Correctives, Bukowski, Potholes and Blowholes in Somerset

The salutary “I hope you aren’t going to Bruton to clean up,” has got me braced and on high alert for any potential potholes on the road to a new life. Choose the correct corrective kids

Interviewer: What do you hold responsible for your success?

Charles Bukowski: A brutal childhood, alcohol, half a dozen rotten jobs, a dozen rotten women, plus an overpowering fear of everything, plus a strange arrival of luck and bravery in sub-zero situations.

From, The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way: On Writers and Writing

When trying to scratch the shame I feel about cannibalising my life in writing, I often think of Charles Bukowski. Such is my internalised misogyny, and so patriarchy-facing is my gaze, that I look to a literary figure who was a notorious misogynist to give myself permission to write autobiographical stuff. Ah well, at least you are a fool with insight, as my Daddy likes to say.

[I hope you see what I did there.]

Bukowski was an actual genius at what is called auto-fiction, confessional but with narrative thread. He’s like St Augustine, with his confessions, but on a path not to the one true God but liver disease and hell. I am not Bukowski, neither brave nor sleazy enough. And given my Mum read one of these substacks and started sobbing at one single clause of a single sentence, there is a grave concern that if I chose to really write like Bukowski, she’d probably die on the spot. And we don’t want that. Parents are a terrible brake on writing, aren’t they.

Bukowski on the toilet, by Michael Montfort