Literary Friction - Obligatory Note Of Hope With Jenny Offill

Literary Friction

Arts

4.9 • 593 Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2020

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How do you hold onto hope in the dark? This question feels more pertinent than ever right now, and we couldn't think of anyone we'd rather ask than author Jenny Offill, who we spoke to from our various quarantine locations this month. Her new novel Weather is a sharp, insightful meditation on how regular humans process catastrophe, and while it's particularly about the climate crisis, as you might imagine it’s become weirdly relevant in our current situation too. But listen, rather than bring you a show about catastrophe, we also wanted to make a show about hope. ‘Obligatory note of hope’ is an expression a character uses in Weather, and it’s also a website that Jenny set up with resources she found during her research (https://www.obligatorynoteofhope.com/). So, as well as talking to Jenny and giving all the usual recommendations, we’ll be thinking about what it means for a book to be hopeful, and talking about which books and authors have personally given us hope over the years. So, Pandora: shut that box just in time, and join us for the next hour on Literary Friction. List of books mentioned that give us hope: Octavia: The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson; Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid; Just Kids by Patti Smith; Octavia Butler and Ursula K Le Guin's writing; The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz Carrie: Middlemarch by George Eliot; Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf; Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson; When I Was a Child I Read Books by Marilynne Robinson; Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout; Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo; The People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn; Ways of Seeing by John Berger General Recommendations: Octavia: Wrechedness by Andrzej Tichý https://www.andotherstories.org/wretchedness/ Jenny: Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin https://oneworld-publications.com/fever-dream.html Carrie: Bad Behaviour by Mary Gaitskill https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/312/312616/bad-behavior/9780241383100.html Email us: litfriction@gmail.com Tweet us & find us on Instagram: @litfriction This episode is sponsored by Picador https://www.panmacmillan.com/picador

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Literary Friction.
0:11.4	I'm Carrie Plitt sitting here in my home bedroom studio in Oxford and thrilled that through the power of the internet.
0:18.0	And today, also through the power of FaceTime, which I guess is the internet as well. I am able to both hear and see my beloved co-host, Octavia, who is far away
0:28.2	in London in her own studio. So Octavia, how are you doing? I'm very happy that I can also see
0:34.8	you as well, because the last time we recorded we didn't have
0:37.9	eyes on one another and it was kind of weird wasn't it but apart from that I'm okay you're great
0:42.7	oh thanks babe said you sunlight streaming through the window other than that I think
0:48.4	ambivalence is kind of my permanent state right now like I'm I'm really thrilled about the sunshine
0:52.7	and also really devastated about
0:54.5	the state of things. And it's kind of confusing trying to hold both extremes in my heart and my
0:59.4	mind at once. But you know, on we go, right? Yep. Yep. Show must go on. And as we mentioned last
1:05.6	episode, please bear with us on the sound quality front. We're dealing with very makeshift studios and
1:10.0	microphones right now.
1:11.0	And also, my neighbours are liable to begin mowing their lawns or, as they did earlier,
1:15.5	chainsawing their trees at any moment. So just FYI. How about you though, Carrie? How are you?
1:23.9	Yeah, I'm okay. I think ambivalence is a really good way to put it. I seem to veer between intense joy and intense sadness. Like I went for a walk the other day and I couldn't stop just opining about the beauty of the sunset. But then I got home and got really sad about the news. So yeah, it's a roller coaster for me, but I am feeling really grateful for family
1:46.6	and friends and the fact that I'm still able to see them. And as always, very, very glad that we
1:52.5	figured out a way to keep doing literary friction. And not only to keep doing literary friction,
1:57.8	but to bring you interviews with authors that we really,
2:01.2	really love. That's right. And we're so excited that this month we're going to be talking to
2:05.7	Jenny Ophill, whose new novel weather is a sharp, insightful meditation on how regular humans
2:11.0	process catastrophe, which feels pretty apt. Weather is particularly about the climate crisis,
	...

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