The February Archive

February, month of despair, with a skewered heart in the centre. (Margaret Atwood)

some recommendations based on what i’ve been reading, watching and using in the month of february.

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to read —

• The Pumpkin Eater written by Penelope Mortimer. (1962)

  (you can read my review here)

  But it’s arrogance that keeps one alive: the belief that one can choose, that one’s choice is important, that one is responsible only to oneself.

The Pumpkin Eater is a surreal black comedy about the wages of adulthood and the pitfalls of parenthood. A nameless woman speaks, at first from the precarious perch of a therapist’s couch, and her smart, wry, confiding, immensely sympathetic voice immediately captures and holds our attention. She is the mother of a vast, swelling brood of children, also nameless, and the wife of a successful screenwriter, Jake Armitage. The Armitages live in the city, but they are building a great glass tower in the country in which to settle down and live happily ever after. But could that dream be nothing more than a sentimental delusion? At the edges of vision the spectral children come and go, while our heroine, alert to the countless gradations of depression and the innumerable forms of betrayal, tries to make sense of it doctors, husbands, movie stars, bodies, grocery lists, nursery rhymes, messes, aging parents, memories, dreams, and breakdowns. How to pull it all together? Perhaps you start by falling apart.

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(articles corner)

• Step inside an interior designer’s modern yet soulful Melbourne home by Anne Marie Kiely. (2024)

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• What I Learned While Cataloguing an Entire Library of 19th-Century Schoolbooks by Kim Bell. (2021)

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to use —

1. Chloé Nomade Nuit D’Égypte

2. Adrianne Lenker — Songs

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to watch —

• The Fall directed by Tarsem Singh. (2006)

  What a mystery this world, one day you love them and the next day you want to kill them a thousand times over.

  

  In a hospital on the outskirts of 1920s Los Angeles, an injured stuntman begins to tell a fellow patient, a little girl with a broken arm, a fantastic story about 5 mythical heroes. Thanks to his fractured state of mind and her vivid imagination, the line between fiction and reality starts to blur as the tale advances.

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• Witches directed by Elizabeth Sankey. (2024)

  I’ve looked back at witch trials over seven centuries, and I can’t help thinking that we see the same thing again, and again, and again.

  

  Elizabeth Sankey’s deeply personal documentary examines the relationship between the cinematic portrayals of witches and the all-too-real experiences of postpartum depression by utilizing footage that spans the entirety of film history alongside heartrending personal testimony.

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• The Last Showgirl directed by Gia Coppola. (2024)

  You know, our mothers are not saints or saviors, just regular people doing the best they can with the tools they have. I know that’s not a great excuse but I just want you to know that I love you, however imperfect that might sound.

When the glittering Las Vegas revue she has headlined for decades announces it will soon close, a glamorous showgirl must reconcile with the decisions she’s made and the community she has built as she plans her next act.

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