Sian Pattenden

She also looks like she could be the successor to someone who's in whole.

You know, if Melissa had walked out at some point, you'd get Elizabeth Wurzel in.

And she would absolutely fit, you know.

And so within that, it's got its absolute iconography sorted out.

I agree.

I thought that this is a book that probably won't stand up today.

If I read it, it's going to sound really old-fashioned.

It's going to be someone moaning about themselves.

Misery memoir is a phrase that we may be using in this podcast.

Yeah.

It's going to be so self-indulgent and self-reflexive that I'm not going to be able to do more than a few pages.

Think, oh, that was the 90s.

Weren't we all so embarrassing then?

It reads really, really well.

But it's existential.

I mean, the thing is that, you know, there might not be masses of context in this.

She might not be talking about the political situation or about, I mean, her cohort as such, being a 90s person or life as a woman.

She's talking about herself, herself, herself, herself, and yet it's so readable.

And it's, you know, say, I think...

It has its tendrils and its threads in French existential philosophical literature.