I hunted through my Ali Smith collection for a story I remembered, featuring a Smith-ish narrator and her father at a gallery, and spent a happy moment not finding that story, browsing, and finding many others that might have ended up here. I settled on ‘And So On’, which preambles and ambles through stories within stories, presenting: life as art; art as an imitation of life; life lived well and true as something that cannot be faked; art as something to hold onto in the face of death; death as a stealer-away, a cheat; and artful living (and dying) as a double-cheat so that death is not the end of the story, but only a part.
Collected in Public Library and Other Stories, Penguin, 2016
