Joanne O’Leary

Why write​ an autobiographical novel? Shouldn’t fiction depart from life and show us a world that’s bigger, weirder and more dramatic than our own? ‘One risks losing one’s privacy in fiction,’ Yiyun Li writes, ‘and to be anti-autobiographical lessens that danger.’ She was born in 1972 in Beijing, a daughter of the Mao regime for whom ‘privacy...

What I’m looking for, maybe unfairly, is a way of reconciling the Maeve Brennan who basked in the ‘lavish solitude’ of ‘small, inexpensive restaurants’ – ‘the home fires of New York City’ – with the Brennan who sparkles in her colleagues’ memoirs. The New Yorker columns bear no trace of the woman who went to a party hosted by E.B. White and silenced the room by yelling: ‘Fuck you, Brendan Gill, you goddamn Roman Catholic!’

Sara Baume​’s first novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither (2015), took the form of a love letter from Ray, a 57-year-old recluse, to his vicious rescue dog One Eye. Her new book, A Line Made by Walking, is narrated by Frankie, a 26-year-old artist who has a nervous breakdown, and stows away in her dead grandmother’s bungalow ‘on the brow of a yawning valley’ in rural...

In​ Roald Dahl’s ‘The Swan’, two boys hack up a bird and tie her wings to a third boy’s shoulders. Then they try to make him fly. The boy escapes up a willow tree, but one of the bullies shoots him in the leg. He staggers, he spreads his wings; later that morning, three people see a great white swan circling the village. Much of my time with Jacob Polley’s...