The Art of Not Falling Apart by Christina Patterson

Author:Christina Patterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

Among the paintings Hodgkin showed me was one that seemed to have the same theme as the poem. It’s called And the Skies Are Not Cloudy All Day. One of the many good things about art is that it reminds us that they are not.

I used to read poetry and fiction all the time. For my last few years at The Independent I was so busy catching up with current affairs and researching my next interview that I never seemed to have time to read books for pleasure. A couple of months after I left, I bumped into the literary editor of the Sunday Times. I used to review for him before I started working at The Independent. ‘Right,’ he said, when I told him what had happened. ‘You’re going to review for us now.’

Book reviews don’t make you rich – unless you’re a very fast reader, which I’m not. The reward is what happens on the page. When I had my fling with the man I met at that conference, I was reading a novel by the American novelist Elizabeth Strout. He wasn’t very pleased that we didn’t get to eat until after midnight because I was still sweating over my review. I wasn’t either. I’ve been reviewing books for nearly twenty-five years and I still find it hard. But I am so grateful to have read those books.

Strout’s novel The Burgess Boys is set in a small town in Maine, but the way she writes reminds us that there’s nothing small about the human heart. The story that unfolds – of clashing cultures, clashing siblings, good intentions and quiet disappointments – felt so truthful that it sometimes made me gasp. She brings the same sympathetic gaze to every character, and every life. ‘I think’, says one of her characters, ‘there is no perfect way to live a life.’

I read Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World when I was sleeping in my study. I had rented out my bedroom to a friend of a friend for a month, and was sleeping on a narrow couch and using a filing cabinet to store my clothes. The Blazing World is a brilliant, blistering novel about what it takes to be an artist. Which, the novel makes clear, is an awful lot.

I read Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows when I was staying with my mother, after I’d rented out my flat. The novel is about a woman whose sister has begged her to help her die. It’s about screaming at strangers in car parks because you don’t know what to do with your anger, and then getting drunk and having a one-night stand with your mother’s mechanic. It is, to echo the opening of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which the central character quotes in her final letter to her sister, about how ‘no matter how many skies have fallen’, you’ve ‘got to live’.

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We all have friends who turn up in our lives at a pivotal moment, friends who shift something in the air around us, so that the landscape looks different.

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