The Obsessive Diary

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...

Thank you Julie Russell , Craig M. Slater , and many others for tuning into my live video with Louise Fein ! 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

Who remembers the old Colony rooms in Soho where Francis Bacon fell off bar stools and Lucien Freud gave those eyes? Not me, I’m making that bit up but I imagine. I have read enough about it. It closed and was recreated in a basement room off Regents Street, complete with everything exact, the pictures on the wall, the bar and piano, and that’s where I whipped off too as soon as Jessica Fellowes a...

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Electric House, early afternoon, the low arched room that stretches with opulence was scantily clad; perfect young women with perfect young hair scraped back for the serious stuff of tapping importance into laptops. Not many, just enough to fill the hush. A central table and sofas adorned with mothers and babies, a pram blocked the way between tables. A little girl knocked over crayons and demande...

Sonder: the word I want written on my arm in tiny script so that it reminds me. Sonder is the awareness that every stranger you encounter has a life as vivid and complex as your own. A man on the street, naked; I saw him from my Uber as I drove uptown. At first I thought he was wearing a suit, the uniform colour of his skin gave an impression of organised outfit, it made him stand out amongst the...

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Holy s**t. I’ve seen a fair bit of theatre in my time, mostly forgotten, but the greats will never be. The inaugural meeting of the We Three Bookclub happened this week (and yes, my friends, I’ve adopted that name without consulting either of you, who do I think I am etc 😂, but I like it.) - K had just come from seeing something in Wales which was wholly forgettable and we ranged among a million...

Easter was B at the farm for a fortnight and me coming and going for the first week but for the second, a whole week together, was a gentle delight. Just me and them doesn’t happen often what with friends and them being at uni and so I’m impelled to write, to mention it, our time together cohesive and easy, a dance of meals and backgammon, walks and conversations about how we would make this world...