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Megan Nolan is a writer of essays, criticism and fiction born in Ireland and based in London. She writes a fortnightly column for the New Statesman.
When women perform pain it is seen as grotesque and manipulative. When a man does, it’s cathartic escape from what they usually are.
A desire to change your body could drag all of that history back.
In the cases of Peter Sutcliffe and the Wests the terrible privacy of the family is apparent, the possibility that it could cloak monstrosity.
Hjorth’s precision becomes a quietly devastating mimicry of the effects of trauma, and of ambiguous and conflicting memories.
A few years ago brash, sensationalist personal essays were booming, but good first-person writing has much to teach us about suffering, forgiveness and redemption.
He saw people like the ones he knew – market traders, small-town people – on the stage, and said to himself, “I’m going to do that.”
I first came to Greece in September 2016, burned out from my life of temping and sub-letting in London, with nothing but a small amount of money I wanted to force a long way and a book to write.
I thought getting older would allow me to look back and put a definitive frame on those dynamics. As with most of my hopes of reaching unambiguous emotional clarity, I have been disappointed.
For all the pig's association with disgust, there is liberation in the idea of a creature that refuses to apologise for its appetites.
Taddeo, an award-winning American journalist, spent eight years exploring the sex lives of three women.
