Reviews and Comments

The collection is absolutely thrilling--boundless and strange. The sentences radiate creative power. Funny and angry. This kind of thing would never be published today. They are 'doing it wrong.' They would need to be tamed, sanded down--in them I see an antidote to the commercialisation of imagination and a way forward.

I read this 30 years ago as a younger woman and as a coming of age story I saw in it a kind of terrible mirror. In the parlance of our times 'I felt seen'. This book is a vortex swirling around a single moment: a girl gets into a strangers car. Everything leading up to that moment and coming after circles it in the narrative, switching point of view from first to third and back. The subject is an object and back to a subject. Rereading this book I now see that it's a document of colonialism and patriarchy and the relationship between the two. A formative text for me, and a master work of autofiction.

Rereading this yet again, this time thinking most about setting, particularly Orkney.

This (unlikeable) protagonist of this book touts cliches as life lessons including quoting Forest Gump. Just no.

What begins as a book about an idyllic cottage garden quickly deepens into a complex narrative about healing the ancestral trauma of slavery and ongoing institutional racism while surviving a pandemic. I particularly appreciated Farrell’s discoveries regarding the ‘invasive’ plants and common English garden plants that were actually colonial imports. Farrell’s lyrical exploration of being othered by the idea of ‘Englishness’ is something I understood, also being an immigrant, though I am white and this has saved me from the worst aspects of British xenophobia. This is also a book for anyone who is breaking ground—in a country garden—or on a patio or sterile patch of grass as I am now doing. An inspiring meditation on gardening, an important work of anti-colonial literature, and sublime piece of nature writing

This is the third time I have read this book. It was once sort of escapist 'comfort' reading for me but some how this time I lost patience with the melodrama and histrionics and the weird pacing at the end.

I have re-read this book perhaps twice. This is not the same edition I have--which I purchased in Rome in 1999. It is fascinating to revisit this, now that I am the age of Mrs. Dalloway, and having lived in London for so many years--the book feels like it is part of me.

An extraordinary work of experiential archaeology & archeological psychogeography. Barthelmess' work with the sun and the tomb is groundbreaking in terms of our understanding of these ancestral spaces.

Revisiting this--the racism is really hard to get around, despite it being such a formative work for my younger self. Not sure about the forward by Frieda Hughes, though her anecdotes are useful in understanding some of the ghoulish obsession with Plath's death among certain people. But none can approach the work as anything but a critical reader--no one owns the meaning of the work, not even people related to the poet, especially Hughes. There is a lot to think about here.

Revisiting this after 25 years. I still have my copy from 1999, purchased in Rome, with the price sticker on it-- 14000 lire.

When I read this as a young woman I thought more about London and Septimus' suicide. Now I see the book is really about menopause.

A beautiful book about looking, surviving and flourishing.

This was a reread--it felt so modern--disturbingly so. I read it as a teenager and I was way too close to the narrative. So little has changed around mental illness and the medical profession. The prose is so good. I relished it and its angry humour. The only thing dated in it would be the racism of the narrator.

Rereading this again after 40 years. It still vivid in my memory & feels so modern and relevant.