‘It was really just one visual idea: a woman standing at the end of the Cobb and staring mysteriously out to sea.’
In 1966 John Fowles and his first wife Elizabeth moved from London to a farmhouse near Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast. Two years later he moved to the town itself—a town with literary antecedents, because it was from the steps on Lyme Regis’s old stone pier known as the Cobb that Louisa Musgrove…
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‘I think there should be a National Service of Hospitality. The best way to see the true face of humanity is to serve it a plate of chips.’
Camilla Grudova on bad-mannered customers.
‘Anyone who has ever worked night shifts will understand the vertiginous feeling that comes with staring down the day from the wrong end.’
A.K. Blakemore on working nights.
‘I was constantly reading job ads, trying to find my holy grail – a job I could stand to do, and someone foolish enough to hire me.’
Sandra Newman on learning how to play professional blackjack.
‘I loved being a receptionist. What I loved about it was playing the part of being a receptionist.’
Emily Berry on being a temporary office worker.
‘Every part of you would swell, including your eyeballs, and no matter how much water you drank, you were always dehydrated.’
Junot Díaz on working for a steel mill.
‘I’d had quite enough of everything. I vowed to no longer mistake obedience for love.’
Fiction by Catherine Lacey.
‘The hard thing, as Alice saw it, was that something bad had happened to her and it was private and then it wasn’t.’
Kjersti A. Skomsvold on writing The Child, a book on motherhood and grief.
