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“When I was at school I used to think that everyone disliked me, and it wasn’t far from true” confesses Meg Bailey at the start of Don’t Look at Me Like That. Coming of age in the mid-1940s, Meg finds herself to be out of place wherever she finds herself: She is a nonbeliever in her father’s parsonage, an artistic dreamer at her stuffy boarding school, a provincial in the worldly circles frequented by her best friend Roxane and Dick, Roxane’s future husband. It is only when Meg, newly graduated from art school, moves into an untidy London rooming house alive with the sounds of crying children, sparring lovers, and even foreigners, that she begins to feel at home. But ties to the past are not so easily severed, and Meg must disentangle herself from her troubled intimacy with Roxane and Dick before she can begin to start “living in her own way.”
Don’t Look at Me Like That is the only novel by the famed memoirist and editor Diana Athill, who died in 2019 at the age of one hundred and one. At once clear-eyed and compassionate, it is a story of making mistakes and making a life.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
August 15, 2023 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781681376127
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781681376127
- File size: 703 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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September 1, 2023
The coming of age--and the reaching of happiness--of a sharp-witted woman of good breeding in post-World War II England. Celebrated memoirist and noted book editor Athill, who died in 2019 at age 101, published this, her first and only novel, in 1967. Now reissued with an afterword by Helen Oyeyemi, the book traces the emergence of Meg Bailey, the granddaughter of a baronet, against a background of 1950s Britain. Class undoubtedly flavors the tale--"they ate jam out of the pot it was sold in"--but it's Meg's acerbic, judgmental narrative voice that dominates. She is a loner, the misfit daughter of a Church of England parson and his irritated wife. At school, Meg is deemed conceited, superior, and affected, which in some ways she is, but she's also shy and short on self-confidence, forever seeking like-minded figures who will assuage her desire to be "seen." Roxane Weaver is her one close friend, and Meg lodges with the Weavers while attending art school in Oxford, learning there that she is better at design and illustration than painting. But Meg's true future lies in London, where she moves into a rackety household and finds a community of friends. True intimacy, however, comes with guilt after she begins an all-consuming affair with Roxane's husband, Dick. Athill grants Meg a forthrightness of tone that is both challenging and disarming. Withering opinions and almost comically damning truths--"At least I was able to disguise from Henry the degree of my revulsion"--are delivered without cease as Meg plows forward, compromised by her feelings for Dick and Roxane. An episode with an Egyptian friend is a weakness in the novel, but helps usher in the surprising discovery of where Meg's heart has led her. Capable and confidently insightful, Athill delivers a stylish, candid life lesson.COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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