Books with Pictures and Years without Love
Thoughts on being a reader
I started writing fiction less than a year ago, having spent most of my adult life trying to tell stories through art and images. And it’s hard not to feel like a massive fraud, because I’m not a bookworm, and I’m not well read. In the world of words, I am no Matilda. I’ve worked at changing this in 2023. But before, I was a one novel a year kinda woman.
Those people who can look at a book of text and have it melt into their minds are wild to me. The Page Scanners. It’s like they blink at a paragraph, and it just shows up in their brains like a new email.
More excuses:
1. I find reading hard, so it’s not something I do to relax (which I think it is for some people). It’s something I do to be interested, or alert, and even when it’s feeding my soul it’s sapping my energy.
2. We were never one of those bookshelf families. And my dad has a gift for woodwork, so if we’d wanted a bookshelf, we would have had one, if you know what I mean.
3. Everyone in the house was good at storytelling, and so maybe I had my fill of stories in those conversations, the words living in the air and not on the record.
4. My mum was always reading, she’s into crime thrillers, but you never saw the books lying round the house afterwards. They’d just mysteriously disappear like the girls in her books did...
5. The main reading material to hand at ours were tabloid newspapers and gossip magazines. Except for this one time when my mum bought me The Guardian paper especially, because she thought I was smart, and it was massive, and I didn’t understand any of it because I was eleven years old and just wanted to watch telly and have karaoke sleepovers and make love potions out of garden weeds.
6. I was really close in age to two of my sisters (they are twins, born exactly eleven months after me) so we’d sometimes get given a book to share between us. Instead of waiting for it to do the rounds, I would read this one book we had out loud from the top bunk to those two terrors down on the bottom bunk. The curse is, I now can’t read anything without having to say every word out loud to myself, in my head, into a pretend bunkbed microphone. There are quick readers and then there is me: the world’s slowest.
7. I always preferred the ones with the pictures.
Even though I spent years not really reading fiction, books have still played a big part in my life. Over the last decade or so I’ve been collecting art and photo books, and sometimes the books I’ve wanted have been out of print. The Dream Collector by Arthur Tress: photos of kids recreating their nightmares in the street. Creative papier mâché by Betty Lorrimar: A how-to guide for paper mâché with all these mad, giant models made by school kids, like a life-size teenager in sunglasses playing guitar, or an entire ‘typical family’ made by girls at Maidenhead High School. UFO Photographs Around the World by Wendelle Stevens: a sincere collection of UFO accounts caught on film in 1985. South Bronx Hall of Fame by John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres: sculptures made using life casts of local people from the South Bronx. And in every case, I was patient, kept looking. Refrained from the urge to blow all my wages on some spenny £80 edition. I’d wait quiet in the back, until one day I would pick the book up from someone who didn’t even know what they had, who was selling this rare thing on eBay for £2.99. As if it was just some old book, as if it didn’t even matter.
Last year, I was doing a talk for college students, teenagers, about the New Year’s love cards Yves Saint Laurent used to send out to his friends and family each year. I’d found pictures of the cards in one of the books from my collection (a popular book, one that didn’t have me patiently lurking in the shadows of eBay on some hustle trip). The talk I was giving was for this taster thing: college kids come in for a day to try out uni, and I’m the Illustration tutor assigned with recruiting them. My plan with the teenagers was to show them some of the YSL love cards, then have them pick a ‘year of love’ from their own lives to illustrate using collage.
Yves would send his love themed cards across thirty years. They usually looked like Matisse paper cut outs, but sometimes they would feature his French bulldog, Moujik (which is the name he gave to every Frenchie he ever owned). But there were two years where he never sent a love card. 1978 and 1993. He called these the ‘years without love.’
I don’t know if something striking and bad happened to Yves in ‘78 or ‘93, or if he just didn’t get round to making a card and thought this was a poetic, and fair enough, excuse. And I am feeling this as an excuse for my own future commitments, I’m sorry I didn’t make the deadline, only it was a week without love x. But what I do know is that, when I tried to talk about Yves’ love cards to these teenagers, I started visibly shaking all over, and it was so bad and sustained that I did the whole talk in this crazy trembling voice, sounded like Ralph Wiggum on a ride at a bad fête. I had lost a friend to suicide a few months before, and the haunting thought of a year without love had made my body gang up on me that day in ways I have never experienced, before or since.
When my friend was first struggling and in hospital, I sent him a book from my collection called Edna Boies Hopkins: Strong in Character, Colourful in Expression. I sent it because the woodcut prints inside reminded me of some of the art he made when we were at sixth form together, bits of nature, boats on the water. And because I thought the title read like a description of his personality. Strong in character, colourful in expression. It was a book still in print, not hard to find. And after my friend died, I searched for the same book again online, but it was nowhere, impossible this time. In some kind of vague routine, over the eighteen months since he’s been gone, I have sometimes searched for the Edna book on the internet, but can only find the odd, rare edition being sold in the hundreds, overseas. I keep searching for its return, but it always goes the same way he did. Out of print forever.
This was brilliant made me emotional xx