As the 4th Estate website rounds off its ‘Family Reunion’ theme, we turn to much-loved Guardian columnist Tim Dowling’s wonderful How to Be a Husband, and consider the benefits of matrimony. Tim is a husband of some twenty years, and his marriage is resounding proof that even the most impossible partnership can work out for the best. Some of the time.
So while his book is called How to Be a Husband, it’s not really a how-to guide at all. Nor is it a compendium of petty remarks and brinkmanship – although it contains plenty of both. You may pick up a few DIY hints. You might learn that while marriage is founded on love, it endures through bloody hard work. Most likely it will make you whimper with the laughter of painful recognition. Read more…
How did we get to be like this? No previous generation has enjoyed the luxuries we take for granted today. But peace has made us complacent, freedom has made us irresponsible, affluence has made us acquisitive, comfort has made us neglectful of others, and security has made us tremulously insecure.
Unable to defer our gratification even for a moment, we want everything, and we want it right now – regardless of whether we can afford it or not. Our homes are viewed not as places to live in, but as ‘assets’ to generate money. Our collective civic decency has been replaced by a persistent, resentful sense of victimhood. Sedated by a dumbed-down popular culture, we are bullied by a tiny, unrepresentative elite of privileged metropolitan bien pensants, and afflicted by imaginary illnesses (Morgellons, anyone?).
In this chapter from Selfish, Whining Monkeys, Rod Liddle delves into his own family structure and his childhood experience.
It is a rare thing to be able to watch literary history unfold before your eyes. We can only wonder what it would have been like, with the benefit of hindsight, to be present for the worlds reaction to writers such as Charlotte Bronte and James Joyce, to see them being ignored or even damned. There are certain moments in literature that, without exaggeration, define the future of the medium as a whole, and Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 publication of The Corrections exists as a catalyst for such a moment. Read more…
In his acclaimed debut We Are Not Ourselves, Matthew Thomas paints a sprawling, profoundly sympathetic portrait of a family coping with slow-burning tragedy. The novel is a grand testament to our deepest hopes and most human frailties. In this video, he speaks about his incredibly personal and touching first hand experience of his father’s battle with Alzheimer’s disease. “He took the news like a champ,” the author recalls. Read more…
This month our blog theme is Family Reunion, and last month it was Love In All Its Forms, so for this edition of 4x4th Estate we’ve combined the two, with icky results. But icky is at may be, incest has always been an important theme in literature, from the epic poetry of Classical Greece to the latest blockbuster book adaptation on HBO. Here are four sets of fictional siblings who prove that when it comes to a good romantic plot, sometimes it’s more interesting to keep it in the family:
If, like us, you’re planning on an indoor picnic for Mother’s Day (‘what a *fantastic* idea’ we hear you cry in unison), we’ve got three bespoke Mother’s Day Hummingbird recipes for you to download from Cake Days. Each of them are easy to make, beautiful to look at, and most of all, will be tasty (and impressive). Just click below to view or download recipes for:
Blueberry crumble loaf, rose cupcakes and custard and cinnamon tart!
Sunday the 15th of March sees Mother’s Day, a day to celebrate every single thing your Mum has done for you. Whether it’s something as basic as your washing, as unconditionally kind as coming to collect you from the train station when you’ve missed the last bus and don’t want to shell out for a cab, or telling your dad that he really ought to respect your life choices (even if it means you’ll be out of work for a year until the green grows out of your hair), Mum has your back, and Mum’s are the best. And, in some cases, let’s not forget that Mum has to be Dad too. To help you give your Mum the very best gift possible, we’ve paired some of our brilliant Mum-friendly books with some especially Mum-friendly presents. Spoil her rotten this Mother’s Day.
Families are weird. We pretend to others that we’re normal, but we secretly wear our family ‘weird’ as a badge of honour. You know you wouldn’t really want to trade up Mum’s creepy porcelain doll collection, Dad’s irrational fear of Morris dancers, or your brother’s love of ketchup and banana sandwiches for anything. Here are a few families of fiction that are perhaps even more bizarre than our own. Read more…
