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Finished The Cuckoo's Calling last night. Flat characters, unsatisfying ending, full of unimaginative swears. I have no problem with the word fuck, and I'm pretty damn fucky myself, but constantly? It's like the author was making a desperate attempt to signal that this was...
...a book for grownups, for some weird reason. The tone is contemptuous throughout, with working class characters and women signalled out for special roastings from the narrator. One woman is described as a 'grey and purple mess', while the aunt of a dead character gets it in...
...the neck for coming off as eccentric and socially needy at her niece's funeral. Another woman, dying of cancer, inspires nothing more than 'distaste' in our hero for the way she draws her impending death around her 'like layers of martyrdom'. So that's nice, then.
She is previously described as a 'morbid bitch' for being sad that her twelve year old son died. And don't even get me started on the bitch count for this book. The word is flung around so often I thought for a moment I was reading about the nitty gritty of dog breeding.
I think it was GK Chesterton who said that a good book tells you everything you need to know about that book, while a bad book tells you everything you didn't want to know about the author. This is the latter. The main thing I got from this book is that Galbraith is unhappy...
...and manifests this by relentlessly punching down at marginalised characters facing circumstances that are not of their choosing. On the infinitesimal offchance that the author ever sees this, I'd just like to say, Bob...can I call you Bob? I get it. I do. I've been where you..
...seem to be now, and I know it's hard. Maybe, like me, you had a dominating father who criticised everything around him ALL THE TIME. And all you knew growing up was just criticism and shade and roastings, and naturally you absorbed that, because you were a kid and you wanted..
...Dad's approval. So you sharpen your tongue and realise you can be funny, but then the meaner you get the louder people laugh? And then you get meaner, and harder, and that laughter fills the loneliness your self-absorbed dad left howling inside you...
...and it feels good, for a bit. You need more, so you expand your range. Start looking down your nose at people who really don't deserve it, who didn't choose to not quite fit in. Maybe, against all your own imagined sensibilities, you became a bit more of a snob?
Like I say, Bob - I don't know you, and maybe I'm projecting, but this is what I FEEL, Bob, and I'm good at feelings now. I was fucking awful at them for over 40 years because I had that hypercritical dad, that sharp tongue, that laughing audience...
...and do you know what they did? Sometimes they laughed so loud that I didn't even notice how that being angry all the time was scooping me hollow. It was draining me of all the things I needed to give the world, like kindness, and compassion, and patience.
I'm saying this with love, Bob, but you're not doing well right now, are you? You seem a little...cruel. And sad, because cruelty only breeds sadness. It can't breed anything else, and it festers inside you until all your issues squirt out in your writing...
...and in your interactions in the wider world. Been there, done that, bought the PTSD t-shirt. And it's hard, I know. It's hard admitting that you've been that person, but isn't it better to NOT be that person anymore? To be kinder? To be wiser? To listen?
Whatever. You're not going to read this and I'm just spitballing. No idea how one tweet turned into this psychodrama, but hey, that's the power of talking about these things. There's no shame in being vulnerable, there's no shame in being damaged. The shame is when...
...you use your voice to be a fucking dick because you can't handle your own messiness. That? That's not great, Bob.
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Dr Kat Day @chronicleflask
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Jul 14, 2022
Good thread. Read. Follow Jess.