Explore Essays and memoir
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Subject+Object: The fount of all smoky wisdom
Will Self
‘To explain what I now feel for the pipe I must paraphrase the writer Robert Stone’s remarks on hard drugs: I admire it from afar.’
Olga Grushin | Portrait of My Father
Olga Grushin
‘Things that aren’t done right away are never done.’
Doing the Paperwork: Life in the aftermath of a violent death
David Goldblatt
‘If the pressure of their life didn’t kill her it made the fight too hard.’
Portrait of My Father
Ali Smith
‘What you do is, you go up to it, and touch it.’
Ali Smith remembers her father.
Portrait of My Father
Adam Mars-Jones
‘I put my trophy on a high shelf, and at some stage laid it face down.’
Tracing Puppa
Ruchir Joshi
‘Also, at core, he was a theatre man, an actor, and he had the confidence of the genuine performer – ‘life makes you go through many roles and you have to act them with style!’’
In My Father’s Footsteps
Francesca Segal
‘The two monoliths that dominated my father’s identity – the peak and the trough of his life – were Love Story and Parkinson’s disease.’
Portrait of My Father
Jon McGregor
‘He must have taken thousands of services in that time, but this still feels like the holiest thing he’s ever done.‘