Appreciating the Understated Complexity of The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing

I met Melissa Bank in the late twentieth century, in between the publication of her two books—the one you are holding (let’s pretend that it is the late twentieth century, and you have no choice but to hold a book in order to read it) and The Wonder Spot . I can’t remember how or why we met, but for a while we hung out whenever I was in New York or she was in London. I loved spending time with her. She wanted to talk, and to listen, and to laugh as loudly and as frequently as possible. But she was acutely observant, shrewd, endlessly sympathetic and, above all, loving. It seemed to me that she met people hoping she could love them. And she was fearless. I had already read The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing when we met—so, like everyone else, I was a fan. When I was putting together Speaking with the Angel , an anthology of short stories with contributions from Irvine Welsh and Dave Eggers and Zadie Smith and a whole bunch of other people, Melissa was someone whose work I very much wanted to include. She gave me The Wonder Spot , the story not the book, and she came to London when Speaking with the Angel was launched. The launch party was an enormous event in the Hammersmith Palais, the much-loved gig venue, now gone, that The Clash sang about. Teenage Fanclub played, and well-known actors read a couple of stories to an excitable crowd. It was a tough gig even for the actors—experienced, professional showoffs—and only one of the authors wanted to read her own work to the noisy spectators: Melissa, the one who had only recently published her debut book. Everyone in that audience, many of whom had had more than one drink, listened to every word. She was a knockout. Reading interviews with Melissa now, all these years later, it’s interesting and a little depressing to see how often she seemed to be required to defend herself. The introduction to one of them includes the line, “Certainly […]

Click here to view original page at Appreciating the Understated Complexity of The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing

© 2024, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.