Category Archives: creativity and its discontents

Life Span by Molly Giles: A Review

Posted on June 20, 2024 by Gabriella West

Molly Giles is best known as a gifted short-story writer, but this late-in-life memoir produces a different kind of sparkle. It’s a more vulnerable tale than her polished fiction, and the flashes of rage and ambivalence that reoccur throughout the … Continue reading →

Posted in creativity and its discontents, Reviews, San Francisco | Tagged abuse, alcoholism, California writers, Creative Writing, dysfunctional parents, Golden Gate Bridge, marriage, memoir, men, Molly Giles, San Francisco State University, short stories, teaching, Woodacre, writing, WTAW Press | Leave a comment

A Funeral in Tipperary

Posted on December 9, 2023 by Gabriella West

Little did I know when I picked up the second Pogues album, Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, on cassette in the mid-1980s in Dublin that I would one day be watching Shane MacGowan‘s funeral on a livestream from San Francisco … Continue reading →

Posted in creativity and its discontents, Personal | Tagged A Rainy Night in Soho, death, Dirty Old Town, Dublin, funeral, Haunted, legacy, Memory, mortality, Music, Shane MacGowan, Sinead O'Connor, The Pogues, Time | Leave a comment

December Thoughts

Posted on December 8, 2022 by Gabriella West

The last month of 2022 is somehow upon us! The weather is so cold and dreary, I can’t get warm. However, I found a winter image I had never seen before, a Marc Chagall painting of a church in the … Continue reading →

Posted in creativity and its discontents, News, Personal, Self-publishing | Tagged 2023, Bookbub, creativity, promotion, Smashwords, snow, The Knight's Return, winter, year of the rabbit | 2 Comments

Review: Putting the Rabbit in the Hat by Brian Cox

Posted on February 6, 2022 by Gabriella West

What a life Brian Cox has had. The weird zaniness of some of his memoir, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat (Grand Central Publishing, 2022, $14.99 on Kindle), is amplified by the fact that the “Editorial Reviews” section on the … Continue reading →

Posted in creativity and its discontents, Reviews | Tagged acting, brian cox, putting the rabbit in the hat | Leave a comment

The Letters of Shirley Jackson—a Preview!

Posted on August 23, 2021 by Gabriella West

I’ve been busy reading the delightful, yet somewhat vexing Letters of Shirley Jackson (Random House, 672 pp., $14.99 on Kindle) and writing a long review of it! Finding a home (irony alert, as Shirley was always focused on the physical … Continue reading →

Posted in creativity and its discontents, News, Reviews, Writing | Tagged 1950s, cruelty, dysfunctional relationships, female breadwinners, feminism, husbands, marriage, mental health, Morris Minors, Shirley Jackson, The Internet Review of Books, The Letters of Shirley Jackson, Vermont, women writers, women's lives | Leave a comment

Happy Pride 2021

Posted on June 5, 2021 by Gabriella West

Pride comes but once a year! This month we are emerging from a pandemic. It feels like we ought to be joyous and yet there is more anxiety in the air than joyousness, for the most part. (Although on June … Continue reading →

Posted in creativity and its discontents, LGBT, Personal | Tagged ADHD, Apple, audiobook, Barnes & Noble, connecting the dots, Covid, Daniela Acitelli, Gay Pride Month, Google play, June, passings, Pride, Smashwords, time of grace, women's lives | Leave a comment

A Final Word on Blake Bailey

Posted on May 29, 2021 by Gabriella West

You can’t keep a bad man down. That’s what sprang to mind when I read on Twitter yesterday that Blake Bailey’s infamous biography of Philip Roth, unpublished by Norton, had been picked up by Skyhorse Publishing and will be rushed … Continue reading →

Posted in creativity and its discontents, News, Personal, Writing | Tagged academics, alcoholism, biography, bisexuality, Blake Bailey, decline and fall, double lives, Eve Crawford Peyton, fathers, Lusher, Philip Roth, publishing, Rape, Scandal, Skyhorse Publishing, sons, The Splendid Things We Planned, Valentina Rice, W.W. Norton | Leave a comment

Review: Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Posted on May 23, 2021 by Gabriella West

Occasionally, I will pick up a library book (and I vow to do this more, post-pandemic). I wanted to review a striking, mostly forgotten novel by 20th-century English author Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978), whose long life spanned almost a century … Continue reading →

Posted in creativity and its discontents, LGBT, Reviews, Writing | Tagged 20th-century women writers, bisexuality, Communism, feminism, historical fiction, Jewish fiction, lesbian fiction, NYRB, Penguin, relationships between women, revolutionaries, Summer Will Show, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, women in love | Leave a comment

It’s Spring!

Posted on May 2, 2021 by Gabriella West

And that’s always exciting. This was what my kitchen looked like last month, with the fruit trees outside in the terraced back yard pressing in at the window. Things are greener now. The cedar waxwings are taking their last bites … Continue reading →

Posted in creativity and its discontents, Personal | Tagged abuse, billie eilish, Blake Bailey, British Vogue, fashion, feminism, Matt Gaetz, sexuality, spring, teen girls, women | Leave a comment

I don’t post enough literary advice/inspiration, but now that I am submitting pieces a bit more again, here is some brilliant advice about putting yourself out there, from a new writer connection on Twitter. It jumped out at me today. … Continue reading →

Posted on June 13, 2020 by Gabriella West | Leave a comment