George Kemp
speaker
121 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 17 Jul
George Kemp’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
This book is so hard to describe and that is exactly why I love it.
And I've read it multiple times and I've listened to it and it's almost like a beautiful song in that it's short enough that you can reread it and reread it and try and consistently try and figure out its little riddles.
And overall, I think it's a book about familiarity and that's what I love about it.
familiarity with one's self, familiarity with one's surroundings, with our fears, with our shortcomings, and most importantly, with our closest relationships, which, you know, quite often, of course, can be the ones within which there is the largest gulf.
And, you know, she says at the start she doesn't know exactly why she feels like she needed to go on this trip with her mother, but she just feels that she does.
And so we're trying to kind of work that out with her as we go.
And so much of the novel is about proximity.
There's so much proximity to ideas, to artworks, to their physical bodies in space.
And it's like they're kind of connected by some sort of elastic through this book that is just stretching and coming together and pulling apart.
And you get this sense that that's their entire lives.
And my mother comes from a generation where neither joy nor sadness are displayed to the extremes.
And that can often lead to some sort of distance.
And so I think about this book a lot in conversations with my own mother.
And you see these moments where the narrator in this book is worried that her mother's not going to be able to handle this thing or she does this thing for her.
And then later it's the mother that brings her the warm food, you know, and there's this symbiotic relationship that is happening between these two characters that
that is explored through art and explored so obliquely, but somehow so deeply.
And so it's just, it's a constant riddle to me, this book.
And it sort of taught me as a writer that whether your writing is, you know, deeply poetic or extremely prosaic, like a lot of this book is, it doesn't matter.
It just needs to be specific and it's going to touch somebody.
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Showing 101–120 of 121 · page 6 of 7
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