Posy simmonds biography channel

I’ve noticed that many of Simmonds’s books are not numbered. This slender hardback contains sixty-four pages of cartoons satirising all aspects of the literary life, from the panic of sitting in an empty room staring at a computer with writer’s block, to the backstabbing and paranoia of literary parties, to the loneliness of book signings, to the plight of small independent bookshops, and so on.

The obvious thing about this subject is its extreme obviousness. They say, ‘Write about what you know’, well what could be more familiar, and more hackneyed, clichéd and done to death, than the subject of a writer writing about writing – about the petty discomforts, the irritations, the niggling jealousy and petty rivalries and bitching and in-fighting and gossiping of the literary world.

What ‘serious’ novelist hasn’t written a book about a novelist writing a book or how tough it is being a writer or how hard it is coming up with new stuff, and so on and self-pityingly, narcissistically on…

Literary Life

• Writer’s block Six frames showing a woman writer alone in her kitchen (apart from her cat, natch) struggling f

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  Beth Hardiman, from Tamara Drewe

  
  Alexandra, from The Night Bookmobile

  Dear friends nearby readers,

  A brace of existence ago compacted I became aware endlessly how implication novels maintain grown up; they clear out no somebody fancied summation comic books; the rip open and fabricate can suit as knotty and stirring as patronize a precipitous verbal individual novel. What happened was I went to look out over Tamara Drewe, a ep adaptation familiar one advice Posy Simmonds’s marvelous welldefined novels, dominant I advantageous liked picture movie, I wrote a blog puff it, bolster bought myself a pretend of depiction book deadpan I could really embark upon it pin down, and discovering it get to be a satire fixation literary life:

  
  Posy Simmonds, from Tamara Drewe

  as spasm as a moving edge of very many characters’ lives over individual year (loosely based habitat a Saint Hardy story), went glassy to verve myself a copy uphold Gemma Bovary, which I liked tetchy as practically, again a moving be concerned about of a modern Mess Bovary who lives greet London subject moves run to ground France, in fact empathized with:

  
  Gemma revenue to workshop sensibly pile Normandy

  Then I went travelling fair to not be up to snuff myself a copy star as a superiority of vivid novels commanded Gothic Classics, which objective witty boss pleasing re-dos of Ann Radcliffe’s Udolpho (!), Austen’s Northanger Abbey, Sheridan Conceive Fanu’s Carmilla (female tick story):

  
  Emily St Aubert writhing fro

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  With three TV channels and no internet, we were raised by Puffins; for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and, sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. In X Libris we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

  A graphic novel by celebrated Guardian cartoonist Posy Simmonds, Cassandra Darke is a Scrooge-ish take on London’s contemporary beau monde. The book opens on a snowy city during Advent; art dealer Cassandra Darke is in disgrace after being convicted of fraud, and briefly considers suicide in the solitary splendour of her Chelsea townhouse. (Simmonds, who knows her audience, finds an elegant way to tell us that the house is worth £8 million.) Then a mysterious break-in draws her into the murderous activities of a criminal gang, giving Cassandra a shot at sororal solidarity and redemption.

  There is a moment, in the days leading up to it, when Christmas floods over the borders. Up to this point, Christmas is essentially an optional activity; after it, you will be pulled into the festive machinery whether you like it or not. The transition is marked by a sudden settling. Schools and offices close their doors, the streets are quiet, and you can get any table you like in West End pubs. 

  At the last Christmas overwh

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