Bainbridge’s novel of the last days on RMS Titanic was acclaimed and popular (“They probably thought it was the book of the film,” she said), and the scenes of the sinking are brilliantly delivered. “There is about me an element of showmanship,” says one character, but Bainbridge’s own showmanship is muffled here by her need to stick with facts, meaning the novel lacks the humour, fluidity and eccentricity of her others. And unlike her earlier books, the final tragedy never feels personal to the characters.

Sample line: “He did have layers, but like an onion they were all the same.”

Bainbridge’s darkest novel is about the teenage narrator and her older, cooler friend Harriet. “I’ve always run wild,” our girl says: a common trait in Bainbridge novels. (She herself was “expelled from school at the age of nine because of some dirty rhyme”.) When the narrator and Harriet get involved with a married man, there’s a lot of “adolescent trembling, swirls of nerves gone gold” – and mortal danger. It’s a story of power and corrupted innocence: but who’s corrupting whom?

Sample line: “It was nothing really. I hardly noticed. Just like going to the dentist. Not even as bad.”

The fifth of Bainbridge’s novels to be shortlisted for the Booker prize – “our table was always the most cheerful, because we didn’t expect to win” – was another based on historical events. She turned to these after she “used up”her life in her earlier autobiographical novels. A subtle book that rewards rereading, it’s set around the Crimean war, narrated in turn by the hangers-on of medic George Hardy. The story comes as a series of snapshot moments, as the characters hurtle toward disaster. “One should never underestimate the disruptive force of haphazard actions,” says one, and Bainbridge’s characters know all about those.

Sample line: “Some people only weep inside, which I think wasteful.”

Of all Bainbridge’s novels, this offers the most direct account of her “terrifying” childhood in Liverpool when, as she later recalled, her mother and father fought so much “my brother and I would never be out of the house at the same time [so as] to stop them killing each other”. Through siblings Alan and Madge, we see their mother’s restless domestic rearrangements (“Everything in its place, though never for long”) and a bad-tempered father, but also the demons that drove him there. Little wonder that “Madge threw herself about in a transport of unexplained grief”. But it’s also a charming, funny, bittersweet portrait of a vanished world of meat pies, fruit drops and poultices on boils.

Sample line: “Though the war was over, Father was still caught in a cross-fire, harassed by battles, by phantom cities tumbling about his ears.”

Many of Bainbridge’s characters long for the transformative effects of love, are so hungry for change that they grab on to it, even if it’s not the right change. Playwright and lothario William provides it for as many women as will have him. (“What did you think when I first met you?” “I thought I had flu.”) Even as his deceits are uncovered, he gets away with it. “You don’t want to expect normality from him,” one of his lovers says to another. “He’s an artist after all.” The novel has the delicious shiver provided by a really good bad guy.

Sample line: “Her doctor said she was a healthy young woman – all normal. Not my heart, she thought. Surely my heart’s not normal.”

Set, like many of Bainbridge’s novels, in post-war Liverpool, this book brings us an ungovernable girl, Stella, and her efforts to become an actor. (Bainbridge acted before she wrote, and appeared in the eighth episode of Coronation Street in 1961.) She falls for the director, Meredith Potter, with his “Gestapo monocle”, as he prepares a production of Peter Pan. This is Bainbridge at her most demanding – “I don’t like to be obvious or spell things out” – and the reader must stay alert, but the rewards are rich.

Sample line: “[Meredith] had never known a father, being the issue of a man who smoked cigars and a girl plucked from the typing pool of the Cunard buildings in 1913.”

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Bainbridge’s best books are both funny and sad: when, early on, her publisher suggested she write a black comedy, “it was like taking a cork out of a bottle”. This is an extreme example of the form: a farce, where everyone seems to be having an affair with everyone else, turns into a hostage drama as a dinner party is invaded by criminals. The darkest moments are rough even by Bainbridge’s standards, but the overall tone is exuberant, even antic.

Sample line: “Why couldn’t he pretend that he longed to leave his wife, so that she in return could pretend she wished he would?”

Easily the best of Bainbridge’s novels based on historical events, this takes us into the minds of Robert Scott (“I’m simply no good when I’m not doing something”) and the four men who went with him to the South Pole – and part of the way back. “We did our business in our britches and shook the turds out when they froze.” Each voice is distinct and a brilliant act of ventriloquism from Bainbridge, but what underlies the men’s relationships as they crawl toward disaster is the great immovable glacier of the English class system.

Sample line: “How curious it is that passion has so little to do with feeling cheerful.”

Most of Bainbridge’s novels end in death: this one opens that way too. Mismatched friends Freda (who “longed to be flung into the midst of chaos”) and Brenda (who wears a coat in bed) both work at a bottling factory, where they navigate desires for and attention from their Italian colleagues. A works day out leads to chaos with horses, a broken toilet, a barrel of brandy, and more death. Here, slapstick and tragedy don’t alternate, but happen at the same time, as Bainbridge once more makes us laugh at things we shouldn’t be laughing at.

Sample line: “She supposed it was the fumes from the wine that kept them all in a constant state of lust.”

Desperate romantics are Bainbridge’s speciality. Sensible Nellie (“Never sit down on someone else’s lav and never eat a shop-bought meat pie”) isn’t one, but her sister Marge (“the big blaze that died down through lack of fuel”) is. So is the niece that lives with them, Rita, who falls in love with an American GI. This is Bainbridge at her best: shocking, sinister, and perfectly expressing her characters’ internal turmoil, which by some process of alchemy results in the blackest of comedy.

Sample line: “She wished she was Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, languidly sitting in a long dress, calling them darling, loving and loyal always – but cool like a snake, telling them to go before they told her.”

‘But after all, writing is nothing more than a guided dream,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges. Dreams and dreaming are fertile concerns for Rosalind Belben, too. Her fourth book, originally published in 1979 and reissued last year, was titled Dreaming of Dead People. It was followed, a decade later, by Is Beauty Good. Now available in a new edition from the Sheffield indie And Other Stories, this eccentric polyphonic novel contains dozens of considerations of dreams, including dogs’ dreams and horses’ dreams as well as human beings’. Yet what makes it extraordinary is Belben’s ability to capture in words the slippery state that is neither dreaming nor sleeping nor waking, but somewhere in the edgelands between all three.

“I fall awake and think, I want to go home. But there is no home.” So begins the chapter entitled Exile, a deliciously elusive story that is, most of the time at least, narrated in the first person by someone who is probably a woman, “a grizzled, cropped person”, and probably quite old and alone. They might be travelling through mountains somewhere, perhaps on a bus. They aren’t sure: “I am quite lost, wherever I am. I want to surrender. I wish to retire. I am tired.” Swishing about are uncertain memories of a childhood “shrouded” in nightmares: there was an orchard with an abundance of flora and fauna, and larks and swallows and “swifts to scream”. Like the author, the narrator was “born in the mud month” of February, and longs to disappear into marshlands to “be touched and stroked by plants”. But Belben never lets us rest in one place for long. Slipping in and out of sleep, “suffering glimpses”, the narrator stares at “a pink and blue angel” in the plaster of the wall. Which wall, you wonder, and how did we get here? This is the lure of Belben’s hypnagogia, the dizzying space into which she writes.

Divided into three sections – The Insatiable Wheel, Peacock Island, and The Great White Worm – Is Beauty Good comprises 30 vignettes, some just a single page, the longest running to nine. With intriguing titles including Peeing for Cynthia, Deaf Eggs, and Hands, each little chapter tells its own weird tale. Some loop into others with nods to earlier characters, narrators and locations, but what holds them together and thrusts the book forward are Belben’s obsessions with the loss of the natural world, with human folly and, as the title makes plain, with challenging the idea of beauty.

As other critics have noted, her work is undeniably strange. It won’t suit everyone. But for those of us who delight in the uncompromising quality of free jazz, Is Beauty Good is its literary equivalent. It is not simply that Belben defies convention by denying the certainty of interrogation in the book’s title, for example; or by excluding letters from some words some of the time – “you’re nevr up to much once you’ve been gassd” – or by taking more formal risks such as ending the chapter Raining Down Dung halfway through a sentence (“but chocolate and raspberry would put some iron into me, thanks very much, they spoon it into ancient folk who have no teeth and reckon”). What makes an encounter with her writing so exhilarating is its undiluted commitment to the author’s singular spirit.

Along the way, much is said about dying, deafness, desolation, depression, dogs, deckchairs and ducks, about horses, fish, frogs, swans, bees, “brackn”, brain cells, bad teeth, beetroot and bodily excretions, about elephants, litter, gardens, graters, colanders, streams, dreams and doubts. Excruciating commentary on the ordeal of being a woman – “how, she thought, do I get out of being a woman, it is repugnant” – surfaces again and again, often combined with slightly cruel humour.

In Daffodils, for example, the narrator ponders planting daffodils on the grave of someone he has poisoned. The victim cooked them up with potatoes and ate the dish with a friend, “the woman that wears purple cardigans, two at a time”. Belben has an aptitude for layering hilarious detail with harsh observation. “The old girl has woes,” she writes, “women tend to have woes and dwell on them, they bear grudges like apple blossom.” In the following paragraph, she doubles down on this train of thought: “Women have woes because men come along and by leaving daffodil bulbs in the vegetable rack dare them to be so stupid.”

Is Beauty Good does the opposite. It dares us not to be so stupid. It is less that Belben seeks deliberately to unsettle – I doubt she cares, to be honest – and more that she refuses to censor her imagination, her exacting fiction, in order to protect readers from her experience of life, in all its ugliness and all its glory.

In March 2020, when the mayor of San Francisco instructed all citizens to remain in their houses due to a pandemic, the first thing I did was order all the books of Agatha Christie. I was not alone; I think many of us immersed ourselves in reliable narratives to drown out the chaos. It did not matter if it ended in marriage or murder; the reliability was what mattered. Later when I realised I would need to hole up for some time, my reading shifted to a different kind of novel. And because, like Christie, our world has an endless supply of new terrors, it is the comic novel that still fills my reading hours.

Nobody knows what a comic novel is. And once you start discussing it, all the fun runs out. EB White compared it to dissecting a frog (you’re left with innards and a dead frog) but I would compare it to turning all the lights on at a party: everyone looks terrible and you’ve ruined the party. Most would agree, of course, that Wodehouse wrote comic novels, but I turn to books hardly anybody would classify that way – Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, for instance – that yet seem to me to be a hoot. I think they are books that decide something is funny, as Jerry Seinfeld once defined comedy. In Moby-Dick, it’s a coin nailed to a masthead. In Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, it’s the worst best poem you’ve ever read. And yet we feel we’re getting at something the most solemn narratives aim for: an understanding of the human condition, of grief, of love, of death. All the big stuff. The comic novels I love are books that could just as easily have been tragedies. It is simply that the author has decided it’s funny.

It’s something I learned from a wise friend of mine who once, after I angrily related a publishing story of mine, responded: “That’s not a very funny story.” I was shocked. And then I understood that I had not processed the story at all, and was serving this dish to her raw. I had to learn to turn an old outrage into a funny story. And then she would be willing to listen. I did learn to do this. And I have put the very scene I have described to you into my latest novel. A comic novel, if you like.

I have written both comic novels and novels where you would not crack a smile – serious novels, I suppose. And I can relate that, for me, writing the comic ones is a much more pleasant, though very different, kind of work. But the plots are no funnier than the serious ones. See if you can guess which one is comic and which is serious:

A young woman in 1952 San Francisco joins with her husband’s gay lover to remove obstacles to her liberation and gain a small fortune.

A middle-aged writer travels across a troubled United States while struggling to maintain his recently renewed relationship with a younger man.

Even if you guessed, you see my point: I have to decide it’s funny. And that takes double-processing. Like blond hair at the salon. First, I work out the hardships and frustrations of the characters as realistically, even tragically, as possible. People die in comic novels. Sometimes the world ends, or sometimes just the world we thought we knew, and I have to consider the real reactions of my characters because, after all, they don’t know it’s a comedy. Second, I begin to write it as if it’s all just a funny story. That takes a great deal of struggle and sometimes feels impossible.

In my last novel, Less Is Lost (that’s the one about the middle-aged writer), I found myself sitting with my notes on visiting three forced labour plantations in the American south. There was nothing humorous about them, yet I didn’t want to cut them; I knew my protagonist had to confront that part of American history. But then I read over the notes of my final visit and realised that I was the comedy: myself and the other white visitors, showcasing our guilt and anxiety through statements that were utterly absurd. In fact, I ended up portraying the visit almost exactly as I had it in my notes … but with a different emphasis. Is it “funny”? No. Is it “comic”? Definitely. Why? I don’t know. I don’t know. I can’t explain it any better for fear of turning on the party lights.

In writing my latest novel, Villa Coco, I had a much easier time, since I was working off notes in my diaries from my time living in Tuscany, and those notes were already blond hair in a salon; I made a promise to myself that I would turn each day’s events into a “funny story”. And yet, in a way, I found myself sifting through these stories for the other thing: the real feeling. Because there was the death, in those days, of a dear friend. A turn of seasons. A broken heart. All the things I would have previously put down in my diary now had been expunged, and though I had processed them into lovely stories, the job (as a novelist now and not a diarist) was to get to the hardships and frustrations of my characters. Because, to me, comedy is only great fun if it is about something hard and true.

“I don’t think of you as writing a comic novel,” a writer friend told me. “I think of you as working through something in whatever way you have to.” He meant that my books are not “about” women in 1952 or middle-aged writers or olive harvests in Tuscany. They are about marriage and growing old and the terror of death. It is just that, in a comic novel, those issues are temporarily resolved, often in a flagrantly artificial fashion. As if to say: life is a vale of tears, and there’s no fixing it, but just for fun let’s fix this one small piece. Let’s decide, briefly, to lift the weight of being. You can’t successfully do that, I think, without being honest about it first.

And yet – what a lovely time I have working on these books. Because everything has to be processed in this way, each awful moment of the day becomes more material for comedy. Thus I become, somehow, more resilient; a trip on the sidewalk is no less embarrassing than before but, instead of trying to play it off, I laugh with anyone who notices (and people do notice). What would normally be a dull wait at a bus stop (or a mind‑numbing trip through the internet) becomes a delightful experience with my notebook. “Cheese rolling contest May 20,” I might copy down from a poster, “Prize is the wheel of cheese.” Or “lady in black sequined dress yelling at a mailbox at nine in the morning. I think she mailed her purse by mistake.” I am not a person who particularly lives in the present tense, but comedy forces me there. A good place to be.

Language also achieves a new richness. People assume writers think about plot or characters, in the way they assume painters or photographers think about their subjects. But painters think about paint. Photographers think about light. And writers think about words. There is something so utterly delicious about being able to make use of words that are otherwise forbidden to touch. I don’t mean curse words; I mean fancy ones. Take for instance something like “noise”. In a serious novel, you would have to say “down the street came a noise”. Anything more elaborate would be a red flag of pretentiousness. So you settle for the austerity of “noise” and move on. But when writing comedy, suddenly a whole feast of words is spread before you: hullabaloo and brouhaha and hubbub and chivaree. Chivaree! Banging pots and pans together to publicly shame a citizen or tease a newly married couple! What a word! My language has not become simpler by writing comedy; it has become zestier. And if, like me, words are your favourite medium, it is akin to tomatoes finally coming into season after months of cabbage and kale.

No wonder what some consider the very first “novel” was one of the most rip-roaring, slapstick comedies around: Don Quixote. Chaucer himself was not above a fart joke, and Shakespeare could never resist a pun. There is a grand tradition, in fact, of great writers dabbling in comedy – Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Thornton Wilder – and I think there is something about having seen the darkness that pulls so many to laughter. Certainly, in these difficult times, with endless apocalyptic films and novels appearing, many of us find ourselves picking up Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm instead.

There is something dear and beautiful about the comic novel, something to love. A friend to hold your hand when the lights flicker out and tell you a story until they come back on again. And, for those of us who write them, a way to feel our way forward down the tunnel into the light. I know that it was a solace to imagine a much younger American man, finding himself delivered to a rural Tuscan train station that he says is “so fanciful one might unwrap it and find it was chocolate”. And to be seated next to a princess who cannot understand him because she has not mastered “the American dialect”. And throw a wild animal into his window at night. And make the septic tank overflow. All to get at a simple truth: the world is trouble, and full of sorrows, and we will not get out alive.

But look closely: it is, in fact, made of chocolate.

Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer is published by Sceptre. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

Ten novels to make you laugh

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
This is a satire of a genre that no longer even exists (the rural English romance) because it erased it with its perfect sense of humour.

Pomp and Circumstance by Noël Coward
The queen is coming to visit a far-flung island nation and everyone is aquiver.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
The poignancy of Nabokov’s tortured Russian academic makes one fall in love with poor Pnin.

Bech: A Book by John Updike
The first of a series of books about a Philip Roth-like novelist adrift in the world. Like Nabokov, a wordsmith having great fun with the English language.

The Sellout by Paul Beatty
A brilliant example of taking the most serious of subjects – slavery in America – and turning it completely on its head.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
I reread this book annually and both laugh and shed tears over the fate of our teenage narrator, Cassandra, whose diary this is.

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
Personally, I prefer Greene’s “entertainments” to his serious fiction, from Travels With My Aunt to this wonderful case of mistaken identity.

Little Me: The Intimate Memoirs of That Great Star of Stage, Screen and Television, Belle Poitrine by Patrick Dennis
From the writer of Auntie Mame, a deliciously deluded memoir of an absolute nobody, complete with photographs!

The Pursuit of Love/Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford
Eccentricity and delight mix with heartache in this classic fictionalised version of her famous family.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Hilarious from beginning to end, and the sequel is even better, because suddenly Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are famous because everyone has read the first.

Matt Haig, the bestselling author of titles including The Midnight Library and Reasons to Stay Alive, is opening a bookshop in Brighton.

The writer plans to open the shop, called Golden, by Christmas. It is located in the Seven Dials neighbourhood, a part of the coastal city that doesn’t currently have a bookshop.

“My belief, as someone who grew up in a town without a bookshop, is that all communities should have a bookshop, because bookshops save civilisation and make life interesting,” the author wrote on Instagram this week, adding that the shop “will be about freedom”.

“We won’t be pushing things we don’t want to push,” he said. “Just good books. Curated by me and people I trust. Mind-bending books. Tearful books. Banned books. Fun books. Graphic novels. Kids’ books. Grown-up books. Really cool music and art books. Books with words. Books that have no words but are really gorgeous to flick through. Books that are actually vinyl records. The best dead and living writers.”

There will be “the occasional evening event”, he added. “No stuffy vibes. No genre snobbery. No high/low book classism.” Dogs will also be welcome at the shop.

Haig, who was born in Sheffield, has written more than two dozen books for adults and children, including his breakthrough 2015 book Reasons to Stay Alive, an account of living with depression.

He follows several prominent authors who have established their own bookshops. Diary of a Wimpy Kid author Jeff Kinney set up An Unlikely Story in Plainville, Massachusetts; Ann Patchett opened Parnassus Books in Nashville in 2011; George RR Martin owns Beastly Books in Santa Fe.

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In response to Haig’s announcement, writers including Dawn O’Porter, Bonnie Garmus and Donna Ashworth shared congratulations.

Recently I was at a film event where I was introduced to a big producer by a very nice actor. The actor said, “this is Patrick, he has a debut novel coming out soon.”

The producer looked me up and down and said, “You took your time.”

Her comic timing – unlike my literary timing – was excellent. I laugh when I think of it still. She was the kind of person who prized herself on “telling it like it is”. And this is the “is” like which she told it: I am 51 years old. I have lived half a century. I genuinely forget this unless I pass a reflective surface, but I am grizzled. I do not feel grizzled. Nobody feels grizzled. As the humane and brilliant Terry Pratchett once wrote, “Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.”

Why is my first novel coming so late? For some of my fellow late starters there is a gendered aspect. My favourite late novelists are all women – Louise Kennedy, Tessa Hadley, Toni Morrison. Often, women have care responsibilities and patriarchal presumptions to cope with before they can get anywhere. My own reasons for my late arrival as a married man without kids are probably less noble. I was in bands in my 20s and that’s where the creative energy went. There is a lost half novel, left in a flat somewhere in north Dublin, but that’s probably best left lost. It was about a man in his 20s who got drunk a lot and ranted about “corporations”.

My experience with music was interesting, though. There’s an industry that makes a man feel old. I have never felt older than I felt in my late 20s playing indie music. As my 20s progressed, I really did feel like I had a “best before” label on my forehead and that my time was running out. It was genuinely newsworthy in the world of indie rock when someone had a breakthrough record over the age of 30. “Jarvis Cocker is 31!” we all said when Pulp broke through with His ’n’ Hers.

Consequently, my band were already feeling over the hill when I was 26. When we took on an energetic 22-year-old guitarist, we asked our female friends, “Does Jeremy make us look younger?”

“We think he makes you look older,” they said, sadly.

Around this time I pursued a master’s in music and took a course in composition where the composer/teacher Donnacha Dennehy said, “The great thing about classical music is that you’re still considered a young composer well into your 40s.”

I took that a little bit too much to heart. I considered the notion that there were definitely fields in which youth has different parameters and filed it away for later. In my 30s, I spent a lot of energy that might otherwise have gone into writing a book into writing freelance articles. I had a living to make and needed to salvage some sort of career from the rocktacular wreckage of my 20s.

It took until my 40s before I started experimenting again with extracurricular writing. I wrote a film script with my brother. I wrote short stories that appeared in some of Ireland’s excellent literary journals. My first book, a collection of essays called OK, Let’s Do Your Stupid Idea, was published in 2020 and was shortlisted for the Dalkey Emerging Writers prize because the organisers had kindly chosen the word “emerging” instead of the word “young” for their award. This was a classy move. However, I still internalised the notion that “emerging” more or less meant “young”. I was only a spritely 45 then and because of my self-image issues I was, and still am, vaguely surprised I wasn’t being heralded as a literary wunderkind – the next Sally Rooney.

I am, it has to be said, probably the first hip young gunslinger of Irish literature to travel with a sleep apnoea machine. Is it not possible I’m just making sleep apnoea machines cool like my fellow young people did with mullets and moustaches? Also: mullets and moustaches are easy. Reclaim the combover and bifocal lenses, you cowards.

Even if it’s not as pronounced as in music, there’s still a cult of youth in literature. Everyone is constantly looking for the next big thing, ideally a youthful voice of a generation. In my more petulant moments, I wonder why I can’t be celebrated as the voice my generation. I’ll admit that Generation X already has more than enough voices representing them – Douglas Coupland and Kurt Cobain and Elizabeth Wurtzel and Kathleen Hanna and Johnny Knoxville and David Eggers, all of whom had the good grace to become that generational voice in their actual 20s, but what have they done for us lately? We need spokesfolk for the current moment, people with sore knees and regret!

Unsurprisingly I love stories of artists breaking through later in life. Louise Kennedy, author of the incredible Trespasses and now Stations, was a chef who had never even considered writing until a friend brought her to a writing workshop at the age of 45. It turns out she’s a genius. Tessa Hadley’s brilliant first novel Accidents in the Home was published when she was 46 but she has said herself that that’s nothing on Penelope Fitzgerald, whose first novel was published aged 61.

It is tempting at this point to say that because I am also an older debutant, I am as good as Kennedy, Hadley and Fitzgerald, but the truth is a late start is no more an indicator of quality than a precocious one. I do think being older to the job brings some advantages. I’m pretty confident about what I like nowadays and I’m pretty positively inclined toward my general worldview (“Surely this character’s politics are a little simplistic. We don’t want him to seem like an idiot,” said my well meaning editor at one point. “But those are my politics,” I replied.)

Thematically, my book also deals with issues that might be consistent with middle age. It’s ostensibly about a bunch of Gen-X musicians climbing over the hill, coping with their forgotten promise, their grief, their failures, their waning creativity, guilt, betrayal and death. You know, classic young person stuff.

But it goes wider than that – it’s a multivoiced novel from the perspective of a number of characters across the city – financiers, homeless addicts, care workers, priests, children, foxes, God. It encompasses a lot of things I have learned about Dublin and the people who live there as both a resident and an on-the-street journalist. It is, I hope, a sad, funny, weird book about community and creativity and ageing. I think if I’d written it in my 20s I would have channelled the story through the perspective of a more solipsistic first person narrator and not a kaleidoscopic chorus – though I can still channel things through a solipsistic first person narrator when I want to (just look at this essay).

There are other pros to being a debut novelist at 51. I sometimes see writers my age fret about whether their new work is overshadowed by their early literary promise. I have no such worries. I will not be overshadowed by my youthful offerings, unless a novel can be overshadowed by some ramshackle indie albums. I am also pretty sure that nobody is pretending to like my work because of my fresh-faced good looks. Though full disclosure: I hesitated typing that. Even as I sit here now, near no reflective surfaces of any sort, I simply can’t believe that that is true.

When Keir Starmer won a landslide Labour majority promising to pursue five governing “missions”, the high-profile leftwing economist Mariana Mazzucato was credited as an inspiration. Two years on, her bracing new book helps shed light on why Labour in power has struggled to project the sense of direction that “mission-led government”, as Mazzucato calls it, requires. Synthesising and extending her earlier work, here she proposes “a new economics of collective action around the common good”.

From this perspective, the economy is not a concatenation of rapacious independent forces, to be contained and offset by public policy, but a project – or rather a series of projects – with direction and purpose. Finance should be turned to the benefit of these collective goals instead of chasing short-term returns, she argues, and the creativity of corporations channelled to the public good.

As she puts it, “a common good framework for the economy is about aligning goals, incentivising collaboration, fostering collective intelligence, and ensuring that all participants share knowledge, risks and rewards”. That also means ditching what Mazzucato calls the “false narrative”, popular in parts of the environmental movement, that economic growth is antithetical to tackling the climate crisis.

The “compass” in the title is really a set of five principles, all of which Mazzucato says such an economy should have: purpose and “directionality”; co-creation by citizens; collective learning; reward sharing; and accountability. (Hikers might well balk at the idea of a five-point compass – and would certainly be well advised not to try to follow all of its directions at once).

Each of these principles is set out in detail. Co-creation implies grassroots participation in designing and redesigning government programmes, for example – because, “when people help define a problem and develop and implement solutions, they see them as theirs rather than something imposed on them”.

Reward sharing means ensuring the creators or rightful owners of economic value stand to benefit: from Indigenous people whose homes lie near raw material deposits, to social media users whose data fuels Big Tech’s profits.

That implies radical tax reform – including greater use of wealth taxes – and the robust use of conditions in public contracts, to make sure workers and taxpayers get their fair share: an approach she calls “predistribution”. “For example, companies benefiting from publicly funded health research should be forced to keep prices low and not create patents that are too wide and strong, leaving them hard to license.”

Aspects of the argument, including a positive role for the state as an enabler of innovation, are familiar from Mazzucato’s previous work, including her 2013 book, The Entrepreneurial State. But in this more comprehensive treatment she urges us to reject altogether the idea of patching up “market failures”, or treating social and economic problems as nasty but inevitable side-effects of economic growth, to be tackled with the odd taxpayer-funded side project – what she calls a “gap filling mode of thinking”.

According to Mazzucato’s definition, Labour’s attempt at mission-led government badly missed the mark. Its first and overriding goal – “kickstart economic growth” – cannot be a “mission” at all, because it lacks the necessary purpose. What, in other words, is that economic growth meant to be for?

At times, her exposition can be cumbersome. She takes us on a lengthy tour through economic history, from Aristotle via Adam Smith to Amartya Sen, slashing away at both mainstream theory and various past attempts at accommodating ideas of the collective good. The book’s own theories might be tempting to dismiss as utopian – too far away from the political economy we are stuck with – had she not scattered myriad practical examples throughout, though many are on a small scale.

“The seeds of transformation are everywhere,” she says, citing inspiring projects that range from delivering healthy and sustainable school meals in Sweden to the EU’s mission to support cities to become climate-neutral, to the international Nagoya Protocol on sharing the benefits of genetic resources and traditional knowledge.

Echoes of Mazzucato’s mindset are detectable in some Labour policies – from using the threat of legislation to cajole pension funds to invest more in UK assets, to writing conditions on youth training into clean energy contracts. But while her scope in this ambitious book is global, the analysis also dismantles Starmer’s claim to be pursuing national “missions”, by setting out just how radical – and radically different – that would look in practice.

Economies work best, she believes, when they pursue grand collective goals – developing and distributing a vaccine for a pandemic; or confronting the climate emergency (or, though she doesn’t lean on the example here, tooling up for a new and more frightening geopolitical era). We should ask, she says, “not which market failure do we want to be fixed, but what direction do we want the economy to sail in”.

If you’ve written a successful book based around one big idea, what do you make the next one about? Back in 2009, Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (co-authored with Richard Wilkinson) argued that inequality was the ultimate cause of almost all our social problems, from obesity and teenage pregnancy to violent crime; more equal societies, they claimed, had better outcomes across the board. While criticised – as most “big idea” books are – for overstating the case and cherrypicking evidence, they struck a chord, and some aspects of their thesis are now mainstream.

However, when it comes to the UK, there is an awkward problem, both for Pickett and for economists like me who, while not entirely convinced by The Spirit Level, would still like to see a more equal society. In the first chapter of Pickett’s new book, inequality is once again the root of all (social) evils: “if you know a country’s level of inequality, you can do a pretty good job of predicting its infant mortality rate, or prevalence of mental illness, or levels of homicide or imprisonment”. By contrast, she argues that GDP or GDP growth are very poor measures of overall welfare. Pickett then goes on to list the ways in which the UK has become a worse place to live since 2010 – higher child poverty, flattening life expectancy and child mortality, more people in prison.

But what actually happened to inequality and GDP over this period? On Pickett’s own preferred measure, the Palma ratio, inequality peaked in 2008 and has fallen considerably since then, as the tax system has become significantly more progressive. Meanwhile, growth in GDP has been very slow compared to the previous two decades. If you’d asked Pickett in 2010 whether she’d have accepted this trade – much slower growth in GDP in return for more progressive taxation and lower inequality, she’d presumably have jumped at it. But now, like most of the rest of us, she’s less than happy with the results.

Rather than addressing this puzzle, Pickett largely dodges it. The Good Society has lots of ideas: that is, rather than one unifying concept, it covers policy problems and solutions across health, education, criminal justice, social care, and elsewhere. In each case, she diagnoses the failures of our current model and suggests alternatives, mostly drawn from the successful social democracies of northern Europe.

The problem is that because – as she commendably admits – she has neither the expertise nor the space to provide a detailed analysis of these topics, we end up with a whistle-stop tour of the greatest hits of progressive social policy, from Finnish schools to Norwegian prisons. If you’re instinctively sympathetic to the view that we imprison too many people, that we should value care work more, that the education system is too exam-focused and so on, then you will probably nod along to much of this. But if you’re not already convinced, you’re unlikely to change your mind. And for those who do have expertise in one of these topics – and can spot the holes, or at least the oversimplifications – this compendium is less than the sum of its parts.

More interesting – perhaps because Pickett has researched the topic in depth herself – is her section on Universal Basic Income. Working with my frequent co-author and friend Howard Reed, she has helped produce detailed, costed blueprints for a UK UBI. I think she overstates the case, though: it’s simply false to claim that a UBI would eliminate the need for means-testing or eligibility tests, since the main drivers of these in the UK system are incapacity and housing benefit, which would still be needed even with a UBI. And most of the small-scale studies of UBI so far have failed to find the transformational benefits she claims. Whether you agree or disagree, however, this at least represents a serious and substantive proposal for tackling both inequality and injustice.

Finally, in an attempt to address the political obstacles to achieving any of this, Pickett concludes with an appeal for the greater use of evidence in policymaking, combined with citizens’ juries. Sadly, this just makes her sound out of touch in the current political context. I wish I could believe her claim that “a fairer, healthier, more caring and sustainable society is entirely within our grasp”, but I’m afraid I ended this book no more optimistic than when I started it.

My earliest reading memory
I acquired from somewhere, in my more or less atheistic family, a Ladybird Book of the Lord’s Prayer, whose every page I can recover in all its lurid 1960s naturalism. “As they forgive us our trespasses against them …” The horrified boy leaves a hand mark on the wall his father has just painted.

My favourite book growing up
One of my favourites was E Nesbit’s The Wouldbegoods. The lives of those Edwardian children seemed as rich as a plum pudding, with their knickerbockers and their ironies, their cook and their sophisticated vocabulary. I didn’t understand, in my childhood, that they were separated from me by a gulf of time and change. Because of books, the past seemed to be happening in the next room, as if I could step into it effortlessly.

The book that changed me as a teenager
I hated the girls’ grammar school I went to, and in revenge filled my break times with historical novels by Jean Plaidy. These flooded the oppressive grey world of the school with their glorious drama, pregnancies and deformities and adulteries, messengers eating their own shoe leather because they brought bad news.

The writer who changed my mind
When I moved myself to the comprehensive school, we studied the Liverpool poets and Stan Barstow. Then a new teacher read us An Horatian Ode by Andrew Marvell, on the execution of Charles I. You can’t tell what side he’s on … New possibilities of subtlety in writing opened up.

The book that made me want to be a writer
All the books I loved, from the beginning, made me want to try. Storytelling was the most powerful magic I knew: it got expressed first in the games I played out with my friends. Written down though, words were puny for such a long time. Encountering the intricacy of Henry James’s fiction – What Maisie Knew first – stirred up that longing intensely, to make something intricate and alive on the page. But it defeated the longing at the same time – because who could match this?

The author I came back to
Vladimir Nabokov was too slippery, I couldn’t get hold of him; Speak, Memory was my way in eventually. When I knew what he made of his own life, I began to understand his ironies, his account of America.

The book I reread
When I first read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina I was Kitty’s age, then I longed to be gorgeously amorous like Anna, then I was worn down with domesticity and children like Dolly. Now I’m closer to the old countess at the end of the book, growing irrelevant in the margins.

The author I could never read again
Well, probably Jean Plaidy …

The book I discovered later in life
For a long time I thought that I wouldn’t like Anita Brookner; I’d got the idea, for some foolish reason, that she was perfumed and ladylike. Then I opened Latecomers and knew from the first sentence how wrong that was. When you discover a new author their work stretches out before you, an undiscovered continent.

The book I am currently reading
I’m a fan of Jean-Philippe Toussaint, and I’ve just finished his short novel Reticence. A man with his baby son in a pushchair visits a coastal town desolate with absence. It’s a little skit and a mockery really, a crime drama with no crime apart from a dead cat, and yet its repetitions are deliciously hypnotic, the moon and the sea and the empty house …

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My comfort read
At first in the pandemic I reread my old children’s books, which is embarrassing but was stabilising at the time. Comfortable books, though, aren’t always comforting; uneasy books are better in uneasy times.

What happens when an internationally bestselling historian, a Nobel peace prize-winning journalist and a former politician get together to discuss the state of the world, and where we’re heading? Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli medieval and military historian best known for his panoramic surveys of human history, including Sapiens, Homo Deus and, most recently, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. Maria Ressa, joint winner of the Nobel peace prize, is a Filipino and American journalist who co-founded the news website Rappler. And Rory Stewart is a British academic and former Conservative MP, writer and co-host of The Rest Is Politics podcast. Their conversation ranged over the rise of AI, the crisis in democracy and the prospect of a Trump-Putin wedding, but began by considering a question central to all of their work: how to live a good life in an increasingly fragmented and fragile world?

YNH People have been arguing about this for thousands of years. The main contribution of modern liberalism and democracy was to try to agree to disagree; that different people can have very different concepts of what a good life is, and they can still live together in the same society, agreeing on some very basic rules of conduct. And the challenge was always that people who think they have the absolute answer to what is a good life try to impose it on others, partly because, unfortunately for many ideologies, an inherent part of the good life is attempting to make everybody live it. And even more unfortunately, in many cases, it seems that it is easier to impose it on others than to do it ourselves. If we take the original crusade in medieval Christian Europe, you have all these people who can’t live a Christian life of modesty and compassion and love your neighbour, but they are able to travel thousands of kilometres to kill people and try to force them to live according to these principles. And what we are witnessing in the world right now is more of the same.

RS At the heart of that observation is this extraordinary idea, which, broadly speaking, is called liberalism. It is an idea that became very powerful, particularly by the 19th century, and found a new form after the second world war. We’re the heirs of that: it assumed things like a rules-based international order; an idea that we would agree how we behaved, state to state; it had an idea of democracy at its heart. And of course, that idea of democracy has a lot of the ingredients that Yuval is talking about, which is tolerance, human rights – how you protect the minority from the views of the majority. And there was an extraordinary period that probably lasted until the mid-2000s where it really seemed possible that this was the natural destination of humanity. And then things began to come off the rails. Now we find ourselves in a world where almost every bit of the model has entered its shadow form. So instead of focusing on democracy, we’re in a world dominated by authoritarian populism. Instead of a world of free trade, we’re in one that’s increasingly about protection and tariffs. Instead of a rules-based international order, we’re in a world of isolation: the strong do what they can, the weak must suffer what they must. And all this, of course, is then reinforced by social media and increasingly by AI.

MR The biggest question we have today is whether impunity will reign, because it’s clear from what is happening in the physical and virtual world that an international rules-based order is not working. How do you live a good life when big tech is using surveillance for profit, to manipulate us in order to keep making more money? Now we’re individually targeted by technology that can go to the cellular level of every democracy.

All five major world religions say that the battle that matters in order to live a good life is the battle inside yourself: your better self versus your worst self. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; it’s a simple thing. But how do we maintain these values when the very way we connect with each other is corrupted?

YNH What is new in the current situation is that we now have the technology to hack human beings and manipulate the inner battle in a way that was simply impossible in the middle ages or even in the 20th century. Big corporations, and anybody wielding this new technology, can both decipher and also manipulate human desires and thoughts in a way that is unprecedented. And liberal democracy, as it was constituted in the 18th and 19th century, really doesn’t know how to deal with it.

RS There’s also the possibility that technology begins to overshadow us. If you think about civilisation, a lot of it traditionally was about these great figures, these role models, these heroes. And what is a hero? Somebody who stretches the limits of what it means to be human. We believe we are this extraordinary species who can do things in science or poetry or drama that no other species can do. The risk of artificial general intelligence is that suddenly it is quite literally superhuman. At that point, if it can effortlessly write a poem better than I can, create a play better than I can, suddenly we are diminished.

MR It would be great if the technology that is enabling this transformation is actually 100% accurate. It is not. But because we’ve grown up with integrity of information, it’s much easier to fool us, because when you see it in writing, you expect it to be right. The way AI has been pushed in our society is completely separate from facts. And I know Yuval in his book says information is not about facts, it’s about the stories we tell, but facts anchor our shared reality.

A question I would like to ask you guys: do you think people are fundamentally good or fundamentally evil? I sound super religious in this conversation, but really that makes a difference, because what we’re doing now in the public information ecosystem, part of the breakdown of democracy, part of our ability to elect illiberal leaders democratically, is because we’ve muted the goodness of humanity. I’ve covered the crappiness of humanity, of people killing each other, I’ve been in war zones, but I’ve also been in these areas where a natural disaster happens and people are incredibly generous. We would not have survived the six-year presidency of Rodrigo Duterte if there were not people who gave not just of themselves, but gave money to Rappler. So I think this is what’s at stake.

YNH One of the most important observations is that goodness is not closely related to intelligence. Artificial intelligence is the most important technology of the era; it has been forgotten that intelligence is no guarantee of goodness or even of wisdom, that when you look at the grand span of human history, you don’t see a clear correlation between intelligence and compassion, or even a clear-sighted view of reality. Homo sapiens is by far the most intelligent species on the planet, and it simultaneously is the most deluded species: humans believe the kind of nonsense that no chimpanzee or elephant or rat would ever believe. We are now creating a superintelligence, and there is every reason to think that it will be super deluded.

RS Yuval is unusual because he is capable of considering the possibility of where we might be in 200 years. But let’s try 20 for a second. When we think about the world, often we think about it from Silicon Valley, and we imagine that really the future is Star Trek, and Elon Musk is off to Mars. For most, perhaps half of humanity, over the next decades to come, hundreds of millions will be living on incomes of under $2 a day, and billions under $5 a day.

The next thing is that conflict is changing. We can see with what’s happening in Gaza and to some extent in Ukraine, the way in which wealthy countries with technology can inflict astonishing damage on their neighbours and take very little risk themselves. Added to that, there is a push towards an arms race happening all over the world. So if we look at Europe, we’re now increasing our spending on defence to 5% of GDP. That will literally suck hundreds of billions of euros every year out of our health systems, our education systems, our welfare systems, at exactly the moment that our economies are flatlining and our populations are getting older, so there’s every likelihood that over the next 10-20 years, at the same time as AI is developing, much of the world will begin to feel like a shabbier, poorer version of the current world, that median incomes will stagnate and that conflict will rise.

MR I completely agree with what Rory said, but I’m more pessimistic. I don’t think it’ll take 20 years. The Philippines gets an average of 20 typhoons every year. We’re watching islands sink, and yet the west is debating whether climate change even exists.

I think the death of journalism is around the corner within six months to a year. The internet is getting worse by the day, and there are absolutely no guardrails put in place, even as news organisations are being forced to pay for that, and our content is exploited. It is a very predatory online world, and that has translated to the world we live in.

YNH If I had to characterise the emotional tone of what I have been doing for quite a number of years, I would say that I was in the business of anxiety – that I’m creating more anxiety around AI, climate change, whatever. Now we need to switch to a different project, which is to rebuild trust, because when there is too much anxiety and you can’t trust anybody or anything, you can’t do anything. The most important thing is to rebuild trust in human institutions, in the media, in government, elsewhere. The big question is, how do we do that?

RS I would say that that involves rebuilding those human institutions. My experience as a politician is that government is much worse than I could ever have imagined. Liz Truss, my boss and colleague, who became prime minister in the United Kingdom, basically thought that her job was Instagram and campaigning, and she dedicated very little time to any serious consideration of policy, and in fact was derogatory of people who worried too much about the real-life impacts of what she was doing. The whole thing has become a game.

MR How long will we pretend that there is integrity of elections as the world falls off the cliff? Part of what made the international rules-based system work was that we had a powerful anchor for it: that we did what was for the greater good. We expected leaders to pull back from their greed. And if they didn’t, journalists would expose these things. Now that the US doesn’t seem to care about any other country but itself, what will that mean? Does that mean that we throw away every value system that was built into the international organisations? If the most powerful only work for themselves, is it every person for themselves?

YNH You see a re-emergence, in a strange way, of monarchist ideas: the leaders that are rising now are quite different from the 20th-century dictators. It’s not a coincidence that, in the US, one of the movements against Donald Trump is “No Kings”, because he is reviving something really medieval. One of the most amazing moments of the last year was the meeting between President Trump and President Zelenskyy in the White House. One of the things that emerged very clearly was that Trump does not think about politics as being an interaction between states or between people, in the sense of the American people, the Russian people, the Ukrainian people. He thinks about it as an interaction between persons, monarchs, dynasties. When people told him that Putin had broken previous agreements, Trump said, “Well, he broke an agreement with Biden, he broke an agreement with Obama, not with me.” And the implication is, the agreement is not between Russia and the US, the agreement is between two people, and if I make an agreement with Putin, I will make sure he sticks by it, but it only holds as long as I’m president. If you then replace me with someone else, that’s the end of the agreement. You see the return of the concept of politics as a dynastic affair between families. This is a bit crazy, but not too crazy, to think, for instance, of a solution to the Ukraine war where Barron Trump would marry Putin’s granddaughter, and they would get Crimea and Donbas as their kingdom.

Let me just say one more thing about this monarchical idea: in the 20th century, dictators served an ideology which, in a way, limited them, because if you’re, say, a communist dictator, you have to promote a communist ideology. You can’t really do what you want. With the new leaders like Trump, there is no ideology there. When you look at somebody like Trump or like Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, the amazing thing is how much freedom of action these people have.

RS One thing that is so striking about the modern age is that we’ve lost an ethical vocabulary in engaging with leaders. I mean, fundamentally, what is Donald Trump? He is shameless. It would be very difficult for Aristotle or Cicero or a Renaissance theorist of politics, or indeed the writers of the American constitution, to imagine this degree of shamelessness, this degree of contempt for constitutions, contempt for minorities, contempt for the truth, the open performance of immorality. And very difficult also to imagine that we would have entered a world where we, at some level, are so tempted to just enjoy the spectacle, and have just lost the ability to be shocked that every day he does three or four things which in the old world would have shocked us to our core.

MR With Zelenskyy at the White House, it was shocking that the breaking news reporters just kept repeating what President Trump said, which was a lie. They could instead have used what is known as a truth sandwich: “Russia invaded Ukraine, President Trump says this, Russia invaded Ukraine.” In journalism, we have to shift: we can no longer stand behind “he said, she said”. Now we actually have to pull up and say, “This guy is lying.” Because those are the facts. So our reporting shifts. On the technology, we cannot live under surveillance for profit, we cannot keep getting manipulated in this way, because it encourages the worst of who we are. [At Rappler] we began to build a chat app two years ago. Our vision is for a global information ecosystem, but we anchor our news organisations with our communities. So this is how we move forward: we embrace the technology. We call it out where it is wrong. We look back at our history, and regardless of all of the problems of democracies, we still haven’t found a better system than this. Of course, it could all end soon, but we keep fighting.

YNH I think that more people need to realise that we have to do the hard work ourselves. There is a tendency to assume that we can rely on reality to do the job for us. That if there are people who talk nonsense, who support illogical policies, who ignore the facts, sooner or later, reality will wreak vengeance on them. And this is not the way that history works.

So if you want the truth, and you want reality to win, each of us has to do some of the hard work ourselves: choose one thing and focus on that and hope that other people will also do their share. That way we avoid the extremes of despair.

Andrea Gibson, a celebrated poet and performance artist who through their verse explored gender identity, politics and their four-year battle with terminal ovarian cancer, has died aged 49.

Gibson’s death was announced on social media by their wife, Megan Falley.

Gibson and Falley are the main subjects of the documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, which won the Festival Favorite award at the Sundance film festival and is scheduled to air on Apple TV+ later this year.

“Andrea Gibson died in their home (in Boulder, Colorado) surrounded by their wife, Meg, four ex-girlfriends, their mother and father, dozens of friends, and their three beloved dogs,” Monday’s announcement reads.

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The film, which explores the couple’s enduring love as Gibson battles cancer, is directed by Ryan White and includes an original song written by Gibson, Sara Bareilles and Brandi Carlile. During a screening at Sundance in January that left much of the audience in tears, Gibson said they didn’t expect to live long enough to see the documentary.

Tributes poured in Monday from friends, fans and fellow poets who said Gibson’s words had changed their lives, including writers Cheryl Strayed and Elizabeth Gilbert. Many LGBTQ+ fans said Gibson’s poetry helped them learn to love themselves. People with cancer and other terminal illnesses said Gibson made them less afraid of death by reminding them that we never really leave the ones we love.

In a poem Gibson wrote shortly before they died, titled Love Letter from the Afterlife, they wrote: “Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before.”

Linda Williams Stay was “awestruck” when her son, Aiden, took her to hear Gibson perform at a bar in San Francisco a decade ago. Their poetry was electrifying, lighting up the room with laughter, tears and love. Gibson’s poetry became a shared interest for the mother and son, and eventually helped Stay better understand her son when he came out as transgender.

“My son this morning, when he called, we just sobbed together,” Stay said. “He says, ‘Mom, Andrea saved my life.’”

Gibson’s poetry later helped Stay cope with a cancer diagnosis of her own, which brought her son back home to St George, Utah, to help take care of her. They were delighted when Gibson accepted their invitation to perform at an event celebrating the LGBTQ+ community in southern Utah.

“It was truly life-changing for our community down there, and even for our allies,” Stay said. “I hope that they got a glimpse of the magnitude of their impact for queer kids in small communities that they gave so much hope to.”

Gibson was born in Maine and moved to Colorado in the late 1990s, where they had served for the past two years as the state’s poet laureate. Their books included You Better Be Lightning, Take Me With You and Lord of the Butterflies.

Colorado governor Jared Polis said on Monday that Gibson was “truly one of a kind” and had “a unique ability to connect with the vast and diverse poetry lovers of Colorado”.

The comedian Tig Notaro, an executive producer on the documentary and Gibson’s friend of 25 years, shared on Instagram how the two came up together as performers in Colorado. Hearing Gibson perform for the first time was like witnessing the “pure essence of an old-school genuine rock star”, and their words have guided Notaro through life ever since, she said.

“The final past few days of Andrea’s life were so painful to witness, but simultaneously one of the most beautiful experiences of all of our lives,” Notaro said. “Surrounded by real human connection unfolding in the most unlikely ways during one of the most devastating losses has given me a gift that I will never be able to put into meaningful words.”

Gibson’s illness inspired many poems about mortality, depression, life and what happens next. In the 2021 poem How the Worst Day of My Life Became My Best, Gibson declared: “When I realized the storm / was inevitable, I made it / my medicine.” Two years later, they wondered: “Will the afterlife be harder if I remember / the people I love, or forget them?

“Either way, please let me remember.”