Current Reads

howls of raw grief, even in its most bizarre moments. Harry recalls the very smell of his mother in the Elizabeth Arden cream he uses to treat an unfortunate case of frostbite on his ‘todger’. As the ghostwriter, Moehringer ensures that the spectre of Diana casts a long shadow over every page of his memoir. In all earnestness, it is a very moving way to paint a sympathetic portrait of the prince as a boy who never recovered from the loss of his mother. How could he have?

Spare, unfortunately, has more ghosts to offer. However, the narrative spends far more time with the memory of Diana than with the 25 Afghans who Harry admits to killing. It breaks an unspoken military code of conduct to publicly own up to the number of lives one has taken during service.. Veterans have argued that he should never have disclosed the number of people he has killed; others may suggest that he never should have killed to begin with.

Though the imagery of Spare is ghostwritten, the confessions, after all, must be Harry’s own. The most polemical moments of ‘Spare’ prompt us to question the ghostwriter’s loyalties, and royalties; as ghostwriter, Moehringer is not acting as Harry’s loyal subject, but instead, he seems to have prioritised making the book as controversial (and commercially successful) as possible. Again, Moeheringer is carving out a new, less submissive role for the ghostwriter: a figure who is visible in his text and exploits the gap between author and narrator for his own ends.

Read the full article on cherwell.org

LEGENDBORN by Tracy Deonn

Did you ever watch that Disney movie Avalon High? Where the legend of King Arthur came alive but the big twist was that King Arthur wasn’t the super cool football quarterback? (That has to be the most American sentence I’ve ever typed.) I remember watching this movie and thinking it was so cool that they had a female reincarnation of King Arthur. It was literally the beginning of my girlboss era – a ‘cultural reset’, if you will.

This is what Legendborn is. But the black girl version. Taking place in an all-American town, our protagonist, Bree, inestigates the death of her mother whilst attending college, the same college her mother attended and wanted her to have nothing to do with. Bree discovers an affinity with ancestral magic, both the Afro-centric kind, and the white American kind.

The story follows her along her quest for answers, as well as her journey to reckon with her traumatic past and history. She forges on to force a place for herself in an environment that rejects her due to her ethnicity.

It’s the perfect book for those who are nerds for Welsh legends but still stay true to their girlboss roots.

Gulf

We met like the warning of winds in an approaching storm, sea-air ozone with crackling promise, sultry skies swollen with rain that yearned to fall like slow insects –but there was quiet in your eye.

You were bird-lithe and sand-slim, my sea-flung angel lost to the depths a fragmentary moment where moon-drenched tides of brine beat stone into submission, and coral bones whiten.

You are lost, and found, and lost again amongst faces salt-slick and sun-swollen remembered, if only in word-splintered shipwrecks if only, if only I had but reached for your hand and let myself be kissed.

by Charlotte Lai

EDITORS’ NOTE

‘You are / lost, and found, and lost again’: Gulf guides us through a chance encounter in both story and style. It carries, too, the implication that a chance encounter is much more than just that - it buries itself inside the images we use to remember it, ‘bird-lithe and sand-slim’. Lai’s uncanny and intoxicating world leaves us - and the poem’s voice - yearning for the impossible: just a little bit more.

If you are interested in writing or illustrating for The Source, email the editors Leila Moore and Max Marks at culturecherwell@gmail. com.