Book review: Reality, Reality by Jackie Kay

Reality, Reality

Jackie Kay

Picador, £12.99

There are stories here that focus upon and articulate sheer joy, without souring or undercutting it – an undertaking that feels bold and uplifting in the context of a medium that tends to be dogged by maudlin introspection.

Kay writes lovingly, warmly, inclusively; even in her sadder tales, her protagonists are sustained by their bolshy wit and their openness to the ludicrousness of things. For the most part, they’re women in mid to later life, assessing their lives and their interactions with other women through the prisms of loneliness or sorrow or mental illness. One soundtracks her banal domestic life with imagined interjections from the Masterchef judges; another measures the trauma of extreme poverty against the inexorable optimism conferred by a late-life pregnancy; another takes a critical look back at her sexual history on the event of having experienced, at 49, the sort of orgasm she had long written off as myth. (Particular scorn is reserved for those vocal exes whose overstated ecstasies “made me feel like I was trapped in some Edinburgh Fringe performance show”.) Two lovers make history by executing Shetland’s first lesbian wedding; two old friends practise mild subversion by getting together just to smoke fags.

Such dry, perky little tales of domestic confinement and sexual awkwardness have a retro feel that will be familiar to anyone who devoured the Virago slate over the 80s and 90s. The mix of bitterness and dippy wonderment recalls Fay Weldon, whilst Kay’s irony-spiked, faux-naive language recalls Lucy Ellman; elsewhere there’s a fairytale quality that draws Angela Carter into the mix.

More experimental pieces also take the approach of reclaiming neglected female experience, and can ring a little over-familiar as a result (beautifully written though it is, the story that embodies a whole historical chain of female torch singers in one immortal, shape-shifting performer might itself remind readers of a lost Fringe show). We might have passed from feminism through post-feminism into a sort of plucked-and-waxed nightmare of renewed objectification since those green spines graced the shelf of every self-respecting student of women’s issues, but Kay’s characters still tend to occupy a space of voicelessness and separation from men. It’s likely this will either resonate or grate depending on how much you feel your gender defines your reality.

Certainly the force and care with which Kay writes of female friendship and lesbian love can still feel fresh and rare. Her treatment of platonic and familial female love is sensitive and often funny; and one realises, as she writes of break-ups, marriage and fertility angst between female partners, just how rarely lesbianism is written of as a permanent, shifting reality, rather than a thrilling alternative to the hetero norm.

Sometimes, the determined ordinariness of Kay’s characters – their reality TV references, their agonies over soup and cardigans and Christmas dinner – can get a bit annoying, a bit too deliberately anti-literary. Where she takes the sole intimate perspective of one character, that person’s interiority can get oppressive, like a drama improvisation taken too far for an audience’s interest to sustain. She’s most interesting and most delightful when she lets her imagination fly more freely, as in the intriguing Mind Away, which analyses just where the scattered thoughts of a dementia patient might land; or the beautiful Hadassah, which makes a jewelled myth out of a bleak contemporary reality.

On the whole this is a collection with a slightly scrappy feel: some stories feel too simple and polished, while others ramble, not quite certain what they want to be. But the pleasure that Kay takes in observation, in dipping her imagination into the secrets of the secretive and the songs of the unsung, is infectious; if her craft can be imprecise here, her work is always borne along by a current of sheer generous interest in and empathy for people. «-