca Bossert , and many others for tuning into my live video with Simon K Jones ! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

I put my glasses in the washing machine and left my AirPod case on the desk and went out for breakfast listening to the last chapter of Permission by Elissa Altman as I walked the few minutes to Electric House. Only the third thing was meant. I suppose as usual I am tired and also being forgetful or maybe just overwrought with the silence that has descended my world since last October. Without tha...

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How can I not begin this post with a snap of Augusta Sagnelli , Creative Director & Co Founder of Souvenir Magazine , caught in a Paris café with the latest edition? Impossible. Red shoes, red fan, red binds on the red chequered chair, the deep burn red of her bag, her drink - is it iced tea? moving into shades of earth. It all begs the question, have you read yours yet? This second edition of Sou...

Ocean Vuong last night at The Emmanuel Centre in London with Andrew Wille and K and others - Andrew gave me the tip off and gathered us, he has seen him many times before but this was my first, akin to seeing Nick Cave, knowing from the moment he began that we were in the presence of greatness. An eloquence and an accuracy of thought and word. A deep and broad learning. He spoke for an hour almost...

When I got back to the farm last night there appeared to be a large triangular black figure with two points of burning flame on its head in the stone circle, and someone running from stone to stone. It was late. It had been a long day. I thought, do I go up and see what’s what? And then I thought, no, to hell with it. Leave them. I’ve been the keeper of these stones for almost thirty years. You na...

Thank you Emily Charlotte Powell , Pia Hinckle , Lisa GK , Roz Edwards , and many others for tuning into my live video with Bridget Young ! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eleanoranstruther.substack.com/subscribe

Hitchhiking barefoot in Sri Lanka. That was the news this week by phone accompanied by photos of those bare feet but as P pointed out when we met for lunch at the Ashmolean, didn’t we hitch around Zim? An d yes we did, aged 19, too and girls and completely unguarded in our notion of danger and fear. At a lovely event for Fallout hosted by Phoebe Griffith I found myself in the company of brilliant...