Blog… resurrected! Apparently this will be emailed to 30 subscribers. Please leave a comment because I don’t know who you are! Let’s get this blogging thing back to mid-2000s action, why not.

Surely I’m not the only one who is totally — seemingly — done with Instagram. And Facebook is a thing of the past it seems. A relic. But still I want to tell people things. I want to share stuff. That impulse has never left me. Like this morning. It’s Tuesday 23rd December 2025 (I haven’t blogged it seems since 2018 or something ridiculous) and I’ve started reading I AM A CAT by Natsume Soseki. It’s quite the thing, this book. Published in 1906, and with a new translation from this year, it reads in such a fresh contemporary way. There are no barriers of archaic language or impenetrable cultural understandings and it’s funny too. I was chuckling on page 2. It begins ‘I, ladies and gentlemen, am a cat. But I still don’t have a name.’

I found out about it on insta. I’m still on there reading and scrolling just not posting at the moment. Maybe that’ll change. But this is how I found out about this wonderful book.

I wanted to look up online why another cat in the novel, Mr Kuro, has a Cockney accent. I discovered that it was to mirror or approximate the effect of Mr Kuro (black cat, or blackie) having a rough local dialect, either Kansai-ben (Osaka surrounds, where I lived in the early ’90s) or Tokyo’s shitamachi dialect. It’s an effective choice.

And then I found a paper by Joel Nilsson called ‘Characterisation in Two Translations of I AM A CAT.’ How interesting.

For me, finding and reading this book is pertinent because my next novel is concerned with Japan (Osaka specifically), it has a translator but it doesn’t have a cat though. That would be too Murakami, because it does have a ‘second moon’ and a couple of mentions of ears.

+

Also this morning I was tootling around the internet. I had saved for myself an article in The Cut which turns out to also be old, from 2019. It came across my feed on Instagram the other day and I thought it was new. But no. It’s about Caroline Calloway which is a name I have come across several times over the years, often (for some reason) in connection with Eliabeth Wurtzel. I think it’s because CC published — or tried to? — a memoir that was Wurtzel’esque. And I haven’t read the Wurtzel memoir (Prozac Nation). These are two women I need to explore.

Here is the link to the article, written by CC’s ‘ghostwriter’ Natalie Beach (it has 479 comments!). Compelling. I think she got a big book deal in 2015 (USD$375,000) for her memoir proposal (that was half-written by her ‘sleep-deprived collaborator living in deep Brooklyn’ — the writer of the Cut piece). Who didn’t get any credit because Caroline was deemed an ‘ingénue’, and ingénues don’t have sleep-deprived collaborators living in deep Brooklyn. But the memoir didn’t get finished, the two women fell out and Calloway stayed on Instagram and rose while Beach remained in obscurity. But now it seems there are new books out, here’s a piece in The New Yorker, paywalled though. It seems Beach and Calloway both have memoirs out, though Calloway’s seems to have been published in 2023 and only available as an audio book? So I don’t know that I have the energy or interest to unpick this knot any further than that. I think I’ll just go and read some of those 479 comments on the Cut.

+

I have a bunch of notes saved on my phone (don’t we all?) and I’ve written down some books I’m looking forward to:

A new George Saunders

A new Lena Dunham

A new Karl Ove K book?

A new Deborah Levy?? Though I haven’t really got on with the last one or two of hers. Somehow they seemed too Deborah Levy? Weird thing to say I know.

+

When I logged into my WordPress this morning and worked out how to bring my blog back I saw that somehow I have 279 subscribers. Subscribers to what? And I didn’t even know I had a sign up to this thing. Must be a WP default where people can follow… I guess that’s what it is. So hopefully my new posts will reach somebody? I had the myname.com domain for years and then somehow I lost it, even though it was automatically renewing each year. So I lost all the lovely SEO and now have myname.com.au to build up. Boring.

That’s about it though. I’m looking forward to Christmas. It’s been a fucking tough year which is partly why I’ve been so quiet on the socials. I broke my knee and had two surgeries — one to shove it all together and pin it in May and a total knee replacement two weeks ago because it was still totally fucked (more about that probably in future posts). My mum died (more about that probably as well). I had my gallbladder out in early September. BUT from my burrow, through all the months of quiet times, I’ve read, I’ve thought, I’ve written. I’ve fed my sourdough starter. I’ve tried to stay open and loving. I’ve tried to do my exercises. People have sent me flowers and love and I’ve had so much support. Good things have happened as well, which is the way of life. Things are happening with my new manuscript. I’m always sending myself notes for future projects. My Mum’s Bad Diaries podcast is finishing its 4th season. A lot to be grateful for.

If anyone’s out there, if anyone’s reading, I’m sending you my best for this time of year. 2025’s been a weird hard one for me and maybe for others too. Onwards to 2026.

X j