AUG 9 – FOG by Kathryn Scanlan - Review by Stella

Aug 9 – Fog could be called ‘How A Notebook Became a Fiction''. It could be dismissed as a disjointed list, or recognsed for its realist nature, or, more aptly, embraced for its brilliant author’s machinations. Kathryn Scanlan, author of the excellent Kick the Latch, found a five-year diary at an estate auction. Falling apart, worn, and illegible in places, somehow it resonated with her. These notings of daily life; the weather, the visitors, the ordinary weariness of aging. There’s food and gatherings, the deaths and births, iilnesses and misadventures as well as the mundane beauty of life. Our diaries or notebooks are our own, whether that’s your physical journal or digital one. We have our own shorthand, the initials or pet names of our most initimate family and friends. Our own shorthand for tasks, thoughts or feelings. Some of us are visual recorders — a sketch or a doodle; while others will write long paragraphs intermittently. Some of us begin well and peter out before the year is done, leaving crisp pages for another purpose (maybe scoring board games). But back to Scanlan, who spent fifteen years reading, studying and dissecting the diary of this elderly woman. Taking it as inspiration, she has written her own version, a series of fractured, seemingly irrelevant, episodes or jottings. As you read on, allowing yourself to abandon trying to work it all out, patterns of time, people, emotions, weather etc emerge. Here, an ordinary life, captured in a work of both deconstruction, almost destruction, and creation. Through Scanlan and her interpretation or disruption, we find in our hands something remarkable and surprising.