Tag: writing

Taking a walk

About a year and a half ago, I moved to New Zealand. The company I work for had been looking to expand into the country, and I asked if there’s an opportunity for me to move and build up the business here. They said yes.

I had no idea what I was getting into. Turns out, they didn’t either.

Because even though I arrived as a marketing person, we needed more than a marketer. We needed someone who people can go to for… anything. It started a “here’s your local point of contact” that soon ballooned into a constant barrage of emails and calls from partners and customers and prospects asking questions, escalating issues, validating ideas, pitching events, and so much more. Plus, I was actively building my network—attending events, talking to people, trying to build partnerships, understanding how businesses operate… it’s fair to say I had a lot going on.

More than once, I’d be typing away in my home office at 3:45pm and remember I’d run out of food or toothpaste or shampoo or toilet paper. Or I’d walk into my living room and realise I hadn’t vacuumed or taken the recycling out for weeks. I’d laugh about it with colleagues after, while secretly wondering why I was so active, energetic, focussed on work but so careless and lazy about my home.

I enjoy 70 percent of my work. It involves meeting lots of new people, learning about their life and work, and trying to identify how we might work together.

The other 30 percent is gruelling. That involves working closely with my colleagues overseas. So lots of late nights, trying to get my brain to think straight even after it’d been running on work mode for 12 hours straight. Then I’d go to bed with my mind racing and refusing to shut down for another two hours. I never really stopped to think how crazy it was that that was week after week and month after month, rather than just a one-time thing.

Plenty of times I told myself it was just for this one project or one event, and things would become a lot less hectic after that. But after a year of it, I had to admit it wasn’t going to slow down. Don’t get me wrong, I had lots of “slow” days that I cherished. But those slow days were about 8-9 hours of work without any late meetings, events, or otherwise large stressors. In reality, that’s not a “slow” day, that’s the definition of a normal day.

I have a fairly high tolerance for stress. However, I’m also aware of what chronic stress can do to the body, inside and out, even if it doesn’t show straightaway. Sidenote—if you haven’t yet, I highly recommend reading Why Zebras Don’t get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky.

So even though I knew I could keep pushing, I also knew that I shouldn’t. When you do weight training, they say you should do as many reps as you can until the point of failure. That’s how I’ve always thought about work stress as well—keep pushing until you can’t. One of my good friends once said that she’ll quit her job when she has her first heart attack. Not if but when. She’d been in that job for about 18 years, and she knew the stress would probably cause her to break. Work isn’t weight training. Yes, I want to get better and stronger and more accomplished in my work, but I don’t want to do that at the cost of getting sick.

So I decided to take a walk to clear my head.

I’d been wanting to walk Te Araroa for years now. It’s a tramping trail that runs the entire length of New Zealand. It’s always been one of those, “Oh, I’ll do it someday” kind of things. So in December last year, I sat down to think through what it’d really take to do this walk. There’s a lot—food, accomodation, trail logistics, gear, safety, hygiene, loneliness, weather, and so many things that we take for granted on a daily basis.

So I started planning. I watched a lot of videos on YouTube, followed all the Facebook groups, looked through the trail inch by inch (got tired mid-way through the North Island), started collecting hundreds of links of potential gear, and created high-density, high calorie food recipes.

It was a glorious three weeks of intense work. Then the Christmas/New Year break ended and we went back to work. The full force of my daily routine returned, and this time it hit harder. We’d built momentum the previous year so now it was about accelerating—about doing more things, bigger things, and doing them faster. I love this stuff, remember. So I dove headfirst. I said yes to all the things, forgetting—every time—that I was also saying yes to more late night meetings. As much fun as it was, it was also utterly exhausting. Every chance I got, I went back to my Te Araroa Trello board and looked through my research, adding a few more links. As March and May rolled around, I was in the thick of work with no brain power left even to write my daily haiku. For the first time in over five years, I stopped writing haiku every day. I had no energy left to give to my creativity. But I knew I still wanted to walk TA this year.

So in June this year, I rolled up my metaphorical sleeves and started narrowing down my gear options. By July I had most of my gear, and a lot of uncertainty about how many layers I’d need. I also spoke to my boss about taking time off. He took a couple of days to think it over and told me he couldn’t let me take time off. It was too much disruption for the business to lose the only marketing person in the country.

So I spent the next three weeks trying to convince myself to do the walk next year, instead. To keep pushing for another year because I know it’ll be fine.

But I couldn’t do it. The idea of doing it all for another year without a break scared me. Even if others don’t see it that way, I saw it as a health and safety issue. I didn’t want to end up in hospital for me to wake up and give myself a break.

I went back to boss and explained that I’m totally spent, and I need this time off. He understood, of course. He always did. But when you work for a big company, things like this need to be run up the food chain to be formally approved.

Now we wait.

I also just ordered a couple of water bladders and a backcountry bidet for the trip.

Hello, again.

When I first started this blog several years ago, I was so young and naive that I needed my brother to help set it up. He was already working in the tech field so he knew all about this thing called blogging that was taking over the internet, with so much promise to change the world with powerful words and images. And I guess blogs did that for a long time… until louder forms of content showed up and we gradually lost interest in reading long-form prose, instead craving more and more short and snappy and entertaining pieces.

But I digress.

When my brother helped me set up this blog, he told me he was going to buy a domain—my name—and pay for it. I pushed back. Would it be worth the money? What if I don’t publish any writing and the domain just sat there useless?

He told me to use that doubt as fuel. To write and publish something every day, “even when you have exams,” I remember him saying, making sure our dad was out of earshot. That way, I could feed my passion for writing and also make the spend worth it.

So I did. I took that advice to heart and wrote every day. For nearly a decade, I made sure that I wrote something, anything, and hit publish. I wrote my exams in the morning and on my blog in the evening. Once I started working, I went to office at 7am so I could write before work.

If I had to travel for weeks, I’d spend hours binge writing so I’d have enough posts to schedule for the days I’d be away. I wrote everywhere—in airports and train stations, in my head on my morning runs or while doing the dishes. I wrote ferociously and veraciously (no, Claude, that’s not a typo). I wrote poetry, short stories, random musings, travelogues, book reviews, and so many things. I even taught myself how to write myself out of a writing block.

Even when I moved countries, I kept writing. Even when I enrolled in a full-time degree while working full-time I managed to keep my one-haiku-a-day habit alive.

And then a few months ago, after far too many months working 12-14 hours a day, my mind finally showed me how exhausted I was. When I wasn’t working, all I wanted to do was to while away. Writing for the sake of writing started to feel a bit too heavy.

So I skipped writing for a day and felt deeply guilty about it. It didn’t feel right to let go, even temporarily, of the only thing my entire personality and life was centred around. Since I was 12, all I’ve ever wanted was to be in a constant state of writing.

Then I skipped another day. And another. And another. And I wasn’t feeling as guilty anymore. I just told myself I was writing on LinkedIn thrice a week and that still counted as writing.

It didn’t. Because as much as I enjoy the stories on LinkedIn, the cognitive load required to filter out the bullshit, to read between the lines, to not judge a post by its pouting lips but by its intellect takes a lot out of me.

And so I found myself tonight, as most nights these days, scrolling through LinkedIn and trying to conjure up the energy to write something that’s professional, meaningful, and enjoyable. And I somehow found myself here, instead.

My 2025 in books—reflecting on the meh, relishing the mastery

Every January, I give myself a target to read a certain number of books during that year. For the first time this year, I read some fantasy fiction that I never would’ve if it hadn’t been for my best friend who loves steampunk, urban fantasy, and exploding worlds in the sky. She chose books we’d read together, so I ended up peering into stories about astronaut schools and moon-hopping rebel cadets; about bone witches discovering their witchiness and bitchiness at the same time; about vampire knitting clubs; and all such woo woo-ness.

Although I enjoyed these strange stories at the time, many of them didn’t challenge me too much. That sounds pretentious, I realise, but they were largely short-lived fun. Not unlike the feeling you get after watching a salacious TV series about steamy affairs and greedy cocaine snorting gangs. You know it’s wrong, and you feel bad that you enjoyed the experience of being embedded in that world, even if just for a few hours.

Surely my year in books wasn’t all that bad?

It wasn’t. I was just blowing things out of proportion. Because when I scrolled through my Goodreads account, I realised I’d also read some fantastic books that kept me obsessed, curious, questioning, and challenging my own assumptions and long-held beliefs.

Like This I Would Kill For by Anne Buist, a book that goes into the mind of a psychiatrist who has bipolar disorder. It was the first time in my life that I’d considered that a mental health physician could live with a complex mental health condition themselves, and that that doesn’t mean they can’t function or do their job admirably.

Or Theory & Practice by Michelle de Krester, a book that challenged my notions of what a story is and how narrative fiction should look and read.

Or The Lasting Harm by Lucia Osborne-Crowley that chronicles a day-by-day account of the now-renown trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, and goes into harrowing details of Epstein’s empire of abuse. This book kept me up at night.

As did the controversial Ayn Rand’s popular Atlas Shrugged that made me think about the parallels between our modern AI-driven world of business and creativity, and the world that John Galt tried to destabilise. I wrote about it, too.

That book nicely sandwiched Cal Newport’s thoughts on the nature of workplace communication in A World Without Email, where he explores how much we’ve let email run our lives even when we’re supposedly switched off, and Johann Hari’s rather disturbing, illuminating, and complementary observations in Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again.

It was with that solid backdrop that I went into the next great read of the year: The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business by Erin Meyer, a beautiful and honest exploration of why we sometimes struggle to like our international colleagues, and how our traditions and cultures influence the way we think, work, and approach life and play. This stuff should be essential reading in colleges and universities. This is what young people should know as they step into the real world of The Workforce.

Then there was Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankar Chandran. It had been on my list for a few years and is the kind of book that immediately reveals its nature in the title, and stays true to every unspoken promise it made in said title. Having read Song of the Sun God by the same author earlier in the year, and as someone born and raised in Sri Lanka during the civil war, I knew what I was getting into with Chai Time and felt connected to these books in a way that I hadn’t connected with a person this year.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It by Kashmir Hill pulled me sharply back to modern day reality, making me pick up my jaw from the ground several times over the course of fabulous narrative prose. The author tells a story I wish weren’t true—the tale of dangerously powerful people like Hoan Ton-That (an Aussie computer engineer) Richard Schwartz (former Rudy Giuliani advisor), and Peter Thiel, and the unregulated facial recognition technology they championed, offered, and sold to businesses, private investors, and law enforcement agencies. A technology so questionable that even Google and Facebook considered it too immoral to release.

One of my favourite pieces of screenwriting comes from BBC’s Sherlock: “Don’t make people into heroes, John. Heroes don’t exist, and if they did, I wouldn’t be one of them.” Once again this year, I was reminded of how true those words are when I settled into finally reading Flawed Hero: Truth, Lies and War Crimes by Chris Masters. The author, a journalist, explores how Australia fell in love with Ben Roberts-Smith VC MG, the most decorated soldier of the Australian army, who after leaving the force, became the epitome of success and gallantry, and the general manager of Seven Media in Brisbane. Masters goes on to explain the biggest defamation trial in modern Australia, one that shed light into the horrific war crimes, bullying, executions, blooding, and abuse that Ben Roberts-Smith (or BRS for ease) was responsible for. I was living in Australia when the war crimes allegations against BRS came to light and the defamation trial was being heard. So I knew what I was getting into with this book but that didn’t make it any easier to digest. Heroes really don’t exist.

It wasn’t all dismay and despair, though. This year’s reading list also included some gloriously heartwarming stories of love, life, and choices that make your heart sing…

Like Two Steps Onward by Graeme Simsion and Anne Buist, a sequel to the story of two people who first met on the Camino de Santiago (Two Steps Forward), and find that circumstances bring them together again to walk the Chemin d’Assise.

Like Northbound: Four Seasons of Solitude on Te Araroa by Naomi Arnold. This woman, who’d been watching the Te Araroa and dreaming of walking it for 20 years finally did it when she was 41. Te Araroa is a 3000 kilometre through hike that goes through the entire length of New Zealand. Most people take 3-5 months to walk the trail, during the spring-summer walking season. But the author, an adult with life and responsibilities and an active job, did it in 10 months. I love this book because the author talks about how we can become obsessed with the idea of perfection (of walking every damn inch of the trail), and how that sometimes leads to missed opportunities and more pain than pleasure.

Like Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, a great story about soulmates who aren’t lovers. This is such a deep exploration of love and relationships, how personal insecurities get in the way of happiness and honesty, and all the reasons we hold people close in our lives. All the feels.

Richard Flanagan is one of my favourite Australian writers. His love for Tasmania, nature, people, history, and country shine through in his personal examination of morality and storytelling. Question 7 is one of those books that doesn’t seem all that coherent on a surface level but illustrates how seemingly random events lead to the here and now. Reading Flanagan is like stepping into a dream where you confront reality in poetic form.

I can’t speak of poetry and dreams without paying homage to Dirrayawadha by Anita Heiss. The author of Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray (glorious read, btw), Heiss has a way with words and stories that made me fall in love with Australia’s aboriginal heritage like nothing else did. She sets humble fiction within the harsh history of Australia; her simple prose slices through any illusions that modern/migrant Australia might still have about the role of invasion in the destruction of aboriginal culture and lifestyle; and she shows that love stories and happily ever afters are so much more nuanced than “boy meets girl.”

So there you have it—the end of another year of reading, thinking, learning about life, work, and the purpose of everything. It’s been a great year of pushing boundaries, sitting in discomfort, keeping an open mind (as much as possible), and reading more of writing that brings me joy.

What are your favourite reads from this year, and what’re you looking forward to reading in the next?

My bookshelf from 2025 – full list of books I enjoyed this year.

You can totally like and not like a book at the same time

Happy new year.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything longer than three lines. I’ve been lazy, but I’ve also been creative. The result is a whole lot of photos and haiku—you’ll see it if you scroll down a few months’ worth of posts.

Did you have a good Christmas and New Year’s?

photo of the cover of Trent Dalton's All Our Shimmering Skies

I did. I spend Christmas Day reading (listening to, rather) Trent Dalton’s All Our Shimmering Skies. He’s a renowned Australian writer, renowned not for this book, but for another one called Boy Swallows Universe. You’ve got to give it to him—the guy knows how to come up with catchy titles. I picked up Shimmering Skies because I heard so much about the writer and his “beautiful writing.” I finished it within two days. I enjoyed it. But it’s also the kind of book that you know you wouldn’t have enjoyed as much if you’d read it a couple of years previously. I would’ve hated the extensively exhausting descriptions peppered throughout the book. It was way too much at times, and a younger me would’ve lost patience within the first three hours (I was listening to it, remember—it’s a 12+ hour read).

However, in my current mental state, I could appreciate the descriptions, and even though some of them were bordering on boredom, I didn’t take it as a personal attack on my patience or reading capacity. This, I think, happens a lot to readers. We like or dislike books based on how we think a writer ought to write rather than appreciating the writer for who they are—along with their quirky and sometimes silly practices.

Nothing wrong in hating a book, of course. I hated Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee because it didn’t deliver what I expected. The writing wasn’t horrible (Lee wrote one of my favourite books—To Kill a Mockingbird), but it wasn’t the Lee I knew and loved. She was much younger when she wrote Watchman and far less strategic about her structuring. It shows in the book. I list those as if they’re flaws, but it doesn’t have to be so.

I read 50 books in 2021—thanks to lockdowns and living alone. It was a marvellous way of getting back into the literary world and analysing words from all over the spectrum of writing styles.

All the things I hate about Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, all the blunders I think she made in that book, are key elements that so many other readers love about the story.

That’s often a hard pill for us to swallow—how can someone enjoy something we abhor? What’s the point of online review sites and endorsements if one person’s treasure is another’s trash?

I guess that’s reality. It’s hard for us to digest the fact that one book can divide the reading community so. After all, isn’t reading one of the most uniting activities of all time? When you move to a new city, you find a book club—because that’s the best way to meet like-minded people, people you like having around. And yet, stories and storytelling have the gargantuan power to separate us and turn us against each other.

That’s what I realised when I read Dalton’s All Our Shimmering Skies. The characters seem to step out of a Disney tale. They’re likeable, but most of them, and mostly the main character, are too naive and childish. Admittedly, she’s 12. But like an overprotective father, the writer patronises the girl with his flowery language. It’s annoying, but as a reader, it’s hard to hate a writer who cares so much about this child. But then, you also realise that it’s so wrong to treat her like an injured magpie lark. These are problems I saw with this book, and when I see reviews that echo this emotion, I resonate with them.

But I also like the child’s innocence (to some extent), I like that she asks the crocodiles for their permission to cross the water. I like that she talks to the sky, and characterises the day sky as a liar and the night sky as the truth speaker. It reminded me of my own childhood when I spoke to the shower and the bucket and the handrail in our bathroom. I had names for them, voices, tones, and emotions. Kids do strange things like that—their imaginations are beyond anything an adult’s adulterated brain can comprehend. And I liked that this child (the main character) has a heart brimming with blind trust. She’s lucky it doesn’t come back to bite her. It’s a feel good fairy tale, almost. A lot like Frozen’s Elsa.

And yet, as I’ve said before, if I’d read this book as a younger person, I probably wouldn’t have given it a chance to show me what it really is.

Case in point—

“She spots a large army of green ants building a nest between two thin twig branches of a flimsy tree with floppy green leaves. “Look at this, Yukio,” Molly whispers, leaning into the tree where a line of ants with amber bodies and glowing jay-coloured abdomens are carrying a white grub along a designated worker road on a branch. “They make their homes out of leaves. Some of the ants are the tough ones who will work together to haul the leaves up, and some of the ants are the clever ones who will weave the leaves together, and some of them are gluers who use that white stuff they’re carrying to stick all the leaves in place.”

That is a beautiful scene. It should’ve brought a smile to your lips. It did to me. It’s so pure that you know it can’t possibly be true except in the mind of a child who’s so obsessed with seeing only the beauty of her surroundings. But after 300 or so pages of similar descriptions of excruciating detail, there’s a good chance it’ll just piss you off.

I’m glad I read this book when I read it. It was a summer day in Canberra, Australia. Absolutely stinking hot. And I had an average-tasting homemade cake and a book that made me think. Really, what else could you ask for?

Hope you had a good one, too. Cheers!

Go set a watchman

Disappointment is a result of expectation.

If you expect nothing, you’ll never be disappointed. But then, if you don’t expect something from an experience, it means you’re not invested in it. That you’re indifferent and neutral. At that point, is that experience even worth your time?

When I first heard Harper Lee had released a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, I was thrilled. I’d read that book a few months ago at the time, and snatches of Atticus and Scout and Jem were etched in my memory. That was 2017-ish. I’d stepped into my twenties, bright young thing, and had dutifully posted a photo of my reading journey on Instagram.

Go Set a Watchman would be a lovely way to relive those characters in a different, more mature light, I thought.

Life happened. So many other books took precedence over Lee’s second masterpiece. Indeed, it took a global pandemic and a second lockdown for me to get my hands on it. A lot had changed since Mockingbird, and far too much time between then and now.

However, my thrill remained unchanged. I still remembered Scout (although I might’ve accidentally said Scott in a few real-life conversations with friends), and I still loved the relationship between the old lawyer and his children, a reflection of my own relationship with my father, even though it was starkly different.

I had a lot to look forward to. Which is why the disappointment was enormous.

Front cover of go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
Source

As readers, we last saw Scout as a pre-teen tomboy. When we see her again in the sequel, she’s 26 and a lady, more lady-like than I ever imagined she could be. Clearly, people are never who they were when they were adolescents. Disappointment 1. But it’s the reality. Harsh, but acceptable.

We then learn that she’s got a boyfriend now. Of course, she’s a straight woman of marriageable age. Why wouldn’t she have a boyfriend? But did it have to be her best friend, the one she grew up with? Cliché. Disappointment 2.

Still, it’s the ’50s, and the story’s set in small-town Maycomb. Having lived there all his life, Henry knows little of the life outside of his town. It’s probably not too surprising that he falls in love with what seems like the only girl in town. Speaking of which, where are all the other girls? Aside from showing up to a gossip party with stories of husbands and children, there aren’t many young women in town. Again, I tell myself, it’s a small town. Justifiable, to some extent.

We move on. Curiously, Jean Louise doesn’t know how to get into a car without hitting her head. She can drive, though. Sure, she lives in New York, where you don’t need a vehicle to commute, but come on, I’m 26 and can’t drive, but I still watch my head when I get into a car. Common sense.

Sure, Jean Louise’s character arc is to have her grow as a person. But there’s a difference between immature and nonsense.

If she’s mature enough to discard the name Scout and have people call her by her real name, Jean Louise (not Jean or Louise), then she’s mature enough to know how a car works, surely?

So disappointment 3: Jean Louise gives us a lot of mixed messages about who she is as a person.

Disappointment 4: “He poured himself a man-sized drink.”

Jem’s dead. And the only explanation we get is that he dropped dead on the street one day. He’d inherited his weak heart from their mother. Now I know that Jean Louise is the protagonist, and we’re interested in her personal growth. But I have a brother, and if he dropped dead suddenly, it’ll gnaw at my head and heart for as long as I live. Even if I recover from the initial shock, I’d still be unable to talk casually about wearing a hat to my brother’s funeral, with ‘he would’ve laughed at me’ as an afterthought. The absolute lack of acknowledgment for Jem’s death is alarming. Sure, there are a few mentions of it, but none seem enough. Disappointment 5.

It’s not all bad, though. Jean Louise lives in New York, and from the beginning, she’s doubtful whether she wants to marry Henry. Identity crisis, nicely done. Although, not. Fan of her leading him on to believe she’ll eventually say yes. Seems terrible, especially because he’s her best friend. Does she wonder if this would affect their friendship in the future? No, she doesn’t.

Jean Louise visits Calpurnia. Shows there’s still some love there. There’re a few pleasant moments for a while. Flashbacks to how Cal took care of the Finches are all good additions. Again, there’s one random instance of Jean Louise recollecting how Jem was Cal’s precious little Jem. It makes you wonder, as a reader, and want more, but the train of thought ends abruptly, leaving you wondering why she brings Jem up in the first place.

Childhood memories. I enjoyed these anecdotes, even though some were a bit drab. There’s some mild emotion as Jean Louise speaks about how Jem’s good friend, who went to Europe in the army, is the only one they hadn’t personally told about Jem’s death. Found out about it from the paper. That’s a grim way to hear your best bud passed away prematurely. It’s a helpful detail in the overall narrative. Even though it doesn’t do much to move Jean Louise’s story forward, it’s one of the more solid acknowledgments to Jem’s death.

Dr. Finch. No one can hate an eccentric old doctor. He’s exactly what Jean Louise needs—someone who’d tell her to shut up and listen, and when she doesn’t, slap hard enough to make her pause and reflect. I don’t support violence as punishment, especially for children, which is why I like that it comes from her uncle and not her father. From his interactions with Jean Louise throughout the story, we see that, like Atticus, he takes things in his stride, but he’s also a strong guardian and a second parent who watches her back. Every kid needs that—someone they can talk to other than their parents. The relationship dynamic between the two is interesting—unlike with Atticus, Jean Louise is far more direct and curt with her uncle without having worrying about hurting him or how he’d perceive her. In many ways, he’s helping her figure herself out. I also find it quite amusing that Jean Louise thinks of him as bat shit crazy when he’s probably the sanest person in the story.

Of course, all of these are small things that cumulate into my big fat opinion. But there’s also one big fat thing that takes my opinion from fat to dangerously obese.

Jean Louise is a 26-year-old independent woman who lives in New York among, possibly, a myriad of people from all ways of life. We see some reference to black people being a part of her everyday life, which is why she’s so indignant when her townsfolk look down on them. We see her as a modern-ish, socially aware young person. All that’s brilliant.

But she doesn’t understand human nature.

She can’t process the fact that her father is an ordinary man with complex emotions. That he has his own opinions and that he doesn’t have to embody her beliefs.

Of course, she’s disappointed in her father. She has expectations of him, as we all do of people we admire and look up to, and when Atticus doesn’t live up to those expectations, she’s upset. Just like I was with this book. That’s understandable.

But her reaction to all this is bizarre. She responds as if she’s never been disappointed in her life before. To me, that signals a bigger problem. She’s either never had people oppose her views or never had a genuine relationship with anyone else. The foundation of any relationship is trust, knowing you’ll still get hurt along the way. Even long-lasting couples would have conflicting opinions and disappointments. 26 years is a long time not to have known that.

Dr. Finch explains to Jean Louise that she’s so upset with Atticus because she regarded him as god. As someone who can never make a mistake. Now, we’ve all done this. We place our heroes (actors, musicians, writers, politicians, even) on high pedestals, thinking they’re perfect and incapable of anything less than godliness. That’s how humans work—we stupidly seek idols all the time. But we don’t do that with people closest to us, regardless of how much we adore them. If you’re close to someone, you’ll notice their flaws. That’s why it’s easier to set the god status to people we can’t reach—the distance enables our blindness.

That’s not the case with Jean Louise. She loves her dad dearly and grew up with him around. Even if she hadn’t realised his humanity then, she should’ve when she left home. Coming back every year should’ve opened her eyes little by little.

There’s a lot of psychological complexity to unpack in this story. Strangely, that’s also good—it’s made me mull it over, and that’s always a positive thing in book marketing.

In the middle of the book, we hear Jean Louise was born colour blind—a fact she doesn’t know (how?!). An odd detail to throw in at mid-point. However, towards the end, we go back to it, as Dr. Finch informs her she’s colour blind, referencing that to their conversation about black and white people. I’m not a fan of using “colour blind” in that context for many reasons. Disappointment 6.

The racism in this book is brazen, and coming from educated adults, it’s… ignorant. That does feel real.

I’ve learnt from various online reviews and commentary that this book was supposedly a ‘crappy initial draft’ never meant to be published. It’s also not a sequel. Makes sense. There’s just too much going on for it to be one complete piece of work. Apparently, this was the original, which Harper Lee then upgraded and published as the wonderful To Kill a Mockingbird. That does make me feel better—if Lee had indeed turned Watchman into Mockingbird, then damn, she’s one good writer, with a kickass editor.