The Long Form and Two Friends
Oh hello
Lest we forget the year my family discovered I liked cooking and the only gifts I received were cookbooks, cooking magazines (“Yummy!”, “Gluttony” and “What Not To Eat”) and cooking tools like a special fork for stirring spaghetti, a knife that cored an apple as it sliced and, my favourite, a spoon that had a magnetic attraction to egg shells, revolutionising their fishing out. As an 11 year old, gifts stacked on my lap on Christmas Day, I felt seen but also scrutinised, watched, like an ant that I might try and burn with a magnifying glass sitting on the roof. I felt perceived too much and too obviously.
Now I like the mystical alchemy of gift giving. I like gifts that are both personal but rub a little bit of the gift giver into the gift. This Christmas Cordelia sent me two vials with a note that said mix and then smell. The two liquids, on their own, didn’t smell like much, just alcohol with maybe a touch of vanilla, but when combined, which I did later that day, alone, in my room on the floor, the smell was heady, tantalising, pulling at me, it was like lanolin, like wet wool, mixed with instant coffee, but specifically, somehow, like a mustiness that was the smell of a jumper that me and Cord bought together and shared during our program. It smelt, not to be too saccharine about it, but it smelt like us.
It’s a new year now and I don’t like the way my life is splitting between the soppy romance of my time with Cord and my life back here in London, which I am trying to rebuild. I want the two together. I don’t do resolutions. I think life is too unpredictable for planning, rustling always with latent kinetic potential. So I won’t say what I want to achieve this year eww, but I do set attitudes or values each year because I like the act of sitting down and writing resolutions, and I use, or hope to use, these attitudes to help me. And one is grace, which I’ve written about before in these emails, but at the moment, I’m thinking about being graceful as sparkling more with the dust and fluff of myself that I feel inside but often do not make it through the frustratingly physical layers of skin. Acting with grace looks like honesty towards myself and extending that honesty outwards. It looks like glowing with ease, sitting calmly, offering warmth and bite and breath. I said this to Sam on new year’s eve over Hawaian pizza before we went to a party inspired by Italian Futurism (“without the fascism”) and Sam said, picking the pineapple off a slice to eat first, that it sounds good but he was more interested in discussing another resolution or attitude or value or whatever, for me, for 2024, which, he thought, was much more pressing and concrete. And that was to be more sexy. At the party, Iris was back again from another anthropological trip. She told me that the party’s aesthetic was tacky and obvious but she was a believer in commitment and following through so she supported the party to that extent. I said I dunno if it’s futurist but I like the tinfoil.
This week, with purpose, as you can tell, I’m writing about a book and a movie that explore and move through rigid notions of time. The first is The Long Form by Kate Briggs, an extraordinary novel about the life of one day spent by a mother and her newborn child. And then Two Friends by Jane Campion, her debut film, about two girls in Sydney, Australia. The story works backwards, starting at a point when their friendship appears distant, loose, and ending earlier when it is close, dear.
The Long Form (2023) by Kate Briggs
The story begins on a playmat, secondhand, “well-mouthed” which Helen lies on with her baby, Rose, in a house they have to themselves. It continues throughout the day as Rose wakes, sleeps, is fed. Helen receives a delivery of a book The History Of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding, which offers another world for The Long Form and Helen to enter. There is also Rebba, Helen’s friend, who lives close by. Their friendship sits behind the story of Helen and Rose, occasionally flickering brighter, like when describing the anchoring role of Helen in Rebba’s life, like: “Helen very lightly, here and there, pegging her days, and not just her days but her very being, to a tentative kind of line, making a framework for her looseness to fall around, to find a shape in relation to - and making it from all these small but mostly pleasurable, prosaically ceremonious things.” At some point, Helen and Rose leave the house and go for a walk. At some point later, they come back.
This is an incredible novel. It is a profoundly rich examination of love, motherhood and friendship. It is interested in space: the shapes that Helen and Rose occupy together, the roof that encloses them, the garden that they walk in, the shapes on the mat. These shapes bring together, I felt, the physical dimension of the novel, namely a mother attentive and devoted to the needs of her newborn child, and the intensely internal lyrical form of the novel. These shapes move into and occupy Helen’s emotional landscape too.
In reading The History of Tom Jones, Briggs also explores in essayistic intervals, what a novel is, what it should include, what needs to happen. The project of The Long Form itself asks: what about this one? Is this a novel? Which is a question that extends beyond academic etymological discussions to a wider consideration of what we, as individuals and as communities, should focus on. What stories about the world and about ourselves should we tell and hold onto? What is worthy of our captivation and awe? When we tell our friends about our day, about our life, what should we tell them?
Close to the end of The Long Form, the narrator is writing about what will happen when Rebba comes over later that evening, how the evening will come to an end. Helen says with a tenderness that holds me now as I write this: “They’ll talk further—further and further. And why not let the day end like this? On conversation. In continued conversation, with what they meant to each other expanding and deepening, allowing for Rose.”
Two Friends (1986) by Jane Campion
Two friends, Kelly and Louise, are living in 1980s Australia. Kelly has dropped out of school and lives with her boyfriend at Bondi. Louise is focused, studious. As the story rewinds, we learn that the two girls used to attend the same school. They were best friends. They would write six page letters to each other. They both wanted to attend the same school, a more selective school, which they take an exam for. Louise plays French horn. Kelly wants singing lessons. When they leave school—with the expectation of attending that new school together—they have a party at Louise’s house full of 1980s tulle and clashing patterns. Louise’s mum shelters upstairs with her friend, laughing at the kids below, drinking, cutting their nails.
Two Friends, in starting at the end and working backwards, brings a heavy sadness to the earlier parts of the story. The audience is weary of the sweet moments of girlhood because we know they are short lived. We want to protect ourselves from the heartbreak of their friendship ending. The movie explores, I think, the unfairness of the structural forces that pull against friendships. We just want them to stay friends forever but school gets in the way, and parents and boys. The movement of their friendship, its intensity, seems out of their control, locked instead into knots caused by the stresses and anxieties of girlhood.
Campion also captures wonderfully the dissonance and pace of friendship between kids: the sharpness of forgiveness, the clawing movement from being mean to being nice. Kelly totally ditches Louise at the pool to hang with cooler kids. But then at home, everything is different, the tone has shifted. Kelly asks Louise what she would like with her ice cream.
Love
Anne