Tag: Claire Carroll

‘Infinite Husbands’ by Claire Carroll

This debut collection contains many examples of what a writer can do when she’s not afraid to play around with telling. ‘Infinite Husbands’ is one of my favourites:

“My second husband is hilarious and cruel and devastatingly handsome, with watery blue eyes. He is so handsome that I can’t even think about him for too long as my heart rate rises unbearably, and I have to lie down. He has been missing for quite some time.”

The show-don’t-tell police would be all over this with a red pen: Don’t tell us that he’s ‘hilarious’, ‘cruel’, ‘handsome’! Dramatize these qualities! Show us how he behaves towards the narrator so that we can draw our own conclusions. Use unusual verbs! But that would take all day, and it’s not what the story is interested in.

Many of the narrators in this collection are – as the title suggests – not entirely trustworthy.

First published in The London Magazine and available to read here. Collected in The Unreliable Nature Writer, Scratch Books, 2024

‘Come and Pick Me Up Immediately’ by Claire Carroll

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