Yesterday ended in disaster. Very late at night, I decided to write down everything that had happened; the only way I could think of coping.
Following a series of devastating rejections, Michèle Roberts began keeping an account of her life in the hope it might help mend her shattered sense of self. In this intimate and wryly honest journal she reflects on cities and countryside, loss and love, food, friendships, sisterhood, pleasure and memories, her abiding relationship with France and with literature. Over the course of a year a new pattern of being develops, until, finally, she finds a better relationship between inner and outer worlds.
About the Author :
Michèle Roberts is the author of twelve highly acclaimed novels, including The Looking Glass and Daughters of the House, which won the WHSmith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and, most recently, the highly-acclaimed Ignorance, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2013. Her memoir Paper Houses was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. She has also published poetry and short stories, most recently collected in Mud: Stories of Sex and Love.
Half-English and half-French, Michèle Roberts lives in London and in the Mayenne, France. She is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres.
Review :
‘A wonderful writer: one in possession of immense feeling’
‘A magnificent writer.’
‘Michele Roberts is a writer who has always excelled at embodying the joy of female intellectual and earthly appetites.’
‘Funny, wise and all-embracing’
‘Michèle Roberts has always been a terrific, complex writer with a natural tone, a tone of her own, and Negative Capability is among the best of her books.’
Raw and glittering... Superb.
Roberts writes with wit and honesty.
Bracing and galvanising.
Brave, naked, defiant and exquisitely written.
Roberts’ intimate, candid writing is underpinned by a dry humour, wry observations, and a poignant strain of melancholy perfect for our time.
Bold, serious and life-enhancing.
