Charlotte Wood

oh my god yes because you love Lauren Groff's Matrix right and they're young

yeah yes yes I love that I have a trilogy of perfect nun books Groff's Matrix Agatha Little Neon by Claire Luchette and um Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood perfect three perfect nun books

Okay, so I did look it up, and Story of an Hour was published in 1894.

It does make me think, because when you were mentioning that, the kind of confusion of the names and also this detail that she goes into, in a way, as much as it doesn't feel intimate to us as readers...

yeah and

not expecting yourself to be perfect um i also went and heard charlotte wood um a couple of weekends ago at the sydney writers festival in a talk about creativity and she has this amazing book about creativity called the luminous solution which i think i read during COVID from memory um but one of the things that in the book that she talked about again um was coming to the desk every day with curious optimism and I thought isn't that the opposite of perfectionism like not being too hard on yourself I'm just going to sit down I'm going to be curious I'm going to hope for the best I'm going to see what happens

yeah

okay I like that so maybe you need to stick that on your something on the metro oh yeah curious optimism Ask me why.

Yeah.

Um, I would recommend for anyone who is suffering from a saccharine overdose of, uh, unrealistic female friendship, uh, tropes on, uh, on television, to pick up Charlotte Wood's book, The Weekend, which is one of the most, I think-

Oh, yeah

... brilliant explorations of friendship between mature women who have been friends for a long time and the way they can survive even terrible betrayals and complicated, knotty stuff.

I have actually just read, oh, I can tell you what I read.

Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, which is, I think it was on the Booker Prize list a couple of years ago.

Your kind of thing, actually.

I don't know if you've come across it.

But yeah, it does sound up my street.

Might give that a little explore.

And I work with someone called Charlotte Wood, so you

know.