Failure and female friendship
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2020
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How do you cope with a sense of failure? Michèle Roberts has been Booker shortlisted and has 12 novels under her belt but her latest book is a clear eyed account of a year spent rewriting after having a novel rejected. What sustained her in part were her female friends and cooking. Lara Feigel is the author of acclaimed non fiction books and her first novel takes the template of Mary McCarthy's 1963 novel about female friendship and examines the lives of women now set against the backdrop of the publishing world. Alexandra Reza has been thinking about the place of the kitchen in novels such as Maryse Condé’s Morsels and Marvels, Marie N’Diaye’s The Cheffe, Calixthe Beyala’s How to cook your husband the African way, and Sarah Maldoror’s Pudding for Constance. Shahidha Bari presents.
Michèle Roberts's latest book is called Negative Capability. You can find her talking to Free Thinking about smell and her novel The Walworth Beauty https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08n24f5
Lara Feigel's novel is called The Group. You can hear her in Free Thinking discussions about Doris Lessing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09tml77 and a debate about Fiction of 1946 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07wrq03
Alexandra Reza is a 2020 New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year to turn their research into radio.
Producer: Robyn Read
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.9 | Listen to evil genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:33.3 | BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:36.9 | How do you feel about capons stuffed with candied fruit? |
| 0:41.7 | Boiled duck on a creamy bed of braised celery, or maybe just a cozy casserole? |
| 0:47.8 | We'll be talking about food, fiction and female friendship in today's program. |
| 0:52.6 | Grab a snack and join me, Shahadabari, |
| 0:55.3 | for the Arts and Ideas podcast just after this. |
| 0:59.2 | Hello, I'm Jess Gillum. |
| 1:00.7 | I play the saxophone, |
| 1:01.8 | and I really think you should subscribe |
| 1:03.1 | to my new podcast, This Classical Life. |
| 1:05.7 | If you're like me and always listening to music, |
| 1:07.8 | this is a great new way of discovering sounds for your playlists. |
| 1:10.9 | It's when I want something really groovy and really funky. |
| 1:16.3 | Every week I'm joined by a special guest and we share the latest tracks we just can't stop playing. |
| 1:20.9 | I also have this playlist on my phone called 5am and it's full of classical music. |
| 1:25.4 | Just head to BBC Sounds and subscribe to this classical life. |
| 1:31.3 | The American author and critic Mary McCarthy once remarked that writing fiction was like putting real plums into an imaginary cake. |
| 1:40.3 | The cake in question was her 1963 novel, The Group, and the plums were the real friendships |
| 1:46.4 | that informed the book's intimate account of desire, ambition and young womanhood in 1930s America. |
... |
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