The Promised Party: Kahlo, Basquiat and Me
Jennifer Clement
Canongate, £16.99, pp304
It’s more than a decade since poet and artist Clement published Widow Basquiat, her acclaimed account of the love affair between her friend Suzanne Mallouk and the doomed neo-expressionist painter, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Now comes a more personal prequel, strung together from impressionistic vignettes that chronicle Clement’s coming of age in 1980s New York, where the counterculture ruled, and before that, her childhood in Mexico, a country caught between surrealism and communism. Whether stashing her poems in a Basquiat-daubed fridge that later sells at Sotheby’s or playing with Diego Rivera’s granddaughter in Frida Kahlo’s bathtub, her memories are a perfect synthesis of clarity and mystery.
Normal Women
Ainslie Hogarth
Atlantic, £16.99, pp320
A move back to her home town forces new mother Dani Silver to acknowledge that rather than being special, “a creative”, she’s just another career-less philosophy graduate, toiling on the home front while depending on her husband financially. Then she discovers the Temple, a cult-like yoga studio that’s essentially a brothel cloaked in “wellness” lingo. Seduced by its charismatic owner, Renata, Dani believes she’s found her vocation, but after Renata goes missing, this spiky second novel veers off into mystery territory. While it fails to live up to Hogarth’s zany debut, Motherthing, it does provide some provocative takes on capitalism’s intersection with domestic labour and “momfluencer” culture.
Life’s Work: A Memoir of Storytelling and Self-Destruction
David Milch
Picador, £10.99, pp304 (paperback)
In 2015, the writer of TV shows NYPD Blue and Deadwood was diagnosed with dementia, yet as he says towards the end of this illuminating memoir, a collaboration with his wife and adult daughters, “I still hear voices. I still tell stories.” Less creative impulses governed his younger years: Milch’s surgeon father was a drug-addicted gambler, and he was himself drinking and betting by the age of eight. He adopts a philosophical tone when describing how he became a heroin addict for the “structure” it lent his days or the millions he lost at the races, but greater enlightenment derives from the TV masterclass that’s folded into these pages. Who knew so much of Deadwood was composed in iambic pentameter?
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