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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor to the

Spectator, and I'm very pleased to be joined this week by Lauren Euler, who is a critic and writer and novelist

and has been described on the cover of her new book as the critic of her generation, which is not reader, perhaps our generation.

Her new book is called No Judgment on Being Critical.

Lauren, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me.

Now, to try and get a sense of you for those of our listeners who aren't so kind of familiar

with your work because you're a very sort of online kind of person, can you say sort of

what it is you see yourself doing in these essays?

Because they seem to range between straight

literary criticism, cultural criticism, memoir, and the kind of more roaming form of the essay.

Sure. Well, I don't think anybody knows what an essay is, right? It's a very capacious category.

And when I was starting to write the essays of the book, I also struggled to understand what it was I was doing.

So my first book was a novel.

And as a literary critic, I felt and still feel that I have a very strong sense of not only what a novel is, but what a novel should be.

Whereas my sense of what an essay, I think much more about what an essay can be rather than what it should be. Whereas my sense of what an essay, I think much more about what an essay can be

rather than what it should be, which is a really nice place to theoretically write from. But in

practice, it's sort of overwhelming. But now I can't remember what exactly your question was.

...