A Memoir of Love and Literature

In the European tradition, Karina Szczurek celebrated her name day on Wednesday 2 August. It was a double celebration, in fact, as she had chosen the date to launch her memoir, The Fifth Mrs Brink, at the Book Lounge in Roeland Street, Cape Town. Published by Jonathan Ball, the book is an account of the year following the death of her husband, internationally acclaimed novelist André Brink, interwoven with Szczurek's life story and her relationship with Brink. This was a time of loss and mourning, catharsis and renewal: 'The only reason to write a memoir is to share something that might matter to other people,' she said. 'In order to reach out and connect, you have to make yourself almost unbearable vulnerable.'

Szczurek, whose family defected from Poland thirty years ago, led an itinerant life thereafter – the Italian refugee camp to which they were heading burnt down and they managed to cross the border into Austria. The family spent financially harsh years in the US, after which Szczurek studied in Austria and Wales.
They met in Vienna when Szczurek was a graduate student of South African literature. 'For me, meeting André was a homecoming on all levels,' she said.
After Brink's death in February 2015, the idea for a memoir simmered in her. But 'thinking about something doesn't mean doing it,' she said. Finally, sitting at a café, she ordered a drink and petitioned the universe. 'I thought, ”If I'm ever going to write this book, the first sentence needs to come to me now.'' And it came: “There is nothing like chocolate.” There can be no writing about André without mention of chocolate,' she said. The sentence was relocated during editing but served as her way in to the story.
In response to Book Lounge owner Mervyn Sloman's questions, Szczurek spoke of the personal meaning of writing. 'Those moments that are so ungraspable at a given time... When you try to grasp them and articulate them and communicate them to someone else, that's what writing is all about.' Memoir-writing also entails keeping some things to oneself: 'No-one is better at hiding among words than a writer,' she said.
No longer hearing Afrikaans spoken around her has been an unexpected loss. 'I missed it terribly. I still do.' These days she reads children's books in Afrikaans. 'It gives me pleasure to have Afrikaans around me. I speak it, but only to my cats.'
The Fifth Mrs Brink  is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek title, considering Brink once erroneously told an interviewer that Karina was his sixth wife (and Wikipedia indeed states he was married six times. The memoir is a tribute to a connection that lasted a decade in real life and endures in book form and in the heart of its author. Before leaving the stage, Szczurek held up a burgundy pen. 'Dark red was André's favourite colour. This was his favourite pen and I am using it to sign books tonight.'  

Book Club for Two (or Even One)

Members of The No-Pressure Book Club are forgiven for not reading their books, or forgetting to bring a book to a meeting, or not attending for months on end (life, you know). This gives some meetings a refreshing intimacy.

I belong to a book club. Ours is not one of those portals to revelry, where women end up drinking and dancing on tables to Belinda Carlisle and forget to talk books. No. The No-Pressure Book Club really is about literature, despite the fact that membership can be thin on the ground at times.

We set the bar low, in a good way. Launched about a decade ago by a psychologist friend of mine (I guess the title gives that away), it's a fluid, friendly association consisting of a few invited members. We meet approximately once a month at a member's home, all contributing a snack so as not to burden anyone with hostessing anxiety. We each take one book we recommend or have heard is a worthwhile read (a second-hand book is perfectly acceptable) and tell the others about it. We like literary fiction and well-written, stimulating non-fiction, and you can throw your used magazines into the ring too, along with your pride, as there's usually a taker for those. We're renowned for only reading the literary best-sellers once all the hype has died down, usually two to three years after publication.

At the No-Pressure Book Club, nobody takes offence if members don't have time to read a book. For six months. Or forget to bring a book. Or forget to attend a meeting because they're engrossed in an erotic romance, and I don't mean a novel. There have also been long stretches where members too distracted by, say, new love or a white-knuckle life crisis, announce, 'No books for me; I'm just taking a magazine this month'. It's all okay.

Book clubs are a phenomenon here in South Africa as books are expensive; a club allows members to share the cost of books. Typically, our club consists of a small group of women, but we once had as a member an American guy who was working in Cape Town for an NGO. The fact that he looked like Barack Obama's hot younger brother and gave intellectually rigorous analyses of the works of weighty US authors kept attendance high. It was reminiscent of The Jane Austen Book Club, though our man left after a year to take up a place at an opera school in New York. He sang arias at his last book club meeting.

We have had marriages, pregnancies, births, divorces, mid-life crises, illnesses – the best of times, the worst of times. Occasionally there are only two of us at a meeting, my psychologist friend and me. The Core, as we refer to ourselves, catch up on our lives over snacks and tea. As my friend pondered at one of those intimate gatherings, 'I sometimes wonder if book club would continue if there was just one of us.'

'Yes, I think so,' I said. 'We're committed.'

'I could do it,' she mused. 'I could make snacks and tea, as usual, and hold book club for one. Write down which titles I'd taken out in the little black book. Select some new ones from the stock.'

In these times of Kindles and short attention spans, one must be flexible.

For me as a writer, it's also interesting to note how diversely people read books. There are those members who doggedly read a book to the end ('The author spent all that time writing it; they must have had something important to say,' one member explained. Personally, I have no qualms about abandoning a book if I run out of mood or feel the plot is sagging, or dropping it on the second page if I suspect I made a selection error). And there are those who glance at the last page to see the ending – jokes! Nobody in our book club would ever do that.

What binds the members is that we like to read books and then discuss them, turning a solitary activity into a shared experience. I remember a member hovering over me as I surveyed the table of books at a meeting, urging in a fervid whisper, 'Oh please, please read Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer. I need someone to talk to about it. It got quite weird at the end and I need to debrief.'

Which explains why many women and some men across the country meet monthly in this way: because humans love to sit down and be told a story by a master storyteller, and in world where books are relocating from paper to pixel, that's something that will never change.

Catriona Ross is the author of several books, including the just-published ebook, Story Star: How to write your first novel and use the uncanny power of fiction to turn your wishes into reality. 

The strangest things happen when you read your own journals

Catriona Ross was merely hoping for a tidy shelf when she decided to catalogue her diaries – not a harvest of pearls 

When I moved into my new house last year, there were a few things I promised myself I'd do. Hang a mini gallery of photographs around my desk so I'd be surrounded by my favourite people while working. Install a bird bath so I could watch white eyes bathing from my desk. Er, finish writing my novel. And unpack and catalogue my journals.
The first two I did immediately, and after a three-and-a-half year writing journey, I finally completed my sci-fi mystery/romance, The Last Book on Earth. But the journal organising? Man, that was work. Having written in a journal for thirty years, often daily, I had boxes of books containing pages and pages of my thoughts, impressions and experiences. And they were just sitting there, dead weight.
Finally, I mustered the energy to get started. I bought a box of little sticky labels and cleared out two shelves in my workspace for the journals. I decided I wouldn't try to do it all at once; instead, I'd aim to catalogue five books a day until it was done. After dinner one night, I began. I sat with a glass of wine and wrote the label for my first journal, from the year I was age 12: '1/1986-12/1986.' Label stuck onto the spine, the book was placed in the shelf. After a couple of weeks, the job was done.
The sight of all my journals and notebooks arranged in chronological order from the past three decades of my life was unexpectedly satisfying. And the strange thing is how useful they've become. Now that these Books of Me are accessible and visible, I mine this database of wisdom and self-knowledge regularly.
Journalling is a way of staying connected to oneself, recording significant events and tracking one's progress. 'Writing may have healing powers you've never thought of,' wrote Sue de Groot in a piece entitled 'Keeping a journal could give you a happier life' while we were colleagues at Cosmopolitan. 'Writing down your thoughts is a way of releasing unconscious stresses. Writing about your life, your confusions and your desires can be therapeutic. It can help you to see yourself more clearly.' Besides tracking our emotional states, 'you could take the power out of whatever scares you by putting your fears into words. You could use it for goal-setting, writing down where you want to be and breaking that down into concrete steps that will get you to that place.'
Indeed. And now my collection of journals is a living, growing, ever-changing source of inspiration. Recently I opened a journal at random and discovered notes I'd made seven years ago from a Deepak Chopra book. Stirring stuff! It was exactly what I needed to read at that moment. The next day in a second-hand bookshop, I spotted a Chopra book I hadn't yet read, and bought it, and that turned out to be just what I needed to read at that moment...
Looking back can help you let go. I'm able to see how the me of today is wiser than my younger self. I've opened journals and had tears well up to see where I was seven years ago in relationships compared with where I am now. Sometimes the long way round is the only way round...
A certain challenge may come up, reminding me of something I experienced years ago. I can now look it up in the relevant journal and compare notes with myself. How did I handle it then? What will I do this time? It's awoken me to the fact that we always get opportunities do things differently – and reach a better outcome.
Yesterday I looked up entries from the time I left permanent employment in magazines 11 years ago in order to freelance and focus on writing novels. With The Last Book on Earth finally finished, I know that major step has been worthwhile.  
Reading my old journals has given me an appreciation of the difficult decisions I've made – leaving a career, leaving a marriage – and an appreciation of myself: I've opened journals and screamed with laughter over scurrilous tales and hilarious experiences I'd forgotten about.
If you don't write in a journal, consider buying yourself a beautiful blank book and a fine pen and starting. And if you do, it's worth spending time organising those journals and displaying them like treasured books, as a way of celebrating your life – because if you don't, who will? Being oneself, I think, is life's greatest and most underrated privilege.

Nominate The Last Book on Earth for a Kindle Scout publishing contract! Campaign ends 9 November.

10 Expert Tips on Designing a Book Cover

Award-winning illustrator and designer Joey Hi-Fi (yes, it's a stage name) was interviewed on radio about the secrets of book cover design. The creator of the cover art for Blackbirds by Chuck Wendig and Lauren Beukes' Zoo City and Moxyland shared this advice:

Make sure your cover stands out on the shelf. Your book is competing with every other title in its genre, and looks count.  

The cover should reflect the book as far as possible: its mood, plot and genre. If you use a book designer, ask him or her to read the synopsis and first few chapters (or, ideally, the whole book) before starting.

Use a photograph. Unless you're a photographer yourself, commission a talented photographer friend to shoot your cover. (Or try istockphoto.com for royalty-free and low-priced photos.) It's best to own the rights to your cover image/s, as reusage will be free for international editions.

An eye-catching cover can be created simply with typefaces and colour or an illustration. If you go this more arty route, commission a professional designer or a friend with good design skills.

Design with the best-case scenario in mind. A cover can add to the keepsake value of a book; ensure yours is good-looking enough to be used in a hardcover collector's edition, for example.

For an e-book edition, your cover image should meet the requirements for the Kindle screen: JPEG or TIFF format, 2820 pixels on the shortest side and 4500 pixels on the longest side for best quality; maximum image file size 5MB. Minimum dimensions for covers are 625 x 1000 pixels.

Don't neglect the spine and back cover. Your book may be stacked on a book store shelf with only its spine visible; some prospective buyers turn straight to the back cover to size up a book.

Feed into current trends in your genre. New South African science fiction, for instance, has its own edgy look. If you're writing in a new genre, establish a look that reflects your book's tone and content.

But don't blend in! It's worth being boldly creative. Joey's Blackbirds cover won The Ranting Dragon's Cover Battle for 2012 (cue free publicity).

Find a signature style. The 'look and feel' should be consistent across all your books' covers, reflecting your brand as an author. Consistency is vital in a series of books (consider the stark, instantly recognisable Fifty Shades of Grey covers.)

Catriona Ross is the creator of The Peacock Book Project: write the novel of your dreams (www.peacockproject.net). Her books are available in the Kindle Store: Little Diamond Eye, The Presence of Peacocks or How to Find Love and Write a Novel, The Love Book, Writing for Magazines: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know, and The Happy Life Handbook.