Portraiture, ospreys, and taking a trip to the museum cafe
With Connor Harrison, Sadia Nowshin, and Jim Moir
I don’t recall how I got hold of V. C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic. It must have been shortly after it was published in 1979; I was 12 years old and a voracious reader. I loved the Nancy Drew books my mother had given me — Nancy, bold girl detective with her blue roadster, always sure to stop for ‘luncheon’ — and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books, which remain one of my greatest loves and inspirations. But Flowers in the Attic was contraband, not a book to be taken out of the library but smuggled hand to hand.
Cathy and Chris Dollanganger are imprisoned as teenagers in their grandparents’ attic, as their mother seeks to recover a family fortune — it is a bizarre tale of fear and abuse with a heavy (yet somehow romantic?) dose of, er, incest. When it was published a reviewer in the Washington Post called it ‘deranged swill’ that ‘may well be the worst book I have ever read’.
Yet for American women of my generation it remains a touchstone, a strange entry-point into adulthood. Sadia Nowshin’s essay on her girlhood reading made me think about how we discover the reading material that shapes us, and how what once was shocking can now seem quaint. I’m too old (let’s be frank) to have grown up with Jacqueline Wilson’s books — my equivalent was the work of Judy Blume.
Andrews’ book is in the tradition of the Gothic; Blume’s realism offered another kind of contraband. Like Wilson, she depicted real teenagers in real situations — the shame and pain of bullying in Blubber, the truth of sexual awakening in Forever (which was published in 1975, but remains a book often removed from library shelves in the United States). We seek mirrors in books; we seek other lives; we seek the strange and the familiar. How much we should be troubled by what we read, and who gets to decide who reads what, are questions that will never go away.
Erica Wagner
Editor-at-Large
Reading through my girlhood past
Sadia Nowshin reminisces about the books that made her, and blushes at a BookTok table
Back in 2012, while my rebellious 13-year-old peers were smoking their first cigarettes and replacing their parents’ depleted vodka with tap water, I had a different kind of contraband hidden in my school bag. Sourced in the school library and concealed inside a folder that disguised its contents, my illicit goods were of a more nerdy quality: one copy of Louise Rennison’s Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging.
I knew that the word ‘thong’ alone would be enough to have the book confiscated should my guilty pleasure be discovered. I say ‘guilty’ — allusions to characters going off to kiss off-page is about as risqué as it got, but it was enough to give tween girls their first glimpse of secondary school grown-up romance.
Adults quickly decided that the book was without merit; in the US, the book is number 35 on the American Library Association's list of frequently challenged or banned books between 2000 and 2009, falling under the category of work that ‘does not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.’ Tell that to a pre-teen girl with dreams of life beyond the training bra.
We saw ourselves in Georgia, with her Wotsit orange legs caused by a fake tan mishap and repeatedly tragic misjudgement of social situations, the awkwardness of girlhood thrown into sharp relief. The objectively terrible film adaptation remains nostalgic for many of my fellow now-20-something women — few films have managed to achieve the same cinematic experience and generational cultural impact as watching protagonist Georgia sprint through Brighton in a homemade olive costume through the opening credits.
Sadia Nowshin is the Junior Editor at Boundless. She joins Erica on this week’s episode of the Boundless Podcast to talk all things teenaged reading, BookTok’s toxic tropes, and Judy Blume
Listen now on Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Cappuccino art at the National Portrait Gallery
In the first part of our new series on reviewing the eateries at London’s galleries and museums, Connor Harrison enjoys a quick coffee at the Audrey Green where customer satisfaction has been variable
Among the 70-odd Google reviews of Audrey Green, the National Portrait Gallery’s gleaming white strip of a café, is a one-star review from a Mrs. Beaver. ‘It is called latte art,’ she writes, giving it priority over thoughts on the bad staff, food and temperature, ‘as you do it on a latte NOT a cappuccino.’ Prewarned, then, I managed to remain relatively calm when my own cappuccino was offered up with a leaf on its face — ‘Waiter waiter, there’s some art on my coffee!’ ‘Well keep it down, or everyone will want some.’
Frivolous adornments aside, the coffee at Audrey Green is good. Perhaps this is of little surprise as it is produced in Australia, where they know their caffeine better than the English are willing to admit. I drank it perched at the bar table that runs along the café’s flank, back to the counter, face to the wall, Audrey Hepburn watching me eat banana bread from above. When I had opportunity to turn, and the queue between me and the baristas wasn’t busy, and there were no visitors using the narrow passage to reach the proper tables or the side exit, and staff weren’t having to navigate the same passage with trolleys and trays of dirty plates, I was able to look out through the café windows, onto the spring light and leafless plane trees and St Martin’s Place.
But to turn back to the banana bread, and portraiture. Award-winning according to its label, the bread is close to perfect; soft, shrapnelled with walnuts, and hefty enough in the hand for those concerned about the country’s oil consumption. However, with each caloric bite, surrounded by faces in paint and photograph, I was reminded of the threat my own portrait posed. As a viewer, I probably enjoy portraits more than any other field of art. As a subject, I am about as comfortable in front of a camera as a dog crossing a bridge over the motorway. I duck my head, avert my eyes, and lie flat to the ground until someone agrees to carry me home.
Connor Harrison is a freelance journalist who has written for LA Review of Books, Literary Review of Canada and Evergreen Review, among others
Osprey Pandion haliaetus
In the eighteenth century, it was widely believed that the Osprey’s body was filled with an oily substance that was irresistible to fish, luring them to the surface wherever the bird hovered.
Jim Moir’s More Birds was published by Unbound in 2024