Joanna Biggs

In February​ 2003, I spent a lot of time saying ‘liar’ to my computer screen. I was twenty, in Paris on my year abroad working as a translator of press releases about mechanical diggers and franking machines, while back home my country was trying to go to war illegally. I must have looked at the Guardian website every 45 minutes; for me, the 2003 online version of the Grauniad...

It took me​ a long time to accept my mother’s brain was failing. I knew the usual pathways of her thought, the jumps she would make from this to that; these jumps were new. She’d always made her mind ours too. When we were teaching my little brother, Richard, to talk, to say ‘ta’ for a proffered rusk, my mother would stop me and my other brother, George, from...

Awake at 4 a.m. when the sleeping pills wear off, she finds a voice and writes the poems of her life, ones that will make her a myth like Lazarus, like Lorelei. But now she knows that her conception of her life, psychological and otherwise, is no longer tenable, and never was. Now what? ‘I love you for listening,’ Plath, abandoned and alone, tells her analyst Ruth Beuscher in a letter late in 1962. The rest of us are listening at last.

It isn’t that the sentences are difficult in Crudo, or the subject matter alien: it is rather that Crudo sits somewhere between a roman à clef and autofiction, the hip blend of fiction and memoir associated with writers like Knausgaard, Ben Lerner or Sheila Heti. If most of Crudo is true, then what does the novel gain by being a novel at all? At the back of the book, all the quotations are identified, providing a key of sorts. But Olivia Laing’s own Twitter feed is another key to the novel, as is the sort of knowledge of literary London that means you might know what the poetry prize being referred to is, or who Mitzi, Mary-Kay, Andy and the first owner of a plate that used to belong to Doris Lessing are.

On average, two women from Northern Ireland travel to England every day. Most are married, most are having their first abortion, most are between 20 and 34. Clinics in England have ‘Irish prices’, set slightly lower than private prices, but even so the cheapest available abortion with pills costs £274, and the average costs £410. Then there is a consultation fee of between £65 and £80. Then there are the travel costs: a round trip booked a week in advance on Ryanair in high summer – leaving at 6.55 a.m. and returning at 11.10 p.m. – costs £134.98.