This Writing Life
Episodes
Tuesday Jan 31, 2017
Episode 100 - Richard Russo reads from Everybody's Fool
Tuesday Jan 31, 2017
Tuesday Jan 31, 2017
For the 100th episode of This Writing Life, we celebrate with a very special instalment. Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Richard Russo reads from his wonderful, warm, funny and mordant new book Everybody's Fool. A sequel to one of our favourite novels - 1993's Nobody's Fool - it returns the reader to the life, opinions and travails of Donald 'Sully' Sullivan in the small upstate New York town of North Bath.
In this scene from the distant past (the character Wirf Saks has died by Everybody's Fool), Sully and Wirf settle down in the local bar to discuss the sex addiction of the irrepressible Carl Roebuck.
Enjoy.
Sunday Jan 29, 2017
Episode 99 - Matt Haig: Part 4
Sunday Jan 29, 2017
Sunday Jan 29, 2017
The final part of This Writing Life's interview with Matt Haig (about Christmas, mental health, the internet) begins with Magic Tweets (about Rupert Murdoch), Tweeting addiction and the inveterate competitiveness of writers.
Monday Jan 23, 2017
Episode 98 - Matt Haig: Part 3
Monday Jan 23, 2017
Monday Jan 23, 2017
Part 3 of This Writing Life's interview with Matt Haig changes tack from memories of Christmas past to consider Matt's experience of depression that inspired his non-fiction memoir Reasons to Stay Alive. We begin by discussing general attitudes towards mental health, not least among politicians, before exploring the effect that Reasons to Stay Alive has had on Matt and his readers.
Tuesday Jan 17, 2017
Episode 97 - Matt Haig Trailer: On Reading vs Depression
Tuesday Jan 17, 2017
Tuesday Jan 17, 2017
A very happy new year to all! We open 2017 by returning back to 2016. This Writing Life's interview with Matt Haig was a game of two halves. For the first 45 minutes, we discussed Christmas, inspired by his excellent festive children's story, A Boy Called Christmas. In the second half, we turned our attention to depression inspired by Matt's excellent memoir about depression, anxiety and his own experience of mental illness, Reasons to Stay Alive. In this short taster, Matt recalls how reading helped him in the early days of recovery: what he read and what he found he could not read.
Part 3 and 4 will follow.