Reviews used to start in the Notes App on the bus home from a gallery. If I scroll back, I can still find that funny poetry now:

31/03/16 ‘weird trees metal flora and clay fauna, I don’t think I would like this 6 days of the week when I’m functional and completing my to-do lists but on those slips when you lean into your own transgressions when your life is greasy, it might make better sense’

16/04/16 ‘The type of immediacy and spitting i have never found in paintings or sculpture. It’s alive and it’s blinky and staticy and it has frictions and like a soundtrack like a dripping well into electricity. I couldn’t go in twice its exhausting’

05/06/16 ‘I was still thinking about how Michael had told me that bacon doesn’t draw and then fill in planes and colour, that he instead actually paints, and I recognised it, in their quality like the curl of space, like if air was solid and to move you had to sandpaper your way through space: that is its formal sincerity, locked in gold and glass. Paintings that make you think ‘how does anyone actually cope’ - these have canvas to cry into, what do I have, Twitter’

Notes open on the left-hand side of my screen, I’d try to make sense of everything in a word document on the right. There was no plan beyond bare minimum clarity. I had a few opinions to work with, a few bricks. I pushed concrete between them until a little wall emerged. I remember wanting to let people know if I thought an exhibition was worth trekking for. I remember wanting my accent to be heard in typed words.

A light hour of writing, light on punctuation too; I never wanted a review to be far away from something I’d text a friend as recommendation or warning. A joke, a cry for help. 500 words if that. I stopped reading other people’s reviews and essays because I wanted to figure this stuff out for myself. We were only 21 when The White Pube started so every time I told someone I was a critic, I said it through a laugh, but even the laughing helped me write I think.

No office, no work hours. I passed between home, cafes, the library, my boyfriend’s parents’ front room. I could always make the writing happen. I didn’t need writing exercises. I didn’t know what writing exercises were. I didn’t need a few days to relax into it, the way people I know now need buffer days of relaxation between the rest of their life and their creativity. I thought there must be something arrogant about this readiness; or the way I was always ready to turn away from the rest of the world to look at the page instead. It could be natural, like a flower to the sun. But I mostly assumed as writers we had to be this way. I thought this is how we were able to get it done.

And it was between recent therapy sessions, in those days when other walls are being built, that I wondered why the act of writing was a sun to me, when for others it’s having kids or being the boss or climbing over dead bodies on Everest. I found my answer. So obvious, I’d never noticed it waiting for me. It’s that: I always retreated to my bedroom to cope with living in the house of a dangerous parent. I would write in my room. Draw and paint as well. Speak to people online. I remember looking forward to doing my homework. I had an itinerary of ways to entertain myself, teach myself. Or, as my therapist repeated back to me: I found a way to parent myself.

So I think it’s just that, since leaving home, I have carried that bedroom on my back like a shell to university, my Nan’s house, the flat next to the park, and now this house too. But it’s with me wherever I go, really. I have subconsciously masterminded a system in The White Pube where where my job constantly gives me new homework and then I get to sit alone and write all about it. It feels like fate. It feels safe. And when I thought about this image of myself with the shell around a girl who is writing, I recognised myself better than I did in any photograph I’ve ever seen, even if someone takes it from the back, candid.

This is why I am happy to wait until the end of the draft before I do the dishes. I don’t need the house to be clean before I can write. This is why I pay a woman in Chile to give me homework every single day. It’s why I lose track of time and don’t mind. It’s why I can write in a room full of people talking, like trauma has given me noise-cancelling headphones. It’s why, last Friday afternoon, I could sit in a cafe on my laptop, receive a phone call about a family emergency, cry at the table but then carry on editing my work. It’s always retreat, retreat. The only thing that would have ever made sense to me is life as a self-employed writer; and now I just wonder how many people end up artists and writers because they grew up the very same way.

After maybe three or four years of those early reviews, the easy, internal writing process fell on its face. Busted its lip. There was a small, feral contingent of readers who were always angry about what I’d said or how I’d said it. Things escalated. Threats all the time and once on Christmas Day. Men picked apart the way I looked (which was funny because there are no mirrors inside this shell). Someone spray-painted lies in my own city. A gallery we were due to speak at hired security because of the nutters emailing them. I got a series of anonymous emails about my day job only to discover it was Another Man To Worry About.

The writing escalated as a result. I would go from the Notes App into a word doc as usual but when I got to the end of a draft, I would open a new document to start it again, transplanting the best parts and finessing everything else. I used to guess at all the things these people could take issue with so that I could pre-empt their aggro in the rewrite. And then, embarrassingly, I would open up yet another blank page and do another filter. Leave it a few days, dream up more rebuttals. Fourth draft, fifth. I tried telling myself it was making me a better writer because I had to become more rigorous. It was textbook anxiety. It was the worst writing I had ever done in my life.

The writing process became an imaginary dialectic with a phantom troll across the table. Reviews were now six thousand words long. No soft messages to friends. It was a team death match. Angry shouts spiralling down the helix to where I was tucked deep inside with a keyboard and a stomach cramp. I know there’s a case to be made that criticism is a conversation, and if you dish it out, and so on. But I resent that all these strangers were writing my texts with me even when they weren’t in the room. I write for myself again now. If you see there’s something new to read, it should feel like it came to you by accident, the way all art should be.

I’m thinking about these different moments in my writing because I have just entered a race. Patreon is providing around £400/month at the moment which isn’t liveable, but I also recently got an Arts Council Project Grant. I am using it to write a fiction book. I have enough remaining for roughly £1000/month for the next 9 months when I will hopefully sell the book — and maybe that can fund me writing the next one? Together it is not a great wage, but my rent in Liverpool is on the low side. I do not have anyone I can ask for help. And so, I need to write a book before the money runs out. I am here trying to remember everything that’s ever worked for me so that I don’t break pace.

Before I say anything of books, there’s one last thing with criticism. This was back in the pandemic. With galleries closed, I tried reviewing video games instead, a medium I’d never tried writing about. It brought back a good vulnerability but also a fair amount of mess.

I remember playing Michel Ziegler’s game Mundaun and being floored by this indie game that used scanned-in traditional art — a feature that meant I was well-placed to evangelise as someone people came to for both art and game reviews. I remember how much I wanted everyone to buy the game. I felt a bit of a responsibility almost? But then, the review I came out with took that excitement and ran all around the houses without ever really going inside. I felt like I had missed a chance to support a small game developer. At the same time, I wasn’t sure I even know how to write a better review, so I asked another writer for help.

I’d been really enjoying the Get Object podcast in which games journalist Paul Walker-Emig used in-game objects like swords, maps or radios as jumping-off points to discuss politics and philosophy. I cold-called, explained the situation, and later sent him the Mundaun text. On a video call, he wondered why I had to review games. Why couldn’t I just write about them? I… had no idea. His question gave me a lot of relief and changed my writing going forward. Because yeah, I didn’t have to carry on being a critic who dealt in value judgements of good and bad, and don’t bother with that exhibition or yes, buy this game right now.

The way I think about it now, it’s like, when I walk out of the Odeon and ask my cousins if they liked the film or not, the yes or no isn’t the bit I’m after. It’s the conversation we have on the way through town before we split for buses. It might not be directly about the film but we wouldn’t be having it if we hadn’t just sat for 2 hours together in the dark. That’s where I want my reviews to exist now — in that aftermath. Seeing what impression art has left on my body, if any, but also what else is going on. I still believe that what I write is criticism, but I am fine if that criticism emerges in the aftermath of the writing too. The criticism itself might not be the most interesting thing I have to say.

Until the next great upheaval, writing reviews feel straightforward. I used to hunt for things to cover but now there’s always something I want to say about my health, the government, or whatever. I just look over my shoulder at all the culture I’ve already experienced and pick something I can lean on to make my point. I don’t keep terrified notes. I write Sunday texts on Saturdays. I don’t write in service of culture anymore. I think I let it serve me.

But writing books is sort of horrible. Book two comes out in February. Book three is the one I am fighting right now. Writing a book is like making a bet with your future self who already gets to hold the physical edition, except the bet is also split with your past self who had the idea in the first place. Your present tense is stuck trying to figure out what the other two need you to do to win, and absolutely no one can tell you the right answer. It is not a thing you can guess at. You have to make it up. You have to write a book.

There are some things that help. I am always knitting something mindless because I only seem to be able to work problems out when I look away for a minute. I book meetings and Spanish lessons in the afternoons so I have mini deadlines all the time. I send drafts to Zarina, who becomes the fourth person in the bet, tipping me off. I still don’t read other people’s criticism but I read as many books as I can stand, mostly so I can remind myself what I even enjoy in a book. You do forget these things.

Reviews are small enough that I can hold them in my head fine, but books go on for so long they lose precision. When we wrote Poor Artists, I spent the eleventh hour deleting fifty thousand words. I told author Holly Gramazio what I’d done because I knew she’d been through the same before her novel The Husbands came out. She said a friend had told her: in the first draft, you write every sentence three times because you don’t know what the book is yet and you’re still figuring it out, and so your job at the end is to pick the best of every three-part multiple choice. I think of that now whenever I write. I don’t want a book sodden with my own subpar attempts. Yeah, I want my prose to sting like Jenny Holzer screams.

I know the system I built for myself came of something horrible, became something protective, but I’m not sure it’s a lifestyle I need to dismantle. I love it here. Fan blowing on my back, cat flaked out at my feet. Water bottle, sand timer. Fingerprints pushing dust around a Magic Keyboard. I like that I had that protection ready to go when I got sick with POTS and spent those first few years in and out of bed, a body totally changed with fatigue and pain. My life was reduced to a bedroom, but wasn’t it always?

And now, I am packing for a month in Chile. I have a residency in Fundación Meteoro in Santiago, and then I’m heading to the Museum of Modern Art on the island of Chiloé. I am going to be researching book three. Taking waterproofs and walking boots, the daily 10mg of Midodrine that props me up, knitting needles, new perfume, the memories of all the writing I’ve ever done. I am going to pause my reviews here to focus on the book. I am going to write as much as I can while I have this grant, get it done while I do not feel as working class as I really am. So, goodbye for now. I am bringing my shell to the end of the world.

• if you’re here at the end of the text, leave a shell emoji 🐚 on the white pube instagram so i know you were here

• this text is funded with support from arts council england project grants - you can find more information about that here; I’ll be over on the /blog on twp to share more about the logistics of getting this book written in terms of disability and finances

• on my way to meteoro soon

• and then to MAM chiloe