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A publisher’s rejection of Roberts’s latest book prompted this candid, absorbing journal of her day-to-day life and search for inner peace

It’s hard to write about rejection; perhaps it’s the hardest thing of all. Who wants to revisit such pain? Who really cares to crack open the smooth shell of their carefully deployed pride, to reveal the gaping wounds beneath? Michèle Roberts’s new book, subtitled A Diary of Surviving, was written during the months that followed the rejection of her latest novel by her publisher and, in one way, it is in itself a means of keeping up appearances: in its pages, we find her determined to construct something elegant and worthwhile out of her humiliation. But it is also valiantly candid. Like onions, she peels her feelings; not even the silliest or most shameful among them will escape the blade of her sharpest knife. Continue reading...