The Twat Files

In The Twat Files Dawn French seems unaware of the definition, which most people know, of the word ‘twat’.  It is an offensive term for vagina and can be used, like many other swearwords, to demonise or diminish women.  In this highly selective memoir, French explains that, for her, a ‘twat’ is a stupid person or someone who does something very silly.  She sees herself, essentially, as a hugely ‘twattish’ person.

In the book, which is also marketed as a self-help text, French urges her readers to embrace the ‘twattishness’ in themselves.  They should learn to free up the happiness that self-created cockups can produce, and just enjoy them in all their ‘staggering stupidity’.  French has enough memories of her own ‘twattery’ to share for an entire book and she is keen to reveal them all.

The anecdotes are divided into sections such as ‘Royal’, ‘Theatre’, ‘Mamma Mia’ and ‘Elton John’ so that chronology is sacrificed, although her teenage ‘twatteries’ open the book. These are, of course, as painful to readers as they must once have been to her.  Those terrible, inappropriate reactions to a first kiss or that total embarrassment of having the wrong clothes at a gymkhana. 

Once she is in her majority, it is easier to laugh along with French, as she recounts a particular meeting with Prince, now King, Charles. Having seen her acting in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the royal personage quips, ‘I saw your Bottom’, referring to the part she played, at which point French ripostes, ‘And now you’re going to see my Beaver’.  She’s acting in a version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Upstaging the future king is, perhaps, quite ‘twattish’. 

Elton John may not have noticed her entrance to his 50th birthday party as Michael Jackson’s chimp, Bubbles.  It would have been impossible for him to tell who was engulfed in the thick, heavy fur and probably hard to recognise her then husband, Lenny Henry as the rock star (not really a physical double) in whiteface.  What a pair of ‘twats’.  Luckily, security guards manoeuvred the couple around the birthday boy whilst French, inside the suit, was so meltingly hot, that they had to leave immediately.  The inappropriately attired couple walked through the entrance and straight out through the exit.

Originally the material was used in the show, Dawn French is a Huge Twat and so the audio version of The Twat Files is a rewarding way to experience the book.  Read by French, it is fun to hear her relate these tales against herself, with little squeaks and giggles at her own silliness.  There is plenty of name-dropping, but she is a celebrity after all and it is much more fun to hear about her girly crushes, and gushes, when they focus on men like Dustin Hoffman, Phil Daniels and Johnny Depp. 

French relates the awful things that she has said, but the sections which make for uneasy reading are those in which, as a self-confessed fat girl with bosoms which lag behind her when she is in motion, she laughs at her own physicality.  The Vicar of Dibley puddle joke is an example of ‘twattishness’, a classic which has been re-produced in many clips and Gifs as French, playing Geraldine, jumps into deep muddy water and then turns, gurning at the camera.

Many laughs stem from another person’s discomfort and only a hair’s breadth separates what is hilariously funny from what is deeply painful. French tends to avoid the elephant in the room just as she does with the definition of ‘twat’. Fat shaming yourself is no less reprehensible than doing it to another. But French’s mantra is that laughing at yourself is healthy and she hopes that The Twat Files demonstrates how to do this, and also makes her lots of money.

works cited

French, D. The Twat Files. Penguin. 2023.

Dawn French is a Huge Twat. Theatre. Dir. David Grandage. 2022.

A version of this review was first published on page 16 of the Irish Examiner on 25th November 2023. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

A Little Give

A Little Give: the unsung, unseen, undone work of women Marina Benjamin

It feels like a travesty to write about this book when it is so beautifully composed that a series of quotations would surely be a better way to recommend it. 

Marina Benjamin offers A Little Give, her most political work thus far, as the third in a non-fiction trilogy about women.  The first of these memoirs, The Middlepause (2016), is about reaching the age of 50 and the second, Insomnia (2018), explores what happens in the minds of those who spend the dark hours wide awake. 

The final volume, A Little Give, does what it says in the subtitle, which is to look at work in the home.  To do this Benjamin divides ‘women’s work’ into seven sections: Cleaning, Pleasing, Feeding, Caring, Safeguarding, Lapsing and Launching. 

Benjamin was told that for a woman writer each offspring means the sacrifice of a book.  She feels that she has lost several books in between the birth and departure for university of her child. 

A ritual visit to IKEA is the pad off which the youngster is launched, a relatively kind rite of passage, remarks Benjamin wryly.  Some cultures have much worse ways of marking adulthood. 

Within each chapter there are sub-sections and some of these are written in free verse whilst others address a specific philosopher.  In Safeguarding Benjamin thinks and writes about the artist Paula Rego.  She says that whenever she lingers ‘over the dog-woman works I experience a powerful sense of recognition’.

This is because Benjamin, ‘works like a dog’ doing all the tasks, and taking all the responsibilities, that she, as a woman, is programmed to do. Rego nursed her husband through the final stages of multiple sclerosis whilst working to earn money for the family.

In the subservience of Rego’s dog-women Benjamin sees her own willingness to bow under the yoke of domestic life, and in their animal defiance she spots her own demands for ‘a space in which to think’.

Benjamin admits, although she does not claim this for Rego, that in carrying out her duties to the limits and beyond what she can physically achieve she can reach a state of exultation.  Self-sacrifice and selflessness can bring a sort of ecstasy. 

In Benjamin’s home, Carlotta, does domestic work for money.  Benjamin believes, having seen her mother’s cleaner, Josefina, die early, that lugging vacuum cleaners around is not healthy for her fifty-year-old body.  She tries to fight her urge to squat down to scrub the floor. 

As a reader and thinker Benjamin can see that there are serious moral issues to be faced.  Does aiding Carlotta in her navigation of administrative tasks negate exploiting her in the labour market? 

Is it acceptable to place, in the face of protest, an elderly parent in a care home?  Should a daughter sacrifice her professional life to nurture a mother whose existence is inexorably heading towards extinction?  Should a woman care so thoroughly for parents, elderly aunt, partner, child and dog that there is a danger of losing herself?

Benjamin was told that for a woman writer each offspring means the sacrifice of a book.  She feels that she has lost several books in between the birth and departure for university of her child. 

When her mother refuses to accept paid carers and insists on her daughter doing all the domestic and nursing work, Benjamin eventually resists and expounds her own hopes and desires.  Once these have been outlined, her mother responds by saying that she ‘has no desire to live any longer’. Benjamin is given to understand that her selfishness has sapped her mother’s ‘desire to live’.  Thus she, in trying to protect herself, is defeated. 

Benjamin dedicates A Little Give to the cleaners whose job it is to make a home flawless knowing that their work will immediately be undone by those who live there.  She prefers to make work that lasts.  

Benjamin, M. A Little Give: the unsung, unseen, undone work of women. Sceptre. 2023.

A version of this review was first published on page 37 of the Weekend section of the Irish Examiner on 9th September 2023. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

All Down Darkness Wide

All Down Darkness Wide Seán Hewitt

33 is an early age for a memoir but Seán Hewitt, born in 1990, offers us his. Now lecturing in Trinity College Dublin, he was born in Warrington, England, and took his first degree at Girton College, Cambridge.  Hewitt opens his story among the dead in the cemetery of St James’s Oratory in Liverpool, the city of his post graduate studies. He is in the graveyard to meet someone, to have sex with him.  After the deed, Hewitt stoops down to a stream to palm water into his mouth, “cleansing himself back to sanctity”. He is down in the wide darkness and needs ablution and absolution.

As a published poet as well as a literature teacher, Hewitt can manipulate language to create meaning, and in the opening chapter symbolism reigns.  He creates a gothic atmosphere using darkness and looming gravestones.  The skeletons of the dead lie in the tombs, foreshadowing the eventual skeletal forms of the two embracing men. Their union may result in them evolving into “stick-thin corpses”, if a virus spreads within their bodies, destroying their organs and killing them.

Reading of the fear of AIDs in the time of Covid is unsettling, and yet the parallels are there, reminding us of the unpredictability of endemic diseases, as they consume the vitality of victims.  The second chapter departs from the William Blake-like blackened churches and bloodstained walls of slavery-enriched Liverpool, reversing to the sun-dappled hallowed lawns of the University of Cambridge. 

Here Hewitt is with Jack, a fellow undergraduate, and they fool around, hanging from branches in the orchard, and singing A. E. Housman’s poem, “Loveliest of trees the cherry now”.  Those who are familiar with Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited will not expect a happy ending for the beautiful Jack who, when he leaves the protective bubble that is Cambridge, will face a harsh and unforgiving world.

All Down Darkness Wide is literary: the title comes from a poem by Gerard Manley-Hopkins, a man believed to have been a repressed homosexual, who had “everything hidden, everything kept down”.  And Hewitt speaks about his own friends and family who have, in attempts to protect him, said that they were “scared he would be unhappy”.  In fact, he thinks, they were aware that in following his happiness he would bring opprobrium upon them.  In other words, people were not scared for him, but of realising themselves to be part of a society which condemns queer men, including him, to ignominy.

In writing this memoir Hewitt felt the need to hide identities, other than his own, under pseudonyms and dislocating methodology.  It is certain that the great love of his life is not, as in All Down Darkness Wide, Elias of Gothenburg but someone with another name, city and homeland.  It may also be that, unlike Elias, this lost lover did not, as the fictional Elias did, survive repeated suicide attempts. 

Hewitt’s book is aboutthe isolation and unhappiness that many gay men feel as they navigate the world.  It is about the dark corners and passageways, literal and metaphorical, into which he – particularly with his Catholic background – is hounded by opinion.  During his young manhood Hewitt’s way of living was constrained, the joy wrung out of it by disapproval.

In contrast, Hewitt’s academic work has been lauded, enabling him to obtain status and confidence.  And, he suggests in the acknowledgments to All Down Darkness Wide, he has found a stable loving relationship. He could replace the title of his life with a line from D. H. Lawrence, Look! We Have Come Through.

Hewitt, S. All Down Darkness Wide. Vintage. 2022.

Lawrence, D. H. Look! We Have Come Through! Chatto and Windus. 1917.

Manley-Hopkins, G. ‘The Lantern Out of Doors’. Collected Poems. 1918.

Waugh, E. Brideshead Revisited. Chapman and Hall. 1945.

A version of this review was first published on page 34 of the Weekend section of the Irish Examiner on 28th January 2023. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.

Solito

Solito Javier Zamora

There are not many good words spoken about people traffickers, and they do not write memoirs.  Perhaps they should, since the books would probably sell well as the reading public tackled the narratives in the hope of understanding: firstly how it feels to be such a person and secondly, how they can be stopped.  Ireland has its own culture of immigration ranging from the recent film, Aisha, the novel, A Slanting of the Sun, by Donal Ryan and the exhibition at the Triskel Centre depicting Direct Provision Centres in photographs of derelict rooms with damp walls and filthy mattresses.

Here, in Solito, the story is told by Javier Zamora, who as a child migrated from El Salvador to California, a trip which was arranged by Don Dago.  Explaining why his prices are high, and non-negotiable, Don Dago describes himself, in a line delivered without irony as ‘only one pearl in a long pearl necklace’. He takes his cut and the remainder of the cash is passed, in backpacks, down the line as strangers bundle the child from one to another.

Zamora’s parents have already left their country: his father for political reasons and, later, his mother for economic ones.  He, their child, is ensconced with grandparents and aunts in the fishing town of La Herradura, down a dead-end road.  As he grows from 5 years old to 9, Javier hears the mantra about how ‘La USA is safer and richer’.  Every week he speaks to his mother on the phone, and the conversation centres only on his trip to join her. 

Don Dago journeys with him for only a short time and then Zamora is told to stick close to a man named Marcelo who comes from his own locale. In return for his nervous smiles the child receives, from his neighbour, only glowering silence.  Instead, he snuggles up to Carla, and her mother Patricia, and the three stick together in their sub-group of six which also includes Chino, Chele and the forbidding Marcelo. 

Zamora likens the group of terrified and desperate humans to some ants that he once saw in a flood.  The creatures linked their legs and antenna to form a living raft and floated on the top of the water.  Can the six compadres reach the promised land or will they, like the insects, sink to the bottom still holding on to each other for dear life? Zamora’s account is, of course, heart-breaking and heart-warming.

Just as it is rare to find an account of illegal crossings produced by traffickers, it is unusual to find one by border guards.  And yet most people, if they are honest, are much more sympathetic to those who prevent entry than to the immigrants themselves.  It is easy to sympathise with Zamora’s plight as a vulnerable minor, powerless to negate the wishes of adults. But those feelings do not necessarily transfer to a welcome for arrivals in a country, like this one, with a serious shortage of housing.  

Javier Zamora: Legal status gained in 2018

In her novel, Spring, Ali Smith studies the daily routine of an officer in a detention centre, and her mindset.  There is cognitive dissonance between her concept of herself as a person and the mundane cruelty of her behaviour.  These are the areas which need exploring, perhaps, rather than wallowing in empathy for a child, now an adult, who left a country we know little of, to travel to another country far from ours.  The moral choices that must be made in Ireland concern what is happening here and now in front of our eyes. 

Works cited

Smith, A. Spring. Penguin. 2021.

Zamora, J. Solito. One World. 2022

A version of this review was first published on page 44 of the Weekend section of the Irish Examiner on 17th December 2022. It is reproduced here by permission of the Editor.