After Lonely City I read Crudo, of course. More qualified people have written about it so I won’t go into that, but I enjoyed it immensely. It was funny, raw, and brilliant.

“When she was young, she’d sliced up her own flesh at the blink of an eye, she loved to get truly abject, but now she’d dried out…not appetising exactly, not desirable, but fodder for someone, a pigeon, at least. Was this getting older? Kathy was worried about ageing, she hadn’t realised youth wasn’t a permanent state, that she couldn’t always be cute and hopeless and forgivable.”

It takes place over a few days in her fortieth summer, and she’s about to get married. It’s not often that we see ourselves reflected so accurately in literature with all our fears and pimples and headaches, and Olivia Laing as Kathy Acker was spot on.

Take a look at the covers too: The UK paperback edition which I read, and here’s the US paperback one.

Title & this quotation from Crudo