Claire Carroll and I met some years ago at a PhD-funding soirée. Claire Carroll’s thesis is on Surrealist literary legacies and mine is on Situationist literary legacies. Shortly after our meeting, PROTOTYPE 5 (yearly assembly of texts by Prototype Publishing) arrived at my flat and Claire Carroll’s ‘A Sun is Only a Shipwreck Insofar as a Woman’s Body Resembles It’ was in there, an outstanding imaginary anecdote involving André Breton to which I was strongly compelled to write a fan-girl response. But that was a while ago; since then, Claire Carroll has released a whole tome of short stories with Scratch Books ~ The Unreliable Nature Writer (2024). It’s all wickedly wry in tone though somehow still soft and of vulnerability. ‘Come and Pick Me Up Immediately’ documents a female protagonist (I t h i n k “The Unreliable Nature Writer” who appears through an eponymous series of bamboozling contemporary episodes?) dealing with a Very Needy & Conventionally Attractive Man (her drunk manager). “Can you call me? There’s something urgent I need. […] I NEED YOU TO TAKE ME TO A WOODLAND STREAM” – his txt – kicks it off. So many eyes are rolling; Claire Carroll is excellent at ffs-vibe interpersonal drama. Basically, she (obligatorily) drives him (very perfumed) out of town across “sick, burnt ochre” landscape to the pined-for woodland stream, and he is underappreciative but wireless-contact-payment-taps them a post-quest ice-cream each. I read ‘Come And Pick Me Up Immediately’ on, appropriately I thought, Marylbone High Street.
Part of The Unreliable Nature Writer, Scratch Books 2024
A Personal Anthology 